f sharks, fled to the mountains, or
fell beneath the driver's lash.

Mahe de Labourdounais was not the founder of slavery. The institution
preceded his arrival. Slavery existed in Mauritius even under the
Dutch regime. Of every eighteen slaves in the colony one died
annually, so that if the traffic had ceased for eighteen years, at the
end of that time the whole black population would have died out. From
first to last Mauritius has been the tomb of more than a million of
Africans. Their lamentable history is like the roll of the prophet,
written within and without, and the writing thereof is mourning and
lamentation.

Many became fugitives, and sometimes by daring adventure returned to
Africa. In order to check the fugitive slaves, Labourdounais employed
their countrymen against them, and formed a mounted police who
protected the colonists from their incursions.[4] To preserve the
inhabitants from famine, he introduced the cassava from the Island of
St. Jago and the Brazils, and published an ordinance by which every
planter was compelled to put under cultivation five hundred feet of
cassava for every slave that he possessed. The planters, an ignorant
and indolent race, used every measure to degenerate and discredit this
innovation, and in some cases destroyed the plantations of the cassava
by pouring boiling water on the root. The benefit conferred by this
ordinance was later felt and appreciated when their crops were
destroyed by the hurricanes or devoured by locusts. The cassava was
immune from either of these casualties and was the usual article of
food for the Negroes. Labourdounais instructed the slaves in the art
of ship building, made them sailors and soldiers and found them highly
useful in the expedition which he undertook against the English in
India. He endeavored also to mitigate their sufferings from the
enforcement of the regulations of the _Code Noir_.

After the dispersion of the pirates, the slave trade fell into the
hands of European merchants or Creole colonists, who extended it to
the adjoining coasts of Africa. The Mozambique Negroes were found more
tractable than those of Madagascar, but Negroes were obtained from
both points, according to the difficulties and exigencies of the
traffic. The price paid by the French at Madagascar for a man or a
woman from the age of thirteen to forty was two muskets, two cartridge
boxes, ten flints, and ten balls, or fifteen hundred balls or
seventeen hundred fl