voyage to Madagascar brought hither betwixt forty and fifty negroes, most women and children, sold for £10, £15, and £20 apiece, which stood the merchants in near £40 apiece one with another: now and then two or three negroes are brought hither from Barbadoes and other of His Majesty's plantations, and sold here for about £20 apiece, so that there may bee within our government about one hundred, or one hundred and twenty, and it may bee as many Scots brought hither and sold for servants in the time of the war with Scotland, and most now married and living here, and about halfe so many Irish brought hither at several times as servants."
The number of slaves at this period in the middle and southern colonies is not easily ascertained, as few books, and no newspapers were published in North America prior to 1704. In that year, the "Weekly News Letter" was commenced, and in the same year the "Society for the propagation of the Gospels in foreign parts opened a catechising school for the slaves at New York, in which city there were then computed to be about fifteen hundred Negro and Indian slaves," a sufficient number to furnish materials for the "irrepressible conflict," which had long before begun. The catechist, whom the Society employed, was "Mr. Elias Neau, by nation a Frenchman, who having made a confession of the Protestant religion in France, for which he had been confined several years in prison, and seven years in the galleys." Mr. Neau entered upon his office "with great diligence, and his labors were very successful; but the negroes were much discouraged from embracing the Christian religion upon the account of the very little regard showed them in
