370 GENERAL OBSERVATIONS. 



off to the vessels, and they are represented as being the 

 very Avorst in every respect of all the tribes that were met 

 with on the banks of the river, being dirty, filthy, and 

 over-run with vermin. One of them was a priest, who had 

 been ordained by the Capuchin monks of Loando, and 

 carried with him his diploma, or letters of ordination ; 

 he could just write his name, and that of St. Antonio, 

 and read the Romish litany ; but so little was he of a 

 Catholic, that his losary, his relics, and his crosses were 

 mixed with his domestic fetiches ; and so indifferent a 

 Christian, that this " bare -footed black apostle," as Dr. 

 Smith calls hin), boasted of his having no fewer than five 

 wives. 



Captain Tuckey seems to think that the plan of sending 

 a few negroes to be educated in Europe, for the purpose of 

 returning to instruct their countrymen, is as little likely to 

 succeed, as that of sending missionaries among them; and 

 that colonization holds out the only prospect of mehorating 

 their civil and moral condition. How far this might suc- 

 ceed with the negroes, remains to be tried; in all other 

 countries, inhabited by a savage or half-civilized people, 

 extirpation has followed close on the heels of colonization. 

 The unconquerable avidity for spirituous liquors on the 

 part of the savages, and the same propensity for their 

 possessions on that of the colonists, have produced conten- 

 tions, encroachments and spoliation, which terminate inva- 

 riably to the detriment of the natives, and too frequently 

 to their utter extermination. It might at the same time be 

 well worth the experiment, of prevailing on a few of the 



