their suicidal proclivity. Henry Laurens, who was then a commission dealer
at Charleston, wrote in 1755 that the sale of a shipload from Calabar then
in port would be successful only if no other Guinea ships arrived before
its quarantine was ended, for the people would not buy negroes of that
stock if any others were to be had.[55]

[Footnote 55: D.D. Wallace, _Life of Henry Laurens_, pp. 76, 77.]

It would appear that the Congoes, Angolas and Eboes were especially prone
to run away, or perhaps particularly easy to capture when fugitive, for
among the 1046 native Africans advertised as runaways held in the Jamaica
workhouses in 1803 there were 284 Eboes and Mocoes, 185 Congoes and 259
Angolas as compared with 101 Mandingoes, 60 Chambas (from Sierra Leone), 70
Coromantees, 57 Nagoes and Pawpaws, and 30 scattering, along with a total
of 488 American-born negroes and mulattoes, and 187 unclassified.[56]

[Footnote 56: These data were generously assembled for me by Professor
Chauncey S. Boucher of Washington University, St. Louis, from a file of the
_Royal Gazette_ of Kingston, Jamaica, for the year 1803, which is preserved
in the Charleston, S.C. Library.]

This huge maritime slave traffic had great consequences for all the
countries concerned. In Liverpool it made millionaires,[57] and elsewhere
in England, Europe and New England it brought prosperity not only to ship
owners but to the distillers of rum and manufacturers of other trade goods.
In the American plantation districts it immensely stimulated the production
of the staple crops. On the other hand it kept the planters constantly
in debt for their dearly bought labor, and it left a permanent and
increasingly complex problem of racial adjustments. In Africa, it largely
transformed the primitive scheme of life, and for the worse. It created new