“The master of her brought in three women and four children to sell,” he remarks casually of a canoe that hailed him from the shore, “but he asked very dear for them and they were almost dead from want of victuals, looking like mere skeletons and so weak they could not stand, so that they were not worth buying. He promised to procure us two or three hundred slaves if we would anchor and come ashore and stay two or three days, but, judging what the others might be by the sample he brought us, and being loth to venture ashore upon his bare word, where we did not use to trade and had no factory, we sent him away and resumed our voyage.” He has left us a very graphic account of the manner in which he and the captain of the _East Indian Merchant_ bought their wares. The slaves were evidently got in small parcels, secured in the factories and shipped off on calm days, for the surf of the Guinea Coast would not always allow of a landing. Where they kept them at Annamabu or in the dominant factory at Koromantyn, I do not know, probably in the court-yard or in the dark dungeons, dark and hot and airless that surrounded it, and the reek of them must have gone up to heaven, calling down a curse upon those captors who were apparently so unconscious of wrongdoing. At Whidah, to which Phillips traded from Annamabu, it is not very far away, there was only a small factory, and the local chief or “king” collected the slaves for sale and kept them in a “trunk,” which Phillips and the captain of the _East Indian Merchant_, attended by their respective doctors and pursers, visited daily to make their purchases. The purser's business was to pay for the goods I suppose, and the surgeon he considers absolutely necessary. “Our surgeon examined them well in all kinds to see that they were sound, wind and limb, making them jump, stretch out their arms swiftly, looking in their mouths to judge of their age; for the cappashiers are so cunning that they shave them all close before we see them, so that, let them be never so old, we can see no grey hairs in their heads or beards, and then, having liquored them well and sleek with palm oil, 'tis no easy matter to know an old one from a middle-aged one but by the teeth's decay... therefore our surgeon is forced to examine... both men and women with the nicest scrutiny which is a great slavery but can't be omitted.” “This place where the slaves were kept day and night,” he records, putting the matter very plainly, “was so foul that I often fainted with the horrid stink of the negroes.” And he was a hard-bitten sailor of the seventeenth century accustomed to the close evil-smelling ships of his period! But he has no particular word of pity for the closely-herded negroes whose condition produced such a state of affairs.