eighteenth century, the presents "generally consist of pieces of cloth, cotton, chintz, silk handkerchiefs, and other India goods, and sometimes brandy, wine, or beer."
Having propitiated the chiefs, the captain was free to begin trade. Some inkling of how this was conducted is told in the letter of Captain George Scott in the chapter "When Voyages Went Awry."
It was disheartening and even exasperating to the slavers, and the more enterprising made ways of livening the trade. They looked for a chief who held a grudge against a native tribe, and incited and aided him to take revenge. They suggested to chiefs that certain stout, well-built citizens of the tribe were ambitious of becoming rulers and that an effectual stop to such ambition was to sell the offenders. They made friends with the fetish or medicine men — always the adroit and underhand rascals of the tribe — in order to have charges of witchcraft preferred against likely young men and women. They persuaded the medicine men to have youths and children entrapped without any charge of any kind. They told men having many wives that this or that young man was the lover of one or another wife. So the great man was led to lie in wait and capture the lover and sell him. It was a short step from this to another practice whereby attractive wives were sent to entrap unwary amorous swains. Incredible as it must seem, the civilized captains from Christian lands introduced what is known to professional thieves as the badger game, and they made money out of it, and the ship merchants and stockholders in the ships knew that it was done and willingly shared the profits.
