A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Addressed to the freeholders and other inhabitants of YorkshireWilberforce, William
History
A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Addressed to the freeholders and other inhabitants of Yorkshire
Wilberforce, William
Antislavery movements -- Great Britain; Slave trade -- Great Britain
Rohone, where the king of Barsali commonly resides, stands near the sea,
about one hundred miles from Joar, which lies in the same kingdom. When
he wants goods or brandy, he sends a messenger to the governor of James
Fort, to desire he would send up a sloop with a cargo, which the
governor never fails to do. Against the time the vessel is arrived, the
king plunders some of his enemy’s towns, selling the people for such
goods as he wants, which commonly is brandy or rum, gunpowder, ball,
fire-arms, pistols, and cutlasses for his soldiers, and coral and silver
for his wives and mistresses. If he is at war with no neighbouring king,
he falls upon one of his own towns, and makes bold to sell his own
miserable subjects.
His usual way of living is, to sleep all day till sun-set, at which time
he gets up to drink, and goes to sleep again till midnight, when he
rises and eats; and if he has any strong liquors, will sit and drink
till day-light, and then eat and go to sleep again, When he is well
stocked with liquor, he will sit and drink for five or six days
together, and not eat one morsel of any thing in all that time. It is to
this insatiable thirst after brandy, that his subjects freedoms and
families are in so precarious a situation[58]; for he often goes with
some of his troops, by a town in the daytime, and returns in the night,
and sets fire to three parts of it, placing guards at the fourth, to
seize the people as they run out from the fire: he ties their arms
behind them, and marches them either to Joar or Rohone, where he sells
them.—(p. 261, 262.). The king furnishes the Europeans with slaves very
easily: he sends a troop of guards to some village, which they surround;
then seizing as many as they have orders for, they bind them up and send
them away to the ships, where, the ship mark being put upon them, they
are heard of no more.
They usually carry the infants in sacks, and gag the men and women, for
fear they should alarm the villages through which they are carried; for
these actions are never committed in the villages near the factories,
which it is the king’s interest not to ruin, but in those up the
country. It often happens, that some escape, and alarm the country,
which, taking arms, join the persons injured, and pursue the robbers. If
they catch them, they carry them before the king, who then denies his
commission, and sells them on the spot for slaves. What is further
remarkable, if any of the injured people appear as evidence still in
bonds before the king, they are also adjudged to be slaves, and sold as
such.[59]—(p. 268.).
_Voyage of Atkins to Guinea, about 1720. Astley, vol. ii._
_Panyaring_ is a term for manstealing, along the whole coast.—(p. 320.)
_Voyage of Smith, about 1727—employed under the African Company._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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