CHAPTER VIII 



THE SLAVE TRADE 



DURING the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the 

 great inducement that brought Europeans to the West 

 Coast of Africa was not merely the trade in gold, ivory, 

 camwood, and pepper, but it was, first and foremost, slaves. 

 Liberia, however, for reasons which will be shown, suffered 

 perhaps less than most parts of the West African Coast, the 

 adjoining district of the Ivory Coast having even greater 

 immunity.^ Nevertheless, it was the slave trade that indirectly 

 gave birth to Liberia as a recognised state, and it is therefore 

 necessary to treat of it to some extent as a part of Liberian 

 history. 



Negro slaves were used bv the Ancient Egyptians, and 

 from Egypt in later days they were sent to Rome and to the 

 Byzantine Empire. Carthage also procured Negroes for the 

 Roman galleys, possibly from Tripoli. Under Islam, however, 

 the modern trade in Negro slaves as we know it really began. 

 The Arab wars of conquest in the Egyptian Sudan and along 

 the East African Coast, and Arab and Berber raids across the 

 Sahara Desert from North Africa to the regions of the Niger, 



• The northern coast districts of Liberia were mnch infested by slavers ; but 

 the natives of the Kru Coast utterly disliked existence in slavery, and, refusing to 

 work under such conditions, were ordinarily left alone. The Ivory Coast people 

 \vere, in those days, fierce cannibals and inaccessible. 



