igger
English" of the West African trade is a regular dialect among the
natives of the Sierra Leone coast. Farther east, along the Upper Guinea
littoral, the Eboe family of tribes who extend across the Niger delta
from Lagos to Old Calabar have furnished a language of trade in one of
their dialects.[503] The Tupi speech of the Brazilian coast Indians, with
whom the explorers first came into contact, became, in the mouth of
Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries, the _lingua geral_ or medium
of communication between the whites and the various Indian tribes
throughout Brazil.[504] The Chinook Indians, located on our Pacific coast
north and south of the Columbia River, have furnished a jargon of
Indian, French, and English words which serves as a language of trade
throughout a long stretch of the northwest Pacific coast, not only
between whites and Indians, but also between Indians of different
linguistic stocks.[505]

[Sidenote: Coast-dwellers as middlemen.]

The coast is the natural habitat of the middleman. One strip of seaboard
produces a middleman people, and then sends them out to appropriate
other littorals, if geographic conditions are favorable; otherwise it is
content with the transit trade of its own locality. It breeds
essentially a race of merchants, shunning varied production, nursing
monopoly by secrecy and every method to crush competition. The profits
of trade attract all the free citizens, and the laboring class is small
or slave. Expansion landward has no attraction in comparison with the
seaward expansion of commerce. The result is often a relative dearth of
local land-grown food stuffs. King Hiram of Tyre, in his letter to King
Solomon, promised to send him trees of cedar and cypress, made into
rafts and conveyed to the coast of Philistia, and asked in return for
grain, "which we stand in need of because we inhabit an island." The pay
came in the form of wheat, oil, and wine. But Solomon furnished a
considerable part of the laborers--30,000 of them--who were sent, 10,000
at a time, to Mount Lebanon to cut the timber, apparently under the
direction of the more skilful Sidonian foresters.[506] A type of true
coast traders is found in the Duallas of the German Kamerun, at the
inner angle of the Gulf of Guinea. Located along the lower course and
delta of the Mungo River where it flows into the Kamerun estuary, they
command a good route through a mountainous country into the interior.
This they guard