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CHAPTER I

THE TRADE IN THE EARLIEST DAYS

The Unnamed Dutch Slaver of 1819 — First Slaver Fitted Out in American Waters and the First American-built Slaver — When Human Beings were Frequently a Part of a Ship's General Cargo — How a Good Priest, through a Love of Humanity, Promoted the Traffic — Days when Christian Missionaries Found Profit in the Trade, and It Hurt the Conscience of No One Engaged in It — Kings and Nobles as Slave-Traders — A Slaver Contract that was Considered a Magnificent Triumph of Diplomacy — The Yankee Slavers' Successful Stroke for Free Trade and Sailors' Rights — Extent of the Early Traffic.

On a hot day late in the month of August, 1619, while the people of the little British settlement called Jamestown, in what is now the State of Virginia, were busily engaged in the work of establishing homes on the borders of the great American wilderness, an alarm was raised that a ship was coming with the tide up from the sea. Only one more startling cry than that could have been heard — a warning that hostile Indians were coming; but in those days, when the fighting between nations nominally at peace might cost more lives than were lost in our war with Spain, the approach of an unknown ship, to a settlement as weak as Jamestown, was a most serious matter. It was the more serious for the reason that Spain, in

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