CHAPTER V. 
THE SLAVE TRADE 
I N regard to the slave trade, a few words of explanation and description may 
be of interest. Slavery has probably existed among mankind from time 
immemorial, and no doubt one race of negroes enslaved another ages before 
the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians introduced the slave trade, by which is 
meant the deliberate expatriation of negroes to countries beyond the sea, or to 
parts of Africa not inhabited by the negro race. But the horrors of the slave 
trade are attributable, firstly to Europeans, and secondly to Arabs. 
The English, Spanish, Portuguese and P'rench had commenced trafficking in 
negro slaves from the West Coast of Africa when that coast became opened up 
to geograjdiical knowledge in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the 
sixteenth century organised attempts were made to replace the disappearing 
aborigines of the West Indies by negro slaves ; then came the introduction of 
negroes into the southern States of North America. At first the trade was 
confined to the West Coast but the Portuguese commenced to export slaves 
from East Africa in the seventeenth century, and thenceforward a mighty slave 
trade sprang up in the valley of the Zambezi which is not yet extinct, although 
several measures for its abolition have been taken by the Portuguese Govern¬ 
ment during the present century. 
Maskat Arabs who warred with the Portuguese in East Africa and gradually 
supplanted them in all the settlements between Aden and the Ruvuma River, 
organised a brisk traffic to supply the markets of the East with black concubines, 
black eunuchs, and strong-armed willing workers. 
Slaves thus became indispensable to Arabia, Egypt, Mesopotamia and 
Persia, and Abyssinian slaves were even introduced in numbers to the West 
Coast of India where they were turned into fighting men or into regular castes 
of seamen. 1 
The Moors of Northern Africa, however, had almost shown the way in the 
matter of the slave trade to the nations of Western Europe by developing an 
active intercourse with the regions of the Nigerian Sudan, so that all Northern 
Africa was abundantly supplied with a caste of negro workers while negro 
blood mingled freely in many of the Arab and Berber tribes. 
The worst horrors of the slave trade were probably the miseries endured by 
the closely-packed negroes on slave ships, where from want of ventilation and of 
such treatment as would nowadays be accorded as a duty to cargoes of beasts, 
they endured untold miseries and developed strange maladies. Moreover, to 
1 Curiously enough some of these slaves revolted and formed communities of their own in Western 
India, now recognised by the Imperial Government as small tributary States under negroid rulers of 
Abyssinian descent. 
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