were the tools of the slave-trader! Those mutilated
hands, they were the hands of captives!

The Portuguese Negoro, and the American Harris, must be in collusion!
And those terrible words guessed by Dick Sand, finally escaped his lips:

"Africa! Equatorial Africa! Africa of the slave-trade and the slaves!"

End of Part I

_PART II_

* * * * *

CHAPTER I.

THE SLAVE TRADE.

The slave trade! Nobody is ignorant of the significance of this
word, which should never have found a place in human language. This
abominable traffic, for a long time practised to the profit of the
European nations which possessed colonies beyond the sea, has been
already forbidden for many years. Meanwhile it is always going on
a large scale, and principally in Central Africa. Even in this
nineteenth century the signature of a few States, calling themselves
Christians, are still missing from the Act for the Abolition of
Slavery.

We might believe that the trade is no longer carried on; that this
buying and this selling of human creatures has ceased: it is not so,
and that is what the reader must know if he wishes to become more
deeply interested in the second part of this history. He must learn
what these men-hunts actually are still, these hunts which threaten
to depopulate a whole continent for the maintenance of a few slave
colonies; where and how these barbarous captures are executed; how
much blood they cost; how they provoke incendiarism and pillage;
finally, for whose profit they are made.

It is in the fifteenth century only that we see the trade in blacks
carried on for the first time. Behold under what circumstances it was
established:

The Mussulmans, after being expelled from Spain, took refuge beyond
the Strait on the coast of Africa. The Portuguese, who then occupied
that part of the coast, pursued them with fury. A certain number of
those fugitives were made prisoners and brought back to Portugal.
Reduced to slavery, they constituted the first nucleus of African
slaves which has been formed in Western Europe since the Christian
Era.

But those Mussulmans belonged, for the most part, to rich families,
who wished to buy them back for gold. The Portuguese refused to accept
a ransom, however large it might be. They had only to make foreign
gold. What they lacked were the arms so indispensable then for the
work of the growing colonies, and, to say it all, the arms of the
slave.