Their methods were at once crude and wasteful...

Their methods were at once crude and wasteful, because they were robbers, not warriors. **“**Their practice was to surround some villages which they have marked down for their prey, and approach it silently at night. The village was usually a collection of primitive mud huts thatched with bamboo's and palm leaves, all highly inflammable, which they set alight without compunction, generally at dawn.

As the inhabitants woke to the cracking of flames and struggled into the open, they were rounded up and made prisoners. Any of them who resisted were cut down, as the slave hunters had no mercy for them.

They had no use for the old or infirm or for babes who were all killed on the spot, and only men and women in their prime, and young boys and girls, were spared, to be carried off into slavery, leaving behind the dead bodies and dying ashes, where once there had been happy homes and flourishing settlements. The waste was out of all proportion to the prize. But waste, wanton waste, was the hall-mark of the negro slavery, from its first moments to the last.

Wherever it reared its head, death, disease and destruction were its invariable concomitants... “ Those captured far inland were less fortunate, for they had to march to the coast on their feet - a dreary trudge over many miles of thick forest and rough desert. They walked almost naked, with no protection against sharp thorns, and jagged stones.

To prevent escape, they had heavy forked poles fastened round their necks; their hands, if they were troublesome, might be secured through holes in a rough wooden board, and they were fettered with chains on their ankles. Linked together by ropes, the long lines known as coffles, they trudged miserably on towards their terrifying fate; for all Africans knew that the white were fed on the negros bought from the barracoons.

Their captors drove them relentlessly forward, ignoring wounds and lacerations, and physicking their energy by plentiful flicks of the whips. If any succumbed, he was thrown on one side; if any of them became too ill, they were left to die or more mercifully knocked on the head. ” [^1] “ ...In fair weather or foul, in spite of diseases and deaths, and for all the insurrections and suicides, every year the ships brought thousands of slaves to America and the West Indies..

They came in ships of many nations - French, Dutch, Portuguese and Danish - but more than half were brought in English ships that sailed from Bristol, London, or Liverpool.