The Negro Boy’s Narrative.

My father’s name was Clashoquin; mine is Asa-Asa.  He lived in a country called Bycla, near Egie, a large town.  Egie is as large as Brighton; it was some way from the sea.  I had five brothers and sisters.  We all lived together with my father and mother; he kept a horse, and was respectable, but not one of the great men.  My uncle was one of the great men at Egie:  he could make men come and work for him:  his name was Otou.  He had a great deal of land and cattle.  My father sometimes worked on his own land, and used to make charcoal.  I was too little to work; my eldest brother used to work on the land; and we were all very happy.

A great many people, whom we called Adinyes, set fire to Egie in the morning before daybreak; there were some thousands of them.  They killed a great many, and burnt all their houses.  They staid two days, and then carried away all the people whom they did not kill.

They came again every now and then for a month, as long as they could find people to carry away.  They used to tie them by the feet, except when they were taking them off, and then they let them loose; but if they offered to run away, they would shoot them.  I lost a great many friends and relations at Egie; about a dozen.  They sold all they carried away, to be slaves.  I know this because I afterwards saw them as slaves on the other side of the sea.  They took away brothers, and sisters, and husbands, and wives; they did not care about this.  They were sold for cloth or gunpowder, sometimes for salt or guns; sometimes they got four or five guns for a man:  they were English guns, made like my master’s that I clean for his shooting.  The Adinyes burnt a great many places besides Egie.  They burnt all the country wherever they found villages; they used to shoot men, women, and children, if they ran away.

They came to us about eleven o’clock one day, and directly they came they set our house on fire.  All of us had run away.  We kept together, and went into the woods, and stopped there two days.  The Adinyes then went away, and we returned home and found every thing burnt.  We tried to build a little shed, and were beginning to get comfortable again.  We found several of our neighbours lying about wounded; they had been shot.  I saw the bodies of four or five little children whom they had killed with blows on the head.  They had carried away their fathers and mothers, but the children were too small for slaves, so they killed them.  They had killed several others, but these were all that I saw.  I saw them lying in the street like dead dogs.