disasters which began with the defeat of the Askias at Tenkadibou.[26]

From the middle of the fifteenth to the last half of the nineteenth
centuries the American slave trade centered in Guinea and devastated the
coast morally, socially, and physically. European rum and fire arms were
traded for human beings, and it was not until 1787 that any measures were
taken to counteract this terrible scourge. In that year the idea arose of
repatriating stolen Negroes on that coast and establishing civilized
centers to supplant the slave trade. About four hundred Negroes from
England were sent to Sierra Leone, to whom the promoters considerately
added sixty white prostitutes as wives. The climate on the low coast,
however, was so deadly that new recruits were soon needed. An American
Negro, Thomas Peters, who had served as sergeant under Sir Henry Clinton
in the British army in America, went to England seeking an allotment of
land for his fellows. The Sierra Leone Company welcomed him and offered
free passage and land in Sierra Leone to the Negroes of Nova Scotia. As a
result fifteen vessels sailed with eleven hundred and ninety Negroes in
1792. Arriving in Africa, they found the chief white man in control there
so drunk that he soon died of delirium tremens. John Clarkson, however,
brother of Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist, eventually took the lead,
founded Freetown, and the colony began its checkered career. In 1896 the
colony was saved from insurrection by the exiled Maroon Negroes from
Jamaica. After 1833, when emancipation in English colonies took place,
severer measures against the slave trade was possible and the colony began
to grow. To-day its imports and exports amount to fifteen million dollars
a year.

Liberia was a similar American experiment. In 1816 American
philanthropists decided that slavery was bound to die out, but that the
problem lay in getting rid of the freed Negroes, of which there were then