I have now finished my section on the mode of procuring slaves, and I should have been made much happier by my visit to the coast of Africa, if no such instances had occurred, as I have felt myself obliged to communicate to the reader.
SECT. II.
Of the Manner in which the Negroes are treated by the Europeans.
CHAP. I.
Of the Negroes considered as TRADERS.
Self-interest, the principle of all commerce, appears in the very basest point of view, when considered, with a reference to the intercourse subsisting between the white and the black nations. The fraud and violence which the stronger generally imagine they have a right in trade to exercise towards the weaker, compel the latter in their turn to have recourse to practices equally base and cruel. Such is the true picture of the low cunning and barbarity which the whites practice towards the negroes, and these last towards their own people.
In such mysteries of iniquity, the Europeans have a decided advantage over the untutored African nations; and thus practice their villainous artifices with impunity. The most despicable juggling tricks are used in measuring or reckoning the commodities bartered with the negroes. Thus for example, instead of the bottles and barrels shewn and approved of, others are substituted apparently of the same size, but containing less perhaps by one half. Advantage is taken of the difficulty with which the negroes reckon beyond ten, and thus the accounts are confused, and they are deprived of the greater part of the commodities bargained for. The wine and spirits, samples of which the negroes had tasted pure, are afterwards adulterated with water. They are defrauded in all sorts of weights and measures; and, that the European adepts in villainy may play off their tricks with success, they previously take care to intoxicate the unsuspecting negroes, and by this means fascinate their senses in such a manner, as to multiply or magnify every article set before them. These ways of trading are esteemed the most modest that can be practiced, and there is not a single European who scruples in the least to have recourse to them on all occasions. I have repeatedly been an eye-witness of such villainy.
CHAP. II.
Of the Negroes considered as SLAVES.
On the coast of Africa there are two descriptions of slaves, namely, the immediate descendants of slaves, and those who are reduced to slavery in the different ways I have described. The former are seldom sold, except for theft, but the most trivial transgression of this kind is often made a pretext for selling them. At Goree I was present at several publick sales of young women,[1] who were sold for acts of petty larceny, which scarcely deserved the name of crimes. The treatment these last experience is mild, when compared to that of the wretches, who are enslaved by force or fraud, and who are treated exactly like wild beasts. They are confined in prisons or dungeons, resembling dens, where they lie naked on the sand, crowded together and loaded with irons. In consequence of this cruel mode of confinement, they are frequently covered with cutaneous eruptions. Ten or twelve of them feed together out of a trough, precisely like so many hogs. There is even less care taken of them than of brutes, while they are confined in these horrid receptacles, and, till they are stowed away in the slave vessels, to be sent from the coast; nor are they worse treated on board, if we may credit some accounts.