of commerce.  The result is often a relative dearth of local land-grown food stuffs.  King Hiram of Tyre, in his letter to King Solomon, promised to send him trees of cedar and cypress, made into rafts and conveyed to the coast of Philistia, and asked in return for grain, “which we stand in need of because we inhabit an island.”  The pay came in the form of wheat, oil, and wine.  But Solomon furnished a considerable part of the laborers—­30,000 of them—­who were sent, 10,000 at a time, to Mount Lebanon to cut the timber, apparently under the direction of the more skilful Sidonian foresters.[506] A type of true coast traders is found in the Duallas of the German Kamerun, at the inner angle of the Gulf of Guinea.  Located along the lower course and delta of the Mungo River where it flows into the Kamerun estuary, they command a good route through a mountainous country into the interior.  This they guard jealously, excluding all competition, monopolizing the trade, and imposing a transit duty on all articles going to and from the interior.  They avoid agriculture so far as possible.  Their women and slaves produce an inadequate supply of bananas and yams, but crops needing much labor are wholly neglected, so that their coasts have a reputation for dearness of provisions.[507]

Along the 4,500 miles of West African coast between the Senegal and the Kunene rivers the negro’s natural talent for trade has developed special tribes, who act as intermediaries between the interior and the European stations on the seaboard.  Among these we find the Bihenos and Banda of Portuguese Benguela, who fit out whole caravans for the back country; the Portuguese of Loanda rely on the Ambaquistas and the Mbunda middlemen.  The slave trade particularly brought a sinister and abnormal activity to these seaboard tribes,[508] just as it did to the East Coast tribes, and stimulated both in the exploitation of their geographic position as middlemen.[509]

[Sidenote:  Monopoly of trade with the hinterland.]

The Alaskan coast shows the same development.  The Kinik Indians at the head of Cook’s Inlet buy skins of land animals from the inland Athapascans at the sources of the Copper River, and then make a good profit by selling them to the American traders of the coast.  These same Athapascans for a long time found a similar body of middlemen in the Ugalentz at the mouth of the Copper River, till the Americans there encouraged the inland hunters to bring their skins to the fur station on the coast.[510] The Chilcats at the head of Lynn Canal long monopolized the fur trade with the Athapascan Indians about Chilkoot Pass; these they would meet on the divide and buy their skins, which they would carry to the Hudson Bay Company agents on the coast.  They guarded their monopoly jealously, and for fifty years were able to exclude all traders and miners from the passes leading to the Yukon.[511]