West India islands, but thither they could not be taken because the slave-owners were beginning to see that free negroes were a serious disturbing element among the plantations. It rarely occurred to a negro slave that he was born to any rights equal with those of his master, until he saw free negroes work or not at pleasure, and receive wages when they did work. Then he began to think. It was a serious matter for the owner when the slave began to think. It became most serious in Jamiaca when the slaves fled to the mountains for freedom and there organized communities that were naturally predatory — so serious, indeed, that troops were sent into the mountains to hunt out with bloodhounds these maroons, as they were called. The troops settled the question there temporarily by killing many of them and capturing more.
Meantime the British people found the ports of England swarming with negroes discharged from the navy at the end of the war. So three classes of free negroes were to be considered at the end of the eighteenth century — the slaves from America, the sailors from the navy, and the Jamaica maroons.
As a first step in solving the problem an Englishman named Smeatham, of London, who had lived for a time at the foot of the Sierra Leone Mountains, conceived the idea of forming an African colony with these freedmen. The subject appears to have been broached first in 1783; it is mentioned in Sharp's ”Memoranda” on August 1st of that year, and Sharp adopted the idea. Eventually the Government granted an allowance of £12 per head for the expense of transportation; a ship was chartered; a sloop-of-
