The price varied from five to ten dollars a head. Sometimes there was a scarcity in the market, and prices advanced; and then again would come a “bear” movement; large quantities would be offered, and prices went down.
Chinese junks, known as lorchas, were sent up the bays and rivers to bring away the marketable inhabitants of the rural districts. From Macao the traffic was carried to other ports, so that five years after the first voyage of the Don Pedro, vessels were waiting for cargoes of coolies at half a dozen ports.
A writer on China says, that about this time “the coolie trade caused a civil war in some of the provinces, just as the slave trade causes a constant warfare between various tribes in Africa.” During the most prosperous years of the coolie trade the mandarins and village chiefs used to connive at the robberies, and sometimes they sent their personal attendants to assist in the capture of citizens of their own town.
If they had a spite against any one, or considered that he ought to be out of the way, they combined business with pleasure by assisting to sell men to the coolie traders.
In 1854 the extensive traffic and the cruelties practised came to the ears of various governments; one after another the civilized ones forbade their ships to engage in it, and from that time the business declined, though it by no means entirely died out. The wholesale capture and sale of men have been greatly restricted, and at the present time the traffic is confined to Macao, where prisoners taken in the civil war are sold, and where certain captives taken by the lorchas find a market.
One mode of obtaining men is by coaxing them into gambling-houses, and inducing them to play for money until they have lost an amount beyond that they have about them. They are then required to sign bonds which hold them as securities for their debts. With these bonds they can be turned over to a coolie-trader, who has a depot or private jail of his own, where he locks up his human securities. When a sufficient number is accumulated, the men are sold to the exporters.
NUMBER OF COOLIES STOLEN.
From 1847 to 1870, the number of coolies or forced laborers taken from China to Cuba was one hundred and thirty thousand, to Peru two hundred thousand, and to Australia, Java, and other parts of the Indian Ocean, about fifty thousand. These do not include voluntary emigrants, nor any of the coolies taken to India or the Sandwich Islands; neither does it include a good many ship-loads known to have been sent away, but of which no record exists. Together not less than half a million coolies—and some persons, familiar with Chinese affairs, say nearly a million—have been taken away by this Asiatic slave trade. The men are bound by contracts to a service of eight years, the contract stipulating that at the end of that time they are free to return to their homes, that they shall receive a certain amount of money, and their return passage shall be paid; but such are the cruelties practised in Peru, Cuba, and other countries, that not one man in five hundred ever returns to China.
The treatment of the coolies on shipboard is quite as severe as that of African slaves. They are crowded densely together. Frequently they are chained or loaded with irons, and the food and water which they receive are in very small quantities. Hundreds of them die on the voyage, and hundreds and thousands more live but a short time after arriving at their destination, especially at the Chincha Islands, where they are, or were until quite recently, made to perform tasks which speedily drove them to despair. They were cruelly whipped, and to escape their tortures thousands put an end to their lives. Many committed suicide by jumping into the sea. One day in 1856, three hundred and forty-two coolies committed suicide in this manner. Two hundred of them walked into the sea together, and were drowned. It can be readily understood that the treatment they received was of the severest character, to drive them to kill themselves.