246 HISTORY OF THE [book iv. 
The rest of Hawkins’s adventures are nothing to 
my present purpose. What has been quoted, i& 
sufficient to demonstrate, that a regular traffic had 
been established so early as the year 1564, both 
by the Portuguese and the French, with some na¬ 
tions of Africa, for the purchase of slaves; that 
•this intercourse was founded on mutual contract, 
and tended to civilize the natives on the coast; 
Some nations of whom were possessed of slaves, 
which they kept for the purposes of agriculture; 
and occasionally killed for food; a horrid practice, 
that, I believe, no longer exists in this part of 
Africa. In regard to Hawkins himself, he was, I 
admit, a murderer and a robber. His avowed pur¬ 
pose in sailing to Guinea, was to seize by strata¬ 
gem, or force, and carry away the unsuspecting na¬ 
tives, in the view of selling them as slaves to the 
people of Hispaniola. In this pursuit, his object 
was present profit, and his employment and pastime 
devastation and murder. He made a third voyage 
to Africa in 1563, for the same purpose, with a 
squadron of six ships, which the reader will not be 
sorry to find terminated most miserably; and put a 
stop, for some years, to any more piratical expedi¬ 
tions of the English to the coast of Africa. 
The first notice which I find in history of an ac¬ 
tual attempt by the British nation to establish a re¬ 
gular trade on the African coast, is in the year 
1618, when king James I. granted an exclusive 
charter to Sir Robert Rich, and some other mer¬ 
chants of London, for raising a joint stock for a 
