losing by death one slave out of the ninety-five in her cargo she landed
the remainder in prime order at Barbados and sold them immediately in one
lot at £35 per head.[19]

[Footnote 18: Snelgrave, introduction.]

[Footnote 19: Massachusetts Historical Society _Collections_, LXIX, 398,
429.]

In Lower Guinea the Portuguese held an advantage, partly through the
influence of the Catholic priests. The Capuchin missionary Merolla, for
example, relates that while he was in service at the mouth of the Congo in
1685 word came that the college of cardinals had commanded the missionaries
in Africa to combat the slave trade. Promptly deciding this to be a
hopeless project, Merolla and his colleagues compromised with their
instructions by attempting to restrict the trade to ships of Catholic
nations and to the Dutch who were then supplying Spain under the asiento.
No sooner had the chiefs in the district agreed to this than a Dutch
trading captain set things awry by spreading Protestant doctrine among the
natives, declaring baptism to be the only sacrament required for salvation,
and confession to be superfluous. The priests then put all the Dutch under
the ban, but the natives raised a tumult saying that the Portuguese, the
only Catholic traders available, not only paid low prices in poor goods but
also aspired to a political domination. The crisis was relieved by a timely
plague of small-pox which the priests declared and the natives agreed was a
divinely sent punishment for their contumacy,--and for the time at least,
the exclusion of heretical traders was made effective.[20] The English
appear never to have excelled the Portuguese on the Congo and southward
except perhaps about the close of the eighteenth century.