But the tide had set west, and
Las Casas might as well have tried to stop the Trades. In 1800
Wilberforce stated in the House of Commons that at that time British
vessels were carrying each year to the Indies and the American
colonies 38,000 slaves, and when he spoke the traffic had been going
on for two hundred and fifty years. After the Treaty of Utrecht,
Queen Anne congratulated her Peers on the terms of the treaty which
gave to England "the fortress of Gibraltar, the Island of Minorca,
and the monopoly in the slave trade for thirty years," or, as it was
called, the _asiento_ (contract). This was considered so good an
investment that Philip V of Spain took up one-quarter of the common
stock, and good Queen Anne reserved another quarter, which later she
divided among her ladies. But for a time she and her cousin of Spain
were the two largest slave merchants in the world. The point of view
of those then engaged in the slave trade is very interesting. When
Queen Elizabeth sent Admiral Hawkins slave-hunting, she presented
him with a ship, named, with startling lack of moral perception,
after the Man of Sorrows. In a book on the slave trade I picked up
at Sierra Leone there is the diary of an officer who accompanied
Hawkins. "After," he writes, "going every day on shore to take the
inhabitants by burning and despoiling of their towns," the ship was
becalmed. "But," he adds gratefully, "the Almighty God, who never
suffereth his elect to perish, sent us the breeze.
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