in the history of the Gold Coast the whites
began using the natives to make war on commercial rivals. In one famous
instance, "the Dutch had instigated the King of Fetu to refuse the
Assins permission to pass through his territory. These people used to
bring a great deal of gold to Cape Coast Castle (English), and the Dutch
hoped in this way to divert the trade to their own settlements. The King
having complied and plundered some of the traders on the way down, the
Assins declared war against him and were assisted by the English with
arms and ammunition. The King of Sabol was also paid to help them, and
the allied army (20,000 strong) inflicted a crushing defeat on the
Fetus."[14]

On another occasion, the Dutch were worsted in a war with some of the
native tribes. Realizing that if they were to maintain themselves on the
Coast they must raise an army as quickly as possible, they approached
the Fetus and bargained with them to take the field and fight the
Komendas until they had utterly exterminated them, on payment of $4,500.
But no sooner had this arrangement been made than the English paid the
Fetus an additional $4,500 to remain neutral![15]

Before 1750, when the competition for the slaves was less keen, and the
supply came nearer to meeting the demand, the slavers were probably as
honest in this as they were in any other trade with the natives. The
whites encouraged and incited the native tribes to make war upon one
another for the benefit of the whites. The whites fostered kidnaping,
slavery and the slave trade. The natives were urged to betray one
another, and the whites took advantage of their treachery. During the
four hundred years that the African slave trade was continued, it was
the whites who encouraged it; fostered it; and backed it financially.
The slave trade was a white man's trade, carried on under conditions as
far removed from the conditions of ordinary African life as the
manufacturing and trading of Europe were removed from the manufacturing
and trading of the Africans.

3. _The Slave Trade_

With the pressing demand from the Americas for a generous supply of
black slaves, the business of securing them became one of the chief
commercial activities of the time. "The trade bulked so large in the
world's commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that every
important maritime community on the Atlantic sought a share, generally
with the sanction and often with the active assistance o