“Yes, a thousand devils!” exclaimed Harris, “although the slave trade becomes more and more difficult, at least on this coast.  The Portuguese authorities on one side, and the English cruisers on the other, limit exportations.  There are few places, except in the environs of Mossamedes, to the south of Angola, that the shipping of blacks can now be made with any chance of success.  So, at this time, the pens are filled with slaves, waiting for the ships which ought to carry them to Spanish colonies.  As to passing them by Benguela, or St. Paul de Loanda, that is not possible.  The governors no longer understand reason, no more do the chiefs (title given to the Portuguese governors of secondary establishments).  We must, then, return to the factories of the interior.  This is what old Alvez intends to do.  He will go from the Nyangwe and Tanganyika side to change his stuffs for ivory and slaves.  Business is always profitable with upper Egypt and the Mozambique coast, which furnishes all Madagascar.  But I fear the time will come when the trade can be no longer carried on.  The English are making great progress in the interior of Africa.  The missionaries advance and work against us.  That Livingstone, curse him, after exploring the lake region, is going, they say, to travel toward Angola.  Then they speak of a Lieutenant Cameron, who proposes to cross the continent from east to west.  They also fear that the American, Stanley, wishes to do as much.  All these visits will end by damaging our operations, Negoro, and if we care for our own interests, not one of those visitors will return to relate in Europe what he has had the indiscretion to come to see in Africa.”

Would not one say, to hear them, the rascals, that they were speaking like honest merchants whose affairs were momentarily cramped by a commercial crisis?  Who would believe that, instead of sacks of coffee or casks of sugar, they were talking of human beings to export like merchandise?  These traders have no other idea of right or wrong.  The moral sense is entirely lacking in them, and if they had any, how quickly they would lose it among the frightful atrocities of the African slave trade.

But where Harris was right, was when he said that civilization was gradually penetrating those savage countries in the wake of those hardy travelers, whose names are indissoluble linked to the discoveries of Equatorial Africa.  At the head, David Livingstone, after him, Grant, Speke, Burton, Cameron, Stanley, those heroes will leave imperishable names as benefactors of humanity.

When their conversation reached that point, Harris knew what the last two years of Negoro’s life had been.  The trader Alvez’s old agent, the escaped prisoner from the Loanda penitentiary, reappeared the same as Harris had always known him, that is, ready to do anything.  But what plan Negoro intended to take in regard to the shipwrecked from the “Pilgrim,” Harris did not yet know.  He asked his accomplice about it.