Liberia ««- 



from which they sprang. In very few cases would the Negro 

 or Negress have been unable to give some indication as to his 

 or her racial origin. Then those who had come from the 

 Niger Delta would have been sent back to the Niger Delta ; 

 those from the Congo to the Congo ; those from Old Calabar 

 to Old Calabar ; the Senegambian slaves to Senegambia ; the 

 people from Little Popo, Hwida, and Lagos to those parts of 

 the Slave Coast, and so on. Thus they would still have had 

 some chance of returning to their own people and of re-uniting 

 their life without too much break to the condition from which 

 they or their parents had been torn.^ But the first care of the 

 promoters of these repatriation schemes was that the Negro 

 should be preserved in the Christian tenets learnt by him in 

 his captivity. It was their desire to create a new Negro nation, 

 as it were, from out of a heterogeneous gathering of Negroes 

 derived from many different African races. 



In an informal way, as merchants and slave traders, the 

 EngHsh had during the seventeenth century (if not earlier) 

 ousted the Portuguese from the occupation of Sierra Leone ; 

 and that mountainous peninsula and bay had become a good 

 deal Anglicised in the eighteenth century, most of the native 

 chiefs being able to talk broken English. It was decided to 

 make the first attempt at repatriating these North American 

 Negroes in the territory of Sierra Leone. This idea sprang 

 first in 1783 from the brain of Dr. Henry Smeathman, an 

 English surgeon who had spent four years on the West African 

 Coast, but was later supported by the advocacy of a Swede, Carl 

 Berns Wadstrom, who had travelled a good deal about the 

 world. Wadstrom had developed from book theories rather 



1 On the other hand, it might have been urged against this argument that 

 the condition of all these parts of Africa was so uncertain that repatriated Negroes 

 might be enslaved and sold again, whereas planted in a solid colony they could 

 defend themselves. 



114 



