war — the Nautilus, Captain Thompson — was sent as convoy, and on April 8, 1787, away they sailed for Sierra Leone. There were more than four hundred ex-slaves gathered in English ports, and sixty Europeans in the party. Reaching the coast they purchased of a native chief, known as King Tom, the Sierra Leone colony site, and the African colonization scheme was inaugurated.
How the first colonists died by the score from malarial fever; how the Nova Scotia negroes were brought there to die in like fashion; how drunkenness and indolence helped on the anarchy; how a war with the natives nearly wiped out the remnants of the settlement, and how, at last, in 1800, a band of maroons from Jamaica, five hundred and fifty strong, came and saved the adventure from utter failure — all that is too long a story to be told here. We need only remember that the men who saved the colony were those who had been too proud to remain slaves, and had found liberty in the wilds of the Jamaica mountains until hunted down by bloodhounds set on by the Christian hosts of the king.
When the colony of Sierra Leone had been established as a refuge for freed negroes the story was told in the United States, where the slave-owners were ever in fear of a servile insurrection led by free negroes.
Here, then, was the solution of the most troublesome question known to slave communities! It appealed to the humanitarian who was willing to sacrifice his property in slaves whenever he could do so without violating the laws of his State, as well as to the slave-owner whose brutal tyranny was the result of innate cowardice. The one was glad of a chance to give free-
