Liberia 



<«^ 



oversea transport being essential considerations, after the British 

 interference with the slave trade had commenced, not so much 

 attention was paid as in the eighteenth century to the comfort 

 of the slaves on board. 



"Sometimes on slave ships the height between the decks 

 where the slaves were chained was only eighteen inches, so that 

 the slaves could not turn round, the space being less than the 

 breadth of their shoulders. They were chained by the neck 

 and the legs. They frequently died of thirst, for the fresh 

 water would often run short." ^ 



The establishment of the Liberian colony contributed 

 remarkably to the driving out of the slave trade from the 

 regions east of Sierra Leone ; but the real hard work in the 

 suppression of this traffic in Negro slaves in West Africa 

 was done by Great Britain sending her cruisers to patrol the 

 Atlantic and the Gulf of Guinea, and abolishing slavery in 

 the West Indies (as in South Africa) at a cost of something 

 like ^30,000,000. When the British West Indian market was 

 closed, half the inducements were removed. Moreover, it became 

 apparent to the men of Liverpool and Bristol that there were 

 other pursuits in West Africa as profitable as slave trading and 

 far less perilous. The invention and growth of railways had 

 stimulated the search for lubricants. Palm oil in consequence 

 succeeded slaves, gold, and pepper as the attraction to West 

 Africa. The oil in the pericarp of the nuts of Eldis guineensis^ 

 the handsome palm tree of the West African forest region, 

 had been used as a food by the natives from a remote period, 

 but its value only became realised in Europe and America in 

 the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth century, and some 

 of the earliest exportations of palm oil (and later of palm 



^ Governor Buchanan writes in his Journal, 1840 : "The space between slave 

 deck and upper deck is only ten inches." This must be a clerical error. 



176 



