[Footnote 12:  American Historical Record, I (1872), 314, 317.]

[Footnote 13:  Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, LXIX, 59, 60.]

The separate traders also had more frequent quarrels with the natives.  In 1732 a Yankee captain was killed in a trade dispute and his crew set adrift.  Soon afterward certain Jolofs took another ship’s officers captive and required the value of twenty slaves as ransom.  And in 1733 the natives at Yamyamacunda, up the Gambia, sought revenge upon Captain Samuel Moore for having paid them in pewter dollars on his previous voyage, and were quieted through the good offices of a company factor.[14] The company suffered far less from native disorders, for a threat of removing its factory would bring any chief to terms.  In 1731, however, the king of Barsally brought a troop of his kinsmen and subjects to the Joar factory where Moore was in charge, got drunk, seized the keys and rifled the stores.[15] But the company’s chief trouble was with its own factors.  The climate and conditions were so trying that illness was frequent and insanity and suicide occasional; and the isolation encouraged fraudulent practices.  It was usually impossible to tell the false from the true in the reports of the loss of goods by fire and flood, theft and rapine, mildew and white ants, or the loss of slaves by death or mutiny.  The expense of the salary list, ship hire, provisions and merchandise was heavy and continuous, while the returns were precarious to a degree.  Not often did such great wars occur as the Dahomey invasion of the Whidah country in 1726[16] and the general fighting of the Gambia peoples in 1733-1734[17] to glut the outward bound ships with slave cargoes.  As a rule the company’s advantage of steady markets and friendly native relations appears to have been more than offset by the freedom of the separate traders from fixed charges and the necessity of dependence upon lazy and unfaithful employees.

[Footnote 14:  Moore, pp. 112, 164, 182.]

[Footnote 15:  Ibid., p. 82.]

[Footnote 16:  William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave Trade (London, 1734), pp. 8-32.]

[Footnote 17:  Moore, p. 157.]

Instead of jogging along the coast, as many had been accustomed to do, and casting anchor here and there upon sighting signal smokes raised by natives who had slaves to sell,[18] the separate traders began before the close of the colonial period to get their slaves from white factors at the “castles,” which were then a relic from the company regime.  So advantageous was this that in 1772 a Newport brig owned by Colonel Wanton cleared L500 on her voyage, and next year the sloop Adventure, also of Newport, Christopher and George Champlin owners, made such speedy trade that after losing by death one slave out of the ninety-five in her cargo she landed the remainder in prime order at Barbados and sold them immediately in one lot at L35 per head.[19]