[Footnote 20: Jerom Merolla da Sorrente, _Voyage to Congo_ (translated from
the Italian), in Pinkerton's _Voyages_, XVI, 253-260.]

The markets most frequented by the English and American separate traders
lay on the great middle stretches of the coast--Sierra Leone, the Grain
Coast (Liberia), the Ivory, Gold and Slave Coasts, the Oil Rivers as the
Niger Delta was then called, Cameroon, Gaboon and Loango. The swarm of
their ships was particularly great in the Gulf of Guinea upon whose shores
the vast fan-shaped hinterland poured its exiles along converging lines.

The coffles came from distances ranging to a thousand miles or more, on
rivers and paths whose shore ends the European traders could see but
did not find inviting. These paths, always of single-file narrowness,
tortuously winding to avoid fallen trees and bad ground, never straightened
even when obstructions had rotted and gone, branching and crossing in
endless network, penetrating jungles and high-grass prairies, passing
villages that were and villages that had been, skirting the lairs of savage
beasts and the haunts of cannibal men, beset with drought and famine, storm
and flood, were threaded only by negroes, bearing arms or bearing burdens.
Many of the slaves fell exhausted on the paths and were cut out of the
coffles to die. The survivors were sorted by the purchasers on the coast
into the fit and the unfit, the latter to live in local slavery or to meet
either violent or lingering deaths, the former to be taken shackled on
board the strange vessels of the strange white men and carried to an
unknown fate. The only consolations were that the future could hardly be
worse than the recent past, that misery had plenty of company, and that
things were interesting by the way. The combination of resignation and
curiosity was most helpful.

It was reassuring to these victims to see an occasional American negro