ransomed. After Muley Ishmael's death, the captives were much butter treated. Captain Braithwaite, who accompanied Mr. Russell on a mission from the English government in 1727, thus describes the condition of the Christian captives in Morocco: "Most part of them," he says, "have expectations of getting back to their native country at one time or another. The emperor keeps most of them at work upon his buildings, but not to such hard labor that our laborers go through. The "Canute", where they are lodged, is infinitely better than our prisons. In short, the captives have a much greater property in what they get than the Moors; several of them being rich, and many have earned considerable sums out of the country. Several keep their mules, and some their servants, to the truth of which we are all witnesses." Morocco was the first of the Barbary states that gave up the practice of Christian slavery. In a treaty made with Spain in 1799, the emperor declared his desire that the name of slavery might be effaced from the memory of mankind.[1]
CHAPTER VII.
African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century.
Negroland, or Nigritia, is that part of the interior of Africa stretching from the great desert on the north to the unascertained commencement of Caffreland on the south, and from the Atlantic on the west to Abyssinia on the east. In fact, the entire interior of this great continent may be called the laud of the negroes. The ancients distinguished it from the comparatively civilized countries lying along the coast of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea by calling the latter Libya, and the former Ethiopia. It is upon Ethiopia in an especial manner that the curse of slavery has fallen. At first, it bore but a share of the burden; Britons and Scythians were the fellow-slaves of the Ethiopian: but at last all the other nations of the earth seemed to conspire against the ne-
- ↑ Chambers' Miscellany.
