, we should have traced, with eager
curiosity, the distinct and domestic footsteps of his march. But the
tedious enumeration of the unknown and uninteresting tribes of Africa
may be reduced to the general remark, that they were all of the swarthy
race of the Moors; that they inhabited the back settlements of the
Mauritanian and Numidian province, the country, as they have since been
termed by the Arabs, of dates and of locusts; [125] and that, as the
Roman power declined in Africa, the boundary of civilized manners and
cultivated land was insensibly contracted. Beyond the utmost limits of
the Moors, the vast and inhospitable desert of the South extends above
a thousand miles to the banks of the Niger. The ancients, who had a very
faint and imperfect knowledge of the great peninsula of Africa, were
sometimes tempted to believe, that the torrid zone must ever remain
destitute of inhabitants; [126] and they sometimes amused their fancy
by filling the vacant space with headless men, or rather monsters; [127]
with horned and cloven-footed satyrs; [128] with fabulous centaurs;
[129] and with human pygmies, who waged a bold and doubtful warfare
against the cranes. [130] Carthage would have trembled at the strange
intelligence that the countries on either side of the equator were
filled with innumerable nations, who differed only in their color from
the ordinary appearance of the human species: and the subjects of
the Roman empire might have anxiously expected, that the swarms of
Barbarians, which issued from the North, would soon be encountered
from the South by new swarms of Barbarians, equally fierce and equally
formidable. These gloomy terrors would indeed have been dispelled by a
more intimate acquaintance with the character of their African enemies.
The inaction of the negroes does not seem to be the effect either of
their virtue or of their pusillanimity. They indulge, like the rest
of mankind, their passions and appetites; and the adjacent tribes are
engaged in frequent acts of hostility. [131] But their rude ignorance
has never invented any effectual weapons of defence, or of destruction;
they appear incapable of forming any extensive plans of government, or
conquest; and the obvious inferiority of their mental faculties has
been discovered and abused by the nations of the temperate zone. Sixty
thousand blacks are annually embarked from the coast of Guinea, never to
return to their native country; but they are embarked i