of any defect, malformation, or incipient signs of disease. The fate of these poor souls was sad; but perhaps many of their brethren envied them their quick release from the cares of this world. The native slave-dealer was too practical a man to burden himself with mouths to fill that he could not immediately turn into cloth, rum, gunpowder or coral, so oftener than otherwise he would simply tel his own niggers to drop their canoe astern of the slave ship, cut the rejected slaves heads off, and cast their bodies into the river to feed the sharks, this often taking place within sight of the European slaver.
A very moderate allowance for loss of life between the interior and the slave-ship from the above-mentioned causes would be at the least 40 per cent.; thus totalling the immense number of 4,480,000 souls sent out of this one district in about two centuries. The greater number of these were Ibos, a slave much sought after in the olden days by planters in the West Indies and the Southern States of America.
I have mentioned these latter facts here to point out to my readers that the so-called benevolent domestic slavery as practised on the coast of Western Africa and tolerated in Her Britannic Majesty's West African Colonies, must, as a natural consequence, lead to a deplorable loss of life, though not in so wholesale a manner as the export of slaves led to in former days.
The Bonny people claim to be descended from the Ibo tribe, but I should be inclined to think that their proper description to-day would be a mixture of Ibos, Kwos, Billa, and sundry infusions of blood from inter-marriage with the female slaves brought down by the slave-dealers from places lying beyond and at the back of the Ibo people.
