I 



-^ The Last Phase of the Slave Trade 



parasites or infection. They were branded by a hot iron with 

 their owner's marks, usually under the breasts. 



A continual warfare raged in West Africa during the first 

 half of the nineteenth century, provoked and sustained by the 

 slave trade with America and the Mediterranean. Tribe fought 

 against tribe, nation against nation, and within each tribe were 

 scenes of bloodshed and civil war (similar to that described by 

 Canot at Digbi) caused solely by the demand for slaves. The 

 Fulas and Mandingos were distinguished beyond all other West 

 African peoples for the zeal they threw into this commerce. 

 P'ula merchants visiting Sierra Leone or Cape Mount might 

 the year previously have travelled to Morocco, Algeria, or Tunis. 

 Morocco Jews were established at Timbuktu by 1827, solely 

 as brokers in the slave trade. Jews from Northern Europe and 

 the Mediterranean settled at Sierra Leone soon after the colony 

 was founded, and enabled Canot and other slave traders to carry 

 on their business by giving them advances of goods and cash, 

 and by sending timely information as to the movements of 

 British cruisers. 



Alcohol was the main inducement to the Negro chief to 

 become a slave trader. From the middle of the seventeenth 

 to the end of the nineteenth century West Africa lay under 

 the curse of this poison — not the mild fermented liquors made 

 by the natives from palm sap, honey, or grain, but the distilled 

 spirits invented by the European. First, brandy (Aqua vitae, 

 Brantwein, distilled grape juice) ; then rum, the product of the 

 sugar cane ; then gin, made from malted rye or potatoes and 

 juniper berries ; last and worst, whiskey. 



Gunpowder and guns, of course, figured largely in the 

 white man's trade goods ; but these were necessary to the Negro 

 chief or slave trader for slave-catching expeditions, or to support 

 an authority under which the punishment for all offences was 



173 



