contemporaneously described as "going every day on shore to take the inhabitants with burning and spoiling their towns."
The century which followed saw the breakdown of Spain's attempted imperial monopoly of the Americas, and of Portugal's attempted imperial monopoly of the African Seas; nascent British and French Empires rising across the Atlantic; adventurous spirits of many nationalities hastening towards the New World, and British, French, Danes and Dutch disputing for mastery at countless points on the West African Coast. And throughout that period the trade in African flesh and blood grew steadily in volume. Towards the middle of the 17th Century the British became direct exporters, both from the West Coast through "The African Company," and from the Mediterranean Coast of Morocco through "The Company of Barbary Merchants," among whose directors were the Earls of Warwick and Leicester. The French, Dutch, and Danes were then exporting considerable numbers of slaves from the settlements they had founded on the West Coast to their respective possessions in the West Indies and on the mainland, to work the sugar and coffee plantations. The Swedish effort at slave trading was short-lived as was the Prussian. A curious, isolated attempt on the part of one of the German Baltic Barons also came to nothing.
One can only speculate as to the total number of unfortunate Africans torn from their homes between 1442 and 1700, or as to the number that perished in the course of transportation on the slave ships—the "middle passage" of infamous memory—when:
the slaves could not turn round, were wedged immovably, in fact, and chained to the deck by the neck and legs … not infrequently would go mad before dying of suffocation … in their frenzy some killed others in the hopes of procuring more room to breathe … men strangled those next to them, and women drove nails into each others' brains.
These horrors were intensified a thousandfold when the trade became an international offence.
It is computed in American records that the British were responsible in the twenty years, 1680–1700, for importing 300,000 Africans into the West Indies and the mainland.
But with the dawn of the 18th Century the trade assumed gigantic proportions. It had been thrown open
