3H HISTORY OF THE [book it. 
precisely by the same people a second time, I 
commonly considered it as grounded in truth. On 
other occasions I have examined brothers and sis¬ 
ters apart. If their information agreed in minute 
particulars, I could have no reason to suspect them 
of falsehood. Of five and twenty young persons 
of both sexes whom I thus interrogated, fifteen 
frankly declared that they were born to slavery, 
and were either sold to pay the debts, or bartered 
away to supply the wants of their owners. Five 
were secretly kidnapped in the interior country, 
and sold to black merchants, who conveyed them 
from an immense distance to the sea coast, and 
sold them to the ship masters that brought them to 
Jamaica. The other five appeared to have fallen 
victims in some of those petty wars, which it is pro¬ 
bable, rapacity and revenge reciprocally instigate 
throughout the whole continent of Africa.* On 
'* Perhaps the reader will not be displeased to be presented with a 
few of these examinations, as they were taken down at the time, and 
without any view to publication. 
Adam, (a Congo), a boy as I guess about fourteen, his country name 
Sarri , came from a vast distance inland, was waylaid and stole, in the 
path about three miles from his own village, by one of his country¬ 
men. It was early in the morning, and the man hid him all day in the 
woods, and marched him in the night. He was conducted in this 
manner for a month, and then sold to another black man for a gun, 
some powder and shot, and a quantity of salt. He was sold a second 
time for a keg of brandy. His last mentioned purchaser bought seve¬ 
ral other boys in the same manner, and when he had collected twenty, 
sent them down to the sea coast, where they were sold to a captain of 
a ship. He relates further, that his father, Scindia Siuante, was a chief 
