HISTORY OF MADAGASCAR. 
147 
The most effectual mode of obtaining the unhappy vic¬ 
tims of this system in large numbers, was by war. As on 
the continent of Africa, so on this great African island, the 
chiefs were in the habit of making attacks on one another, 
whenever the occasion of a quarrel could be found, and 
then securing in the contest as many prisoners as possible, 
whom they afterwards disposed of to the slave-traffickers. 
Hence, the principal aim in these intestine wars was, not 
so much the slaughter and extirpation of the opposite party, 
as the seizure of the living; and often the struggle would 
be to capture a chief or noble, in which case a large sum 
of money would be paid by the relations and friends, or a 
number of slaves would be given for his ransom. 
For these reasons, the conflicts were less sanguinary than 
they have been since the introduction of fire-arms and the 
suppression of the slave-trade, though the actual amount 
of crime, cruelty, and suffering may not have been less. 
It was not unfrequently that whole villages were swept off, 
and their inhabitants separated, and sold into different 
and remote provinces, never to be associated again. Ves¬ 
tiges of such villages remain to the present day, exhibiting 
a waste where cultivation had formerly smiled, with frag¬ 
ments of deserted and dilapidated walls, where once the cul¬ 
tivators of the adjacent fields had found their home; a home 
to them, perhaps, as sweet as the mansions of the rich in 
other lands, whose luxury and wealth had, perhaps, been 
augmented by the extirpation of these very people from 
the land of their birth—and their consignment to hopeless 
captivity and an early grave. 
In addition to these wars, an extensive system of kidnap¬ 
ping prevailed, by which children, domestic slaves, and 
others, were entrapped in the fields and neighbourhood of 
villages, by the gift of some money, a piece of cloth, or other 
l 2 
