The other chiefs remonstrated against this infringement of their rights, but receiving no satisfactory answer, joined their forces, and almost wholly destroyed the country, where all the horrors and misery so appallingly attendant on African wars were inflicted on and borne by the wretched inhabitants. A dreadful instance of the detestation in which the actual state of slavery is regarded by the free-born negro, so far as they are themselves concerned, occurred at the destruction of one of those towns. The wives of some chiefs who had either been killed or taken by the enemy determined not to survive their husbands’ or their country’s fall, and preferring death, even in its most terrifying shape, to slavery and the embraces of their captors,—suffered themselves and their young children to be burnt to death in a hut, where they had assembled with that determination, and which was set on fire by themselves. This affair and some others of a similar nature which took place about that time in the Senegal, although rendered necessary by acts of plunder, breach of contract, or treachery on the part of the chiefs, who are unfortunately much addicted to such conduct, were unavoidably attended with circumstances which, so far from being calculated to make those people regard the visits of Europeans to their country in a favourable light, had the effect of corroborating in a great measure the false and interested reports already but too sedulously circulated by the Moors and other native traders, and too credibly received by the several chiefs. Another circumstance, which took place in Bambarra, must serve to convince every impartial reader that fears were really entertained by the chiefs as to the ultimate results of our communications with them. At an interview which Mr. Dochard had with one of Dha’s head slaves at Bamakoo, where all the occurrences in the Senegal were not only known but much exaggerated, he was asked with a significant smile, “in case the Niger terminated in the sea and was found navigable to Sego, would our large vessels come up to that place, and our merchants settle there as the French had done in the Senegal?” The object of this question is too palpably evident to need any comment of mine, and Mr. Dochard’s answer, “that he doubted the possibility of large vessels ascending that river, or the wish of our merchants to try it without even settling there,” although in my opinion the best he could have given, did not remove from the minds of Dha and his ministers their apprehension of the consequences.