The priests then put all the Dutch under
the ban, but the natives raised a tumult saying that the Portuguese, the
only Catholic traders available, not only paid low prices in poor goods but
also aspired to a political domination. The crisis was relieved by a timely
plague of small-pox which the priests declared and the natives agreed was a
divinely sent punishment for their contumacy,--and for the time at least,
the exclusion of heretical traders was made effective.[20] The English
appear never to have excelled the Portuguese on the Congo and southward
except perhaps about the close of the eighteenth century.
[Footnote 20: Jerom Merolla da Sorrente, _Voyage to Congo_ (translated from
the Italian), in Pinkerton's _Voyages_, XVI, 253-260.]
The markets most frequented by the English and American separate traders
lay on the great middle stretches of the coast--Sierra Leone, the Grain
Coast (Liberia), the Ivory, Gold and Slave Coasts, the Oil Rivers as the
Niger Delta was then called, Cameroon, Gaboon and Loango. The swarm of
their ships was particularly great in the Gulf of Guinea upon whose shores
the vast fan-shaped hinterland poured its exiles along converging lines.
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