They stood there in rows, naked savages, men and women with clean cloths round their loins, and boys and girls stark. Their shackles had generally been struck off because a quiet and peaceable slave was more valued than one who had to be kept in restraint. There were shade trees growing round the marketplace, and the sun flickered down through their leaves and made patterns on the shapely dark bodies, and the buyers examined them exactly as they would have examined a horse or a cow they wanted to buy. The buyers had certain preferences. In spite of an evil reputation, “the Koromantyns,” says Bryan Edwards, “are distinguished from all others by firmness both of body and mind, a ferociousness of disposition; but withal, activity, courage, and stubbornness,” and this, while it made them dangerous, made them good labourers. The Papams or Whidahs, those who came from the coasts between Accra and all along by Keta and Togoland and Dahomey, “are accounted most docile.” The Eboes from Calabar and the swamps round the mouths of the Niger “were valued the least, being feeble, timid, despairing creatures, who not infrequently used to commit suicide in their dejection,” which perhaps was not surprising if they could not work and knew what they had to expect if they did not. The people from the Gaboon country, at the bottom of the Gulf of Guinea, were said to be invariably ill-disposed, and lastly, those from the Congo and farther south from the coasts of Angola, though counted less robust than the other negroes, were more handy as mechanics, and more trustworthy. So the gentlemen, crowding to the sales, had some idea of the quality of the goods they had come to buy. The value of a slave increased as the years went on. In 1689, I believe, a slave could be bought for £7, but of course £7 was a great deal more money then than it is now. Then a good negro rose to £20. In 1750 a planter writes, “Bought ten negroes at £50 each”--which, Edwards says, was the common price in 1791; boys and girls cost from £40 to £45, while an infant was worth £5. After that they rose in value rapidly, and before Edwards had finished his history in his estimate of the expenses of a sugar plantation, he values the negroes at £70 apiece; while in 1832, just before the Emancipation, when the planters expected compensation for the loss of their labour, the value of a slave sometimes rose as high as £110 per man.