slave trader.

The English trade began with Sir John Hawkins' voyages in 1562 and later,
in which "the Jesus, our chiefe shippe" played a leading part. Desultory
trade was kept up by the English until the middle of the seventeenth
century, when English chartered slave-trading companies began to appear.
In 1662 the "Royal Adventurers," including the king, the queen dowager,
and the Duke of York, invested in the trade, and finally the Royal African
Company, which became the world's chief slave trader, was formed in 1672
and carried on a growing trade for a quarter of a century. Jamaica had
finally been captured and held by Oliver Cromwell in 1655 and formed a
West Indian base for the trade in men.

The chief contract for trade in Negroes was the celebrated "Asiento" or
agreement of the King of Spain to the importation of slaves into Spanish
domains. The Pope's Bull or Demarkation, 1493, debarred Spain from African
possessions, and compelled her to contract with other nations for slaves.
This contract was in the hands of the Portuguese in 1600; in 1640 the
Dutch received it, and in 1701 the French. The War of the Spanish
Succession brought this monopoly to England.

This Asiento of 1713 was an agreement between England and Spain by which
the latter granted the former a monopoly of the Spanish colonial slave
trade for thirty years, and England engaged to supply the colonies within
that time with at least one hundred and forty-four thousand slaves at the
rate of forty-eight hundred per year. The English counted this prize as
the greatest result of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which ended the
mighty struggle against the power of Louis XIV. The English held the
monopoly until the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), although they had to
go to war over it in 1739.

From this agreement the slave traders reaped a harvest. The trade centered
at Liverpool, and that city's commercial greatness was built largely on
this foundation. In 1709 it sent out one slaver of thirty tons' burden;
encouraged by Parliamentary subsidies which amounted to nearly half a
million dollars between 1729 and 1750, the trade amounted to fifty-three
ships in 1751; eighty-six in 1765, and at the beginning of the nineteenth
century one hundred and eighty-five, which carried forty-nine thousand two
hundred and thirteen slaves in one year.

The slave trade thus begun by the Portuguese, enlarged by the Dutch, and
carried to its culmination by the English cent