of trade and of political
ambition had become thoroughly identified with that of exploration. The
expansion of the European _nations_, which had languished since the
Crusades, had begun again. What was more unfortunate, from a modern
standpoint, the African slave trade, as a part of European commerce,
begins here too. It is useless to try to explain it away.

Henry's own motives were not those of the slave-driver; it seems true
enough that the captives, when once brought home to Spain, were treated,
under his orders, with all kindness; his own wish seems to have been to
use this man-hunting traffic as a means to Christianise and civilise the
native tribes, to win over the whole by the education of a few
prisoners. But his captains did not always aim so high. The actual
seizure of the captives--Moors and Negroes--along the coast of Guinea,
was as barbarous and as ruthless as most slave-drivings. There was
hardly a capture made without violence and bloodshed; a raid on a
village, a fire and sack and butchery, was the usual course of
things--the order of the day. And the natives, whatever they might gain
when fairly landed in Europe, did not give themselves up very readily to
be taught; as a rule, they fought desperately, and killed the men who
had come to do them good, whenever they had a chance.

The kidnapping, which some of the Spanish patriot writers seem to think
of as simply an act of Christian charity, "a corporal work of mercy,"
was at the time a matter of profit and money returns. Negro bodies would
sell well, Negro villages would yield plunder, and, like the killing of
wild Irish in the sixteenth century, the Prince's men took a Black-Moor
hunt as the best of sport. It was hardly wonderful, then, that the later
sailors of Cadamosto's day (1450-60) found all the coast up in arms
against them, and that so many fell victims to the deadly poisoned
arrows of the Senegal and the Gambia. Every native believed, as they
told one of the Portuguese captains in a parley, that the explorers
carried off their people to cook and eat them.

In most of the speeches that are given us in the chronicle of the time,
the masters encourage their men to these slave-raids by saying, first,
what glory they will get by a victory; next, what a profit can be made
sure by a good haul of captives; last, what a generous reward the
Prince will give for people who can tell him about these lands.
Sometimes, after reprisals had begun, the whole