Brazil and the Spanish Indies; but in the British settlements it fell out
far otherwise.

[Footnote 1: Gomez Eannes de Azurara _Chronicle of the Discovery and
Conquest of Guinea_, translated by C.R. Beazley and E.P. Prestage, in the
Hakluyt Society _Publications_, XCV, 85.]

As the fifteenth century wore on and fleets explored more of the African
coast with the double purpose of finding a passage to India and exploiting
any incidental opportunities for gain, more and more human cargoes were
brought from Guinea to Portugal and Spain. But as the novelty of the blacks
wore off they were held in smaller esteem and treated with less liberality.
Gangs of them were set to work in fields from which the Moorish occupants
had recently been expelled. The labor demand was not great, however, and
when early in the sixteenth century West Indian settlers wanted negroes
for their sugar fields, Spain willingly parted with some of hers. Thus did
Europe begin the coercion of African assistance in the conquest of the
American wilderness.

Guinea comprises an expanse about a thousand miles wide lying behind
three undulating stretches of coast, the first reaching from Cape Verde
southeastward nine hundred miles to Cape Palmas in four degrees north
latitude, the second running thence almost parallel to the equator a
thousand miles to Old Calabar at the head of "the terrible bight of
Biafra," the third turning abruptly south and extending some fourteen
hundred miles to a short distance below Benguela where the southern desert
begins. The country is commonly divided into Upper Guinea or the Sudan,
lying north and west of the great angle of the coast, and Lower Guinea,
the land of the Bantu, to the southward. Separate zones may also be
distinguished as having different systems of economy: in the jungle belt