CHAP. VI. DOMESTIC SLAVERY IN MADAGASCAR. 147 



men in the court or yard ; one of them asked me if I did not 

 want to buy a boy, pointing to a nice, healthy-looking lad, 

 scarcely twelve years of age, who stood behind him, and 

 whom he called to come forward and show himself. On m}'^ 

 shaking my head and intimating that I did not want a 

 slave, it was explained that it was not temporary service 

 that was offered, but that the boy would work for me all 

 his life, or could be sold to another, and that the price was 

 only ten dollars, little more than two pounds English money. 

 My continued refusal left no hope of the lad being sold to 

 me, and they soon went aAvay, followed by their slave, whose 

 appearance interested me much, and excited strong feelings of 

 commisseration towards one in whose breast all the ardent 

 aspirations of youth, with the prospects of happiness and con- 

 tentment in after life must be stifled by the stern reality that 

 he would never be his own, but must, until death should release 

 him from his bondage, render unrequited labour to another. 

 The price of a male slave was from seventy to one hundred 

 dollars, and of a female slave from twenty to forty dollars. 



From the little which I saw of the domestic slaves in 

 Madagascar, I should think their condition vastly superior 

 to that of the severe labour and suffering which characterised 

 the slavery of our West Indian colonies, yet I occasionally saw 

 some of the inevitable consequences of the system that were 

 perhaps more revolting in their moral degradation than in the 

 physical suffering inflicted. In one of the houses which I 

 entered one day, a number of female slaves were at work. 

 Some of them were carrying baskets of cotton or other 

 articles from one room to another, and, as they passed along, 

 I saw one young girl who had a couple of boards fixed on 

 her shoulders, each of them rather more than two feet 

 long, and ten inches or a foot wide, fastened together by 

 pieces of wood nailed on the under side. A piece had been 

 cut out of each board in the middle, so that, when fixed 



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