370 GENERAL OBSERVATIONS. 
off to the vessels, and they are represented as being the 
very worst in every respect of all the tribes that were met 
with on the banks of the river, being dirty, filthy, and 
over-run with vermin. One of them was a priest, who had 
been ordained by the Capuchin monks of Loando, and 
carried with him his diploma, or letters of ordination ; 
he could just write his name, and that of St. Antonio, 
and read the Romish litany; but so little was he of a 
Catholic, that his rosary, his relics, and his crosses were 
mixed with his domestic fetiches; and so indifferent a 
Christian, that this “* bare-footed black apostle,” as Dr. 
Smith calls him, boasted of his having no fewer than five 
wives. 
Captain Tuckey seems to think that the plan of sending 
a few negroes to be educated in Europe, for the purpose of 
returning to instruct their countrymen, is as little likely to 
succeed, as that of sending missionaries among them; and 
that colonization holds out the only prospect of meliorating 
their civil and moral condition. How far this might suc- 
ceed with the negroes, remains to be tried; in all other 
countries, inhabited by a savage or half-civilized people, 
extirpation has followed close on the heels of colonization. 
The unconquerable avidity for spirituous liquors on the 
part of the savages, and the same propensity for their 
possessions on that of the colonists, have produced conten- 
tions, encroachments and spoliation, which terminate inva- 
riably to the detriment of the natives, and too frequently 
to their utter extermination. It might at the same time be 
well worth the experiment, of prevailing on a few of the 
