the towns prettily laid out. On the 25th, being informed by the
Portugueze of a town of Negroes called Bymba, where there was not only a
quantity of gold, but an hundred and forty inhabitants, they resolved to
attack it, having the Portugueze for their guide; but by mismanagement
they took but ten Negroes, having seven of their own men killed, and
twenty-seven wounded. They then went farther down the coast; when,
having procured a number of Negroes, they proceeded to the West Indies,
where they sold them to the Spaniards." And in the same naval chronicle,
at page 76, it is said, "That in the year 1567, Francis Drake, before
performing his voyage round the world, went with Sir John Hawkins in his
expedition to the coast of Guinea, where taking in a cargo of slaves,
they determined to steer for the Caribbee islands." How Queen Elizabeth
suffered so grievous an infringement of the rights of mankind to be
perpetrated by her subjects, and how she was persuaded, about the 30th
year of her reign, to grant patents for carrying on a trade from the
North part of the river Senegal, to an hundred leagues beyond Sierra
Leona, which gave rise to the present African company, is hard to
account for, any otherwise than that it arose from the misrepresentation
made to her of the situation of the Negroes, and of the advantages it
was pretended they would reap from being made acquainted with the
christian religion. This was the case of Lewis the XIIIth, King of
France, who, Labat, in his account of the isles of America, tells us,
"Was extremely uneasy at a law by which the Negroes of his colonies were
to be made slaves; but it being strongly urged to him as the readiest
means for their conversion to christianity, he acquiesced therewith."
Nevertheless, some of the christian powers did not so easily give way in
this matter; for we find,[C] "That cardinal Cibo, one of the Pope's
principal ministers of state, wrote a letter on behalf of the college of
cardinals, or great council at Rome, to the missionaries in Congo,
complaining that the pernicious and abominable abuse of selling slaves