ed negroes. The Company had also to furnish as
many negroes for the galleys at Marseilles as His Majesty should find
convenient. And the Crown offered a bounty of thirteen livres per head
for every negro, to be paid in "pieces of India."

[Footnote B: Du Tertre, the missionary historian of the Antilles,
proudly says, previously to this date, that the opinion of France in
favor of personal liberty still shielded a French deck from the traffic:
"Selon les lois de la France, qui abhorre la servitude sur toutes les
nations du monde, et ou tous les esclaves recouvrent heureusement la
liberte perdue, sitost qu'ils y abordent, et qu'ils en touchent la
terre."]

This is a famous phrase in the early annals of the slave-trade.
Reckoning by "pieces" was customary in the transaction of business upon
the coast of Africa. Merchandise, provisions, and presents to the native
princes had their value thus expressed, as well as slaves. If the negro
merchant asked ten pieces for a slave, the European trader offered
his wares divided into ten portions, each portion being regarded as a
"piece," without counting the parts which made it up. Thus, ten coarse
blankets made one piece, a musket one piece, a keg of powder weighing
ten pounds was one, a piece of East-India blue calico four pieces, ten
copper kettles one piece, one piece of chintz two pieces, which made
the ten for which the slave was exchangeable: and at length he became
commercially known as a "piece of India." The bounty of thirteen livres
was computed in France upon the wholesale value of the trinkets and
notions which were used in trade with Africa.

The traffic by pieces is as old as the age of Herodotus;[C] it was
originally a dumb show of goods between two trading parties ignorant of
each other's language, but at length it represented a transaction which
the parties should have been ashamed to mention.

[Footnote C: _Melpomene_, Sec. 196.]

Although this second Senegal Company was protected by the rigid
exclusion, under pain of fine and confiscation, of all other Frenchmen
from the trade, it soon fell into debt and parted with its privilege to
a third Company, and this in turn was restricted by the formation of a
Guinea Company, so that it soon sold out to a fourth Senegal Company,
which passed in 1709 into the hands of Rouen merchants who started a
fifth; and this too was merged in the West-India Company which
was formed in 1718. So little did the agriculture of the isl