they offered a profitable source of commerce to such persons as were disposed to enter upon the traffic of human beings, and who would not hesitate to forcibly transport the superabundant population of Africa to meet the rapidly increasing demands for labour in the Western world.
In those days, when the transition from privateering to piracy was easy of accomplishment, the pirate soon became a practised and desperate slaver. There were then no laws to prevent this inhuman traffic. Indeed the nobler Spaniards, who first peopled the tropical portion of the vast American continent and the West India Islands, were of opinion that, in the innocent and docile children of Africa might be found, if kindly treated, servants who would labour without repugnance, and who, while replacing the native Indians, would materially improve their own then wretched condition. The Spanish settlers therefore encouraged the exchange, and, as emigrants from other nations flocked in great numbers to the newly discovered West, the demand for African labour soon became enormous.
Character of its promoters. When the freebooters of England found it either necessary or expedient to seek elsewhere other opportunities for their lawless and plundering propensities, no employment could have been more agreeable to their habits than that of a slave trade on the coast of Africa, and thus a commerce, which, if it had been conducted from the first by honest men, on a well-defined system of immigration, might have proved of immense benefit to every one connected with it, became, in the hands of worthless adventurers, one of the most depraved and demoralising recorded
