Liberia 



<«- 



partnership a vagrant Englishman, Edward Joseph. But at 

 last the authorities of Sierra Leone, and later on the French 

 ships of war, came down on this nest of slavers. Ormond died, 

 Joseph fled, the slave-trade settlements were broken up, and 

 Canot eventually fell into the hands of the French, and was 

 sentenced to a long term of imprisonment at Brest, from which 

 he succeeded in escaping. He then found his way out with 

 scarcely any money to Sierra Leone, and here started a small 

 coasting trade which eventually led him to the Gallinhas country 

 beyond Sherbro. 



The region round the Gallinhas lagoon and the River 

 Sulima had become the chief focus of the West African slavers 

 after the Rio Pongo had been rendered more or less impossible 

 by English and French action. Don Pedro Blanco, a native 

 of Malaga, and originally the mate of a sailing vessel, settled 

 in the Gallinhas country about 1821. Amid the islands of 

 these lagoons, with their occasional openings on to a surf-lashed 

 sea-coast, he gradually built up an extraordinary establishment, 

 which had its subsidiary stations at various points on the 

 Liberian coast, as far down as New Cess in the Grand Basa 

 district. 



Pedro Blanco had of course been led into the slave trade 

 by his original voyages to Cuba. He was a man of very 

 cultivated mind, and, it is asserted, not naturally cruel. He 

 finally retired from the trade in 1839 with a fortune of nearly 

 a million sterling, and after living for a time in Cuba he 

 settled at Genoa, and ended his days in a pleasant Italian home. 



Pedro Blanco surrounded himself with every luxury that 

 could be imported from Europe. His bills were as promptly 

 cashed as a banknote in Cuba, London, or Paris. He had 

 large numbers of Negroes under his command as paid servants, 

 watchers, spies, and police. From a hundred look-outs on 



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