The company soon fell upon still more evil times, and met them by evil practices.  To increase its capital it offered new stock for sale at reduced prices and borrowed money for dividends in order to encourage subscriptions.  The separate traders meanwhile were winning nearly all its trade.  In 1709-1710, for example, forty-four of their vessels made voyages as compared with but three ships of the company, and Royal African stock sold as low as 2-1/8 on the L100.  A reorganization in 1712 however added largely to the company’s funds, and the treaty of Utrecht brought it new prosperity.  In 1730 at length Parliament relieved the separate traders of all dues, substituting a public grant of L10,000 a year toward the maintenance of the company’s forts.  For twenty years more the company, managed in the early thirties by James Oglethorpe, kept up the unequal contest until 1751 when it was dissolved.

The company regime under the several flags was particularly dominant on the coasts most esteemed in the seventeenth century; and in that century they reached a comity of their own on the basis of live and let live.  The French were secured in the Senegal sphere of influence and the English on the Gambia, while on the Gold Coast the Dutch and English divided the trade between them.  Here the two headquarters were in forts lying within sight of each other:  El Mina of the Dutch, and Cape Coast Castle of the English.  Each was commanded by a governor and garrisoned by a score or two of soldiers; and each with its outlying factories had a staff of perhaps a dozen factors, as many sub-factors, twice as many assistants, and a few bookkeepers and auditors, as well as a corps of white artisans and an abundance of native interpreters, boatmen, carriers and domestic servants.  The Dutch and English stations alternated in a series east and west, often standing no further than a cannon-shot apart.  Here and there one of them had acquired a slight domination which the other respected; but in the case of the Coromantees (or Fantyns) William Bosman, a Dutch company factor about 1700, wrote that both companies had “equal power, that is none at all.  For when these people are inclined to it they shut up the passes so close that not one merchant can come from the inland country to trade with us; and sometimes, not content with this, they prevent the bringing of provisions to us till we have made peace with them.”  The tribe was in fact able to exact heavy tribute from both companies; and to stretch the treaty engagements at will to its own advantage.[5] Further eastward, on the densely populated Slave Coast, the factories were few and the trade virtually open to all comers.  Here, as was common throughout Upper Guinea, the traits and the trading practices of adjacent tribes were likely to be in sharp contrast.  The Popo (or Paw Paw) people, for example, were so notorious for cheating and thieving that few traders would go thither unless prepared to carry things with a strong hand.  The