jealously, excluding all competition, monopolizing the
trade, and imposing a transit duty on all articles going to and from the
interior. They avoid agriculture so far as possible. Their women and
slaves produce an inadequate supply of bananas and yams, but crops
needing much labor are wholly neglected, so that their coasts have a
reputation for dearness of provisions.[507]

Along the 4,500 miles of West African coast between the Senegal and the
Kunene rivers the negro's natural talent for trade has developed special
tribes, who act as intermediaries between the interior and the European
stations on the seaboard. Among these we find the Bihenos and Banda of
Portuguese Benguela, who fit out whole caravans for the back country;
the Portuguese of Loanda rely on the Ambaquistas and the Mbunda
middlemen. The slave trade particularly brought a sinister and abnormal
activity to these seaboard tribes,[508] just as it did to the East Coast
tribes, and stimulated both in the exploitation of their geographic
position as middlemen.[509]

[Sidenote: Monopoly of trade with the hinterland.]

The Alaskan coast shows the same development. The Kinik Indians at the
head of Cook's Inlet buy skins of land animals from the inland
Athapascans at the sources of the Copper River, and then make a good
profit by selling them to the American traders of the coast. These same
Athapascans for a long time found a similar body of middlemen in the
Ugalentz at the mouth of the Copper River, till the Americans there
encouraged the inland hunters to bring their skins to the fur station on
the coast.[510] The Chilcats at the head of Lynn Canal long monopolized
the fur trade with the Athapascan Indians about Chilkoot Pass; these
they would meet on the divide and buy their skins, which they would
carry to the Hudson Bay Company agents on the coast. They guarded their
monopoly jealously, and for fifty years were able to exclude all traders
and miners from the passes leading to the Yukon.[511]

The same policy of monopoly and exclusion has been pursued by the Moro
coast dwellers of Mindanao in relation to the pagan tribes of the
interior. They buy at low prices the forest and agriculture products of
the inland Malays, whom they do not permit to approach either rivers or
seaboard, for fear they may come into contact with the Chinese merchants
along the coast. So fiercely is their monopoly guarded by this middleman
race, that the American Government in the Phi