26 NORTH-EAST APRICA. 



personal freedom he enters a new family, and the offspring of the free woman 

 whom he marries are free like their mother. 



It must be confessed that the condition of the African slave has been aggra- 

 vated mainly through the influence of European civilisation. Even long before the 

 discovery of the Coast of Guinea by the white navigators, and before the founda- 

 tion of European colonies in the New World, slave markets were held in Seville 

 and Lisbon. But when Portugal had taken possession of the seaboard, and the 

 Spaniards, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch required robust hands to 

 replace the exterminated natives on their remote western plantations, then a large 

 part of Africa was transformed to a vast hunting-ground for human quarry, and 

 the name of " white " became synonymous with " cannibal," as it still is in the 

 Galla language. All round the coast stations sprang up as outports for this new 

 merchandise. The Portuguese forwarded to Brazil the Negroes captured in 

 Angola ; Jamaica, Barbadoes, and Virginia received their supplies from the Cape 

 Coast ; Louisiana and the French Antilles from Senegal and the Slave Coast ; New 

 Amsterdam from Elmina. Every American settlement thus had its corresponding 

 emporium in Guinea. The horrors of the " middle passage " exceeded all descrip- 

 tion. To save space the living freight was packed in the smallest compass on 

 board ship, where large numbers were swept away by typhus, heat, thirst, and 

 suicide. It would be impossible even roughly to estimate the midtitude of human 

 beings sacrificed by the slave-trade, through the wars it fomented around the 

 African seaboard, the epidemics it propagated, the revolts and massacres of which 

 it was the consequence. 



Although the Africans removed to the New World must be reckoned by many 

 millions, the coloured population, consisting almost exclusively of men, increased 

 very slowly on the plantations. In the present century, however, the equilibrium 

 of the sexes has at least been established amongst the exiled race. At present the 

 number of pure or half-caste Negroes in America exceeds twenty-five millions, and 

 amongst them there are still about one million five hundred thousand unemanci- 

 pated. But since the sanguinary civil war waged in the United States for the 

 liberation of the blacks, this ancient form of servitude is finally condemned, and 

 the number of slaves is daily diminishing in its last strongholds, Cuba and 

 Brazil. 



In Africa itself, the institution has received a fatal blow by the closing of the 

 maritime outports, and whatever may at times be said to the contrary, very few of 

 the Arab and other craft engaged in the traffic succeed in forcing the blockade 

 along the shores of the Indian Ocean.* Many however still cross the Ped Sea, in 

 defiance of the English at Aden, of the French at Obock, and of the Italians at 

 Assab, while tens of thousands continue to fall victims to the Arab and other 

 kidnappers in the interior of the continent. During the heyday of the slave- 

 traders the traffic cost the lives of at least half a million Negroes every year. 

 Compared with that already remote epoch, the present must be regarded as an age 



* Slavers captured and condemned on the east coast of Africa, 1876-7, 27 with 438 slaves ; 1877-8, 15 

 with 60 slaves. 



