The Southern Press

Slavery in The English Settlements on THE Coast of Africa.—The captain of a French merchantman, writing to the National, (Paris,) states that at the port of Acera, on the coast of Guinea, there is not a single English settler who has not more or less slaves, some owning as many as 150, and even 200. When the owner wishes to get rid of his captive, he sells him to the first captain of any emigrant boat that lands. These emigrant boats are miserable little coasters, commanded by liberated slaves, who embark as crew, at Sierra Leone, a great number of persons bound to service for some specified time.

They take them not to South America or Jamaica, but where the trade has its centre, the Gulf of Benin, where they are disposed of, no one knows how, and never heard of afterward. "Thus," the National continues, "if slavery has been erased from the law, it exists in practice; and to what extent it prevails may be judged by the fact that wherever there is a want of horses, the negroes are yoked to the tilbury, five or six instead of a horse. The English use the negroes as the ordinary animals of conveyance. They reproach the Portuguese with chaining their slaves, while they have a prison at the fort into which the black natives are cast for the most trifling offence, and out of which they always come chained by the neck when on their way to the public works."