Introduction^{Footnote 1}

The study of historical attitudes to work has for a long time been a topic of interest in studies of European history.^{Footnote 2} One example of an attitude frequently expressed in many historical sources, from many parts of the world (including for example Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, the United States, Russia and Ming China), is the idea that the lower classes were generally lazy.^{Footnote 3} One of the issues debated by early modern authors in Europe, for example, was thus how the lower classes could be encouraged to become more industrious: should for example wages be kept so low that the lower classes were compelled to work hard in order to earn their subsistence, or was it more effective to let them “taste the fruits of their industry,” as the Irish bishop Berkeley put it?^{Footnote 4} In the previous scholarly literature, there has however been some controversy over how much credibility one should give to any statements about the work ethic of the population.^{Footnote 5} Many scholars would agree with Herbert Applebaum when he argues that there is a great problem with sources that can inform us about such attitudes: “People who work are mostly humble, with no voice in the recorded pages from which histories are written. It is mostly the leisured or the recipients of the state’s or a patron’s largess who have the time, energy, and training to produce written works. (…) while we may see these ideas as representing the values of a culture, we must recognize the class origin of such ideas.”^{Footnote 6} In a recent study, Luca Morelli has for example shown how the attitude to work could differ considerably between workers and the elite in pre-industrial Milan.^{Footnote 7}

In recent years, there have been attempts to study historical attitudes to work in countries or regions outside of Europe. When studying global attitudes to work, however, there is the further problem, aside from the bias from the class origin of the source, that there may have been few historical sources that gave voice to domestic agents in many parts of the world – particularly many countries in the current-day global South. The available written sources about precolonial Africa, for example, have, to a very large extent, been written by European authors. This adds the problem of the European “othering,” the construction of stereotypes about other peoples, emphasized in much postcolonial theory and research.^{Footnote 8} The expressions of attitudes to work that can be found in historical sources are therefore often not only biased by class origin but also by racism. Syed Hussein Alatas has for example shown how the stereotype of the “lazy native” was commonly used by Europeans in their descriptions of people from Southeast Asia.^{Footnote 9}

The stereotype of the “lazy native” was historically frequently used when Europeans were describing Africans. Many scholars have discussed the stereotypical, racist picture that Europeans constructed about Africans in the early modern European discourse: Africans were in general portrayed as savage, primitive brutes – a portrait that had very little or nothing to do with reality. One of the core propositions in the bundle of characteristics that was attributed to the Africans was the particular claim that they were lazy. William Cohen has argued, based on a study of French sources, that the stereotype of the “lazy African” “was repeated an infinite number of times, finally becoming a basic European belief.”^{Footnote 10} In his study of the British image of Africa, Philip Curtin argued likewise: “Laziness was the vice most frequently reported, and the emphasis was repeated from several sides.”^{Footnote 11} Anthony Barker has made the even stronger claim that “virtually all” British writers referred to laziness among people in West Africa.^{Footnote 12} The same stereotype can also be found in Danish travel writings.^{Footnote 13} The stereotype would survive well into colonial times. It was for example, as Babacar Fall has shown, widely used by Europeans in colonial French West Africa.^{Footnote 14} It was also ubiquitous in sources from the British colonies in Africa, as Okia Opolot has shown in the case of colonial Kenya,^{Footnote 15} and Ann Whitehead in the case of colonial Zambia.^{Footnote 16} Several scholars have similarly shown its use by people of European descent when describing Africans in colonial South Africa.^{Footnote 17} The previous literature thus shows that the stereotype had become quite hegemonic in European travelogues from and descriptions of Africa from the precolonial, as well as the colonial, periods.

This stereotype of the lazy native had several implications. At the time, there was a widespread idea in early modern Europe that to work and strive hard was virtuous. Laziness, on the other hand, was considered a sin that had to be opposed.^{Footnote 18} This idea commonly originated in religious doctrines, but over time it experienced a process of secularization, as Ilja Veldman for example has shown in the case of the Netherlands.^{Footnote 19} One way of fighting the vice of laziness was to coerce the unwilling people to work. The stereotype of the “lazy African” therefore came to be used as an excuse for the institution of slavery in Africa, as well as for the transatlantic slave trade.^{Footnote 20} Indeed, Jeffer Daykin has argued – based on a study of French travel accounts – that the discourse was constructed in France by the late seventeenth century precisely in order to justify the French slave trade taking off at this time.^{Footnote 21} The stereotype also became ubiquitous in the Americas, often used as an excuse for exploiting the slaves there.^{Footnote 22} Many scholars have also written about how the stereotype of the “lazy African” came to be used during the colonial period in African as an excuse for various forms of forced labour.^{Footnote 23} As William Cohen summarized it: “Under the impact of imperialism, these stereotypes were increasingly emphasized to justify conquest.”^{Footnote 24}

Aim of this Paper – The Question and the Sources

In this paper, I am going to study the stereotype of the “lazy African,” as it was discussed in the European literature in the early modern period. The paper will therefore try to deal with the question: how did Europeans write about the work ethic of the people in precolonial Africa?

It is of the utmost importance to remember that the sources used for the study clearly represent an “alter-perspective,” in Marcel van der Linden’s terms.^{Footnote 25} They do not therefore necessarily reveal much or anything at all about the actual work ethic of West Africans, but only of the European perception or idea of this ethic. The European accounts will be analyzed with an eye both to the observer (Who were the observers? What role did they play in West Africa, and did this impact on the way they wrote about Africans? Did it change over time?) and the observed (Who were the Europeans writing about? Are there any geographical differences in the observations? Did it change over time?). The study will be limited to accounts referring to the region of West Africa in particular. The choice of region is motivated by the fact that this was the part of sub-Saharan Africa which first came into contact with Europeans during the age of explorations.

Both primary and secondary accounts will be used: the primary accounts for an analysis of the impressions that European travellers in West Africa presumably gained from their stay in this part of the world, whereas the secondary accounts will be used for an analysis of what other European writers picked up and transmitted from the primary accounts.

There are two main problems with much of the previous scholarly literature on this topic. Firstly, previous studies have often been based on a quite limited number of sources, but have made bold generalizations about the stereotype based on limited samples. William Cohen’s claim that the stereotype of the lazy African was repeated an “infinite number of times,” to take one example, is directly supported by references to just four sources. Secondly, previous studies have also been country-specific (looking at the British/American or French sources, respectively). As will be argued in this paper, more sources and – most importantly – a comparative approach can nuance and deepen our understanding of this stereotype considerably.

The article is based upon more than seventy sources – travel accounts and reports (both published books and pamphlets, and unpublished manuscripts), as well as some secondary sources such as geographical atlases – produced prior to formal European colonization in Africa. Most of these sources only discuss the African work ethic very briefly in passing. The sources were located using existing guides, by Adam Jones and John Fage, to primary sources on African history.^{Footnote 26} All sources found in these guides in languages mastered by the author of this paper (English, French, and Scandinavian languages) or translations of primary sources into any of these languages have been searched for any discussion related to the work ethic of the African population. Other sources referring to West Africa were located by searching a number of digital databases: The Making of the Modern World, Part I (MOMW1), Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), and Gallica.^{Footnote 27} In this search, various keywords frequent in this literature, e.g. Guinea, or the various countries in the region, have been used in combination with keywords related to the stereotype (e.g. “lazy,” “laziness,” and various synonyms of these words). In practice, since three of the four databases used focus on English-language publications primarily, this method of locating sources has amounted to a bias in favour of English sources; roughly half of the sources used were written by English authors. French authors account for roughly a fifth of the sources used, whereas the remainder is publications by Portuguese, Venetian, Dutch, German, Danish, and Swedish authors. Because of my limited language skills, I have been forced to rely on translations into English for sources in Latin, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch and German.

There has been a lot of previous research into how reliable many of the presumed primary sources are. It is well known that some of the authors of travel accounts – for example Olfert Dapper or William Smith – were in reality plagiarizing much of their accounts from previous authors. Scholars have therefore put a lot of effort into analyzing and decompiling what these authors plagiarized from others, and what they contributed themselves.^{Footnote 28} It seems reasonable to assume that some of the plagiarizing, perhaps especially among some of the lesser-known and less well-used sources, has still gone unnoticed. And even if an author has not directly plagiarized texts, he or she might still have read and been influenced by previous authors. For that reason, we cannot treat all the observations in the primary sources as being made independently of each other. For the paper, I have also tried to assemble the picture from some of the secondary literature. Whereas the paper probably covers a large share of the primary sources that describe the work ethic in precolonial West Africa, this is not necessarily the case regarding the sample of secondary sources because of the much greater problem of finding such sources. The results from this part of the study must therefore be treated as being of a more impressionistic nature.

Ideas of the Lazy African

As Mary Campbell has argued, there is no corpus of travel accounts from the Middle Ages that are concerned with Africa – “Egypt, then as now, was part of Asia, and Ethiopia was legend alone.”^{Footnote 29} A lack of primary accounts did not stop people in Europe from having prejudices and putting forth ideas about Africans. The idea of African laziness can be found at least as early as in some medieval documents.^{Footnote 30}

The stereotype would occur frequently in the early modern travel writings from West Africa. In 1453, the chronicler of the Portuguese explorations of the African coast, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, argued that the Africans lived like beasts: “no knowledge of bread and wine, and they were without the covering of clothes, or the lodgment of houses; and worse than all, through the great ignorance that was in them, in that they had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in a bestial sloth.” The argument was used as a direct excuse for slavery, since “their lot was now quite the contrary of what it had been,” once they had been enslaved by the Portuguese.^{Footnote 31} The stereotype is also to be found in the accounts of Cadamosto, who wrote about people in Senegal in the second half of the fifteenth century: “They are very bad labourers – unwilling to exert themselves to sow more than will barely support them throughout the year. Few trouble to raise supplies for market.”^{Footnote 32} The stereotype can be found to be used as an excuse for coercion in another early source, an anonymous Portuguese report on El Mina on the Gold Coast, dated to 1572:

The idea of the lazy African would be repeated over and over again in the following centuries, by many authors writing on Africa. In the year 1600, for example, the German explorer Johann von Lübelfing had the same idea: “They do not take the trouble to work, either: they live on the fruits of the country and on their livestock.”^{Footnote 34} The Jesuit priest Baltasar Barreira would, in 1605, argue that the land in Guinea was extremely fertile, suitable for sugar and cotton plantations, but it could be problematic to establish plantations since “the inhabitants have little interest in agriculture and are more inclined to enjoy themselves than work.”^{Footnote 35} In 1623, the English explorer Richard Jobson’s book on the exploration of the river Gambia was published. Jobson wrote about the Mandingos: “The men for their parts, do live a most idle kind of life, imploying themselves (I meane the greater part) to no kinde of trade nor exercise, except it be onely some two moneths of the yeare, which is in tilling, and bringing home their countrey come, and graine, wherein the preseruation of their liues consists.”^{Footnote 36} An unpublished French document written in Senegambia by the late seventeenth century, attributed by historians to the French governor Louis Moreau de Chambonneau, echoed the same idea: “For the most part the men do nothing at all and are terribly lazy and lecherous. Provided that they can sit with the sun playing down on their bellies, and they have something to smoke, and a little millet and water they are more content than Princes in France.”^{Footnote 37} In 1696, the physician Jaques-Joseph le Maire, employed in the French slave trading company, would argue likewise, claiming that: “If they Work one hour, they’ll be sure to Chat two for it.” ^{Footnote 38} The Norwegian priest Johannes Rask, working for the Danish slave trading company in the early eighteenth century, argued: “If they had been forced to it, or if they themselves had had the energy to work, something that is very much against their nature, then they would probably be found to be able to learn all sorts of things.”^{Footnote 39} Other travellers adhering to the stereotype of the “lazy African,” but who only touch upon the issue in passing, include the explorer André Álvares de Almada (1605),^{Footnote 40} Jean Barbot who worked for the French slave-trading company (in his highly influential accounts of Guinea, dating from 1678 to 1712),^{Footnote 41} the French explorer François de Paris (1682–1683),^{Footnote 42} the German physician Johann Peter Oettinger (1692–1693),^{Footnote 43} the French explorer François Froger (1698),^{Footnote 44} the English slave trader Nathaniel Uring (1726),^{Footnote 45} John Atkins, who was employed as a physician by the English slave trading company (1735),^{Footnote 46} the Moravian priest Christian Oldendorp who worked for the Danish slave trading company (1784),^{Footnote 47} John Matthews, officer in the Royal Navy (1788),^{Footnote 48} the English slave trader Robert Norris (1789),^{Footnote 49} and the Swedish scholar Adam Afzelius (1795–1796).^{Footnote 50}

Many of these authors state their claim of the lazy African quite matter-of-factly: the Africans are just lazy. The claims are often made in passing, with the main emphasis of the publication instead being put on completely different issues – for example the adventurous journey of the author, trade or political negotiations undertaken, or the natural environment of the region.

For many writers, the idea of the lazy African would be discussed in highly moralizing, pejorative terms. The Portuguese priest Manuel Alvares would for example in the early seventeenth century argue that the Jolof “accept the burden of work unwillingly and the seventh of our mortal sins predominates with them. To see a Jalofo is to see a true portrait of laziness.”^{Footnote 51} Willem Bosman, merchant of the Dutch West India Company, could for his part write: “These degenerate Vices [Africans were described as e.g. crafty and villainous] are accompanied with their Sisters, Sloth and Idleness; to which they are so prone that nothing but the utmost Necessity can force them to Labour.”^{Footnote 52} Ludewig Ferdinand Rømer, working as a merchant for the Danish slave-trading company, would similarly condemn what he thought were lazy natives of the Gold Coast: “How the Almighty has blessed this land which these lazy natives do not know how to utilize! God has undoubtedly left them to their evil nature, and they consider good to be evil and evil good, since they consider all work too demeaning, and beneath them.”^{Footnote 53}

The same ideas would continue to be spread by European travellers in the early nineteenth century as well. In 1806, for example, the French governor J.P.L. Durand wrote: “The character of the Blacks is nearly the same every where: they are indolent, except when animated by the desire of vengeance.”^{Footnote 54} The slave traders Joseph Corry (writing in 1807)^{Footnote 55} and Hugh Crow (memoirs published posthumously in 1830),^{Footnote 56} the ship surgeon Francis Spilsbury (Reference Spilsbury1807),^{Footnote 57} and the English governors Henry Meredith (1812)^{Footnote 58} and Brodie Cruickshank (in 1853),^{Footnote 59} as well as another governor of the British Cape Coast Castle, in a letter to the African Committee in 1809,^{Footnote 60} would be of a similar opinion, but would never elaborate on the issue.

The idea of the “lazy African” existed even among travellers sympathetic to the abolitionist cause. This, for example, is what the physician and abolitionist Thomas Winterbottom wrote in 1803: “When unoccupied by these employments they [people in Sierra Leone] while away the hours in listless indolence, reclined upon mats, or sleeping in the shade. Indolence is, without doubt, a distinguishing feature in the character of Africans, as of all uncivilized nations.”^{Footnote 61} It is also noteworthy that the lazy African workers were also argued to have become a real problem for the Europeans, once they started to employ Africans. In a narrative of a journey to Sierra Leone, published in 1802, Anna Maria Falconbridge claimed, for example, that the British colony in the area had problems with the workers, since “when they get their wages, like our English tars, they quit work while they have money.”^{Footnote 62} In Falconbridge’s opinion, then, it seems as if the African workers were at least no worse than the British ones.

Ideas of the Industrious African

Idleness is however not the only description of an African work ethic that can be found in the writings of European travellers in precolonial Africa. Quite a few authors argued that Africans on the contrary were or could be highly industrious. These ideas can be found from an early date in the accounts of the Muslim diplomat and traveller Leo Africanus. In the English translation of his book, published in 1600, one can read that the inhabitants in a number of kingdoms in Western Africa, south of where he himself travelled, were “most rich and industrious.”^{Footnote 63} Similar ideas can also be found in the writings of many later European travellers. The stereotype of the industrious African would however virtually always be made regarding people of a special ethnicity or nationality in Africa.

In the early seventeenth century, the Portuguese priest Manuel Alvares would on the one hand condemn Jolof for the sin of slothfulness, while both the Banhu and the Balanta were described as excellent workers.^{Footnote 64} The people of Metts, a polity described as lying to the east of Timbuktu, were depicted as industrious in an anonymous English pamphlet published in 1665.^{Footnote 65} A very explicit proponent of this idea is perhaps the French explorer Nicolas Villault. In his account from a journey to the coast of Guinea (translated into English in 1670), he wrote:

Jean Barbot would, by the end of the century, describe several peoples on the Gold Coast as being more industrious than Africans living inland.^{Footnote 67} William Snelgrave described the people of Whydah as industrious in 1734.^{Footnote 68} The Fula in Senegambia were held forth as a particularly “industrious and frugal” by Francis Moore in 1738,^{Footnote 69} and in 1794 James Watt would also describe them in similar terms.^{Footnote 70} William Smith claimed in 1744 that the people of both the Gambia and the Gold Coast in general were lazy, whereas people in Axim or Whydah were described as industrious.^{Footnote 71} The French naturalist Michel Adanson wrote in 1759: “Is it not amazing that the inhabitants of this island [Goree] should have traded with those of Senegal more than thirty years, and all this while not have given themselves the trouble to open a convenient road! Can there be a stronger proof of the laziness and indolence of the Negroes?”^{Footnote 72} A few pages later in the same publication, Adanson would describe the people of Rufisque in Senegambia as highly industrious.^{Footnote 73} John Matthews would for his part similarly argue that both the “Bagoes” and the “Suzées” in Sierra Leone were very industrious, whereas the “Mandingos” were described in the same publication as “too lazy and too proud to attend to trade.”^{Footnote 74} In 1792, mr Saugnier described people in the region of Senegambia as “laborious.”^{Footnote 75} The inhabitants of Fante on the Gold Coast were described in similar terms by Paul Erdmann Isert in 1788.^{Footnote 76} Captain John Adams would in 1813 describe men on the Gold Coast as quite lazy, whereas the people of Dahomey and Ardrah were industrious.^{Footnote 77} In 1821, William Hutton would describe a number of peoples in Sierra Leone, on the Gold Coast and Ashante as industrious, whereas the people of Paintrey were described as indolent, “sitting about in lazy postures, drinking palm wine, and talking palavers.”^{Footnote 78} Peter Leonard, in an account of a voyage to West Africa published in 1833, described the Kru in these terms:

Thomas Winterbottom, who generalized about Africans in very pejorative terms, as noted previously, would at least be satisfied with the same group as Peter Leonard, the Krumen of the Grain Coast, describing them at least as “very industrious.”^{Footnote 80} J.P.L. Durand would similarly describe people of Foigny as industrious.^{Footnote 81}

The Hegemony of the Stereotype

The stereotypical discourse on the “lazy African” soon found its way into secondary accounts in Europe, since many authors were citing – if not outright plagiarizing – the travel accounts of travellers who actually had visited Africa. The arguments could be found in the literature defending the slave trade, for example from Malachy Postlethwayt^{Footnote 82} and other pro-slavery authors.^{Footnote 83} Some of the leading abolitionists, such as James Ramsay^{Footnote 84} and Thomas Clarkson,^{Footnote 85} came to adhere to the same stereotype, and had to adapt their arguments in favour of abolition of the slave trade accordingly. Abbé Grégoire argued, in 1808, that Christianity might correct the vice of idleness.^{Footnote 86} The idea also found its way into contemporary novels.^{Footnote 87}

The idea was also repeated in contemporary scholarly accounts. The British geographers Richard Blome and John Ogilby, collecting their information on Africa from a number of other European authors, got the impression that Africans in general were lazy, from the literature they consulted.^{Footnote 88} The French scholar Henri Justel would argue likewise in 1684.^{Footnote 89} In the anonymously published book The Compleat Geographer, published in 1723, one can find the claim that: “The Blacks are here [in Guinea] generally crafty and deceitful, given to Sloath and Idleness, and no less careless and trepid.”^{Footnote 90} In 1728 the French scholar Jean-Baptiste Labat would similarly argue: “They are excessively lazy, flee work as if it were the worst thing in the world; if hunger did not force them, they would never cultivate their land.”^{Footnote 91} Others would in a similar manner pick up the same pejorative terms, for example John Barrow in his New Geographical Dictionary, published in 1759: “The negroes (…) are all, without exception, crafty, villainous, fraudulent, and very seldom to be trusted. They are prone to sloth and idleness, incredibly careless and stupid; being equally unmoved at good or ill success.”^{Footnote 92} The Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus would, in the twelth edition of his famous Systema Naturae, classify Africans as “niger, phlegmaticus, laxus” (“black, phlegmatic, lax”), and later in the same entry adds that they are “vafer, segnis, negligens” (“cunning, lazy, negligent”).^{Footnote 93} In the French Encyclopédie, published in 1780, it was argued that Africans “are blamed for ferociousness, cruelty, perfidy, cowardice, laziness. This accusation is but too true.”^{Footnote 94}

Only a few of the secondary accounts acknowledged that there might be exceptions to the general stereotype. In 1704, Henry Curson argued that the “People [of Guinea are] the richest and most Industrious amongst the Inhabitants of Negroland.”^{Footnote 95} The Universal Modern History, published in the middle of the eighteenth century, clearly adhered to the stereotype of the “lazy African” as a general rule of thumb, but did at the same time add the caveat that the stereotype primarily applied to people in the inland of Africa, whereas “those who live on the coasts and maritime parts, having been long since allured to a more active and laborious life, as well as civilized in their manners.”^{Footnote 96} In A New System of Geography, published in 1765, it is similarly argue that “though idleness is the favourite vice of the Africans, people of both sexes are here [in Whydah] so laborious and diligent, that they never desist till they have finished their undertaking, carrying the same spirit of perseverance into every action of their lives.”^{Footnote 97} Charles Middleton, publishing A New and Complete System of Geography in 1777, claimed that some (e.g. people on the Gold Coast) were “naturally slothful and indolent,” whereas others (e.g. people in Whydah) were described as highly industrious. Most innovatively, when discussing the people of Benin, Middleton described the people as divided into four classes, the lowest being the commonalty: “The generality of these are very indolent, nor will they go to work but when necessity obliges them: the laborious part of their business is executed by the wifes, such as tilling the ground, spinning the cotton, weaving of cloth, and other handicrafts.”^{Footnote 98} In 1799, John Leyden would describe several peoples in Senegambia as industrious (often adding, though, that they also were “warlike,” “rude,” or some similar pejorative term).^{Footnote 99}

Challenging the Hegemonic Stereotype

In time, a third line of argument would start to develop, quite explicitly challenging the stereotype of the “lazy African.” The American abolitionist Anthony Benezet seems to have been the first to directly and explicitly question the whole stereotype of the “lazy African.” Reading and quoting many of the primary travel accounts at length (including those of Willem Bosman, Jean Barbot, and Francis Moore), Benezet in 1762 came to the conclusion that:

The French philosophe and abolitionist Condorcet would, in a pamphlet published in 1781 under the pseudonym Mr. Schwartz, argue similarly, adding that laziness was a “fate of slaves” rather than any “natural” trait of Africans.^{Footnote 101} Another important contribution came from Olaudah Equiano, an abolitionist of African origin (possibly from Benin). In the chapters of his memoirs devoted to his early life in Africa, first published in 1789, Olaudah Equiano claimed that: “[W]e [the people of Benin] are all habituated to labour from our earliest years. Every one contributes something to the common stock; and, as we are unacquainted with idleness, we have no beggars.”^{Footnote 102} Other abolitionists would also contribute to challenging the stereotype. Thus, for example, wrote the Swedish scholar and abolitionist Charles Bernhard Wadström in 1794:

In a letter published in Wadström’s book, the English naturalist Henry Smeathman also agreed on this issue:

In 1799, the explorer Mungo Park wrote:

Philip Beaver, who was an officer in the Royal Navy and had tried to establish a colony of free people in Sierra Leone, argued in 1805: “[A]s far as my experience goes, I am warranted in saying that the Africans are not averse to labour, unless those in the neighbourhood of Bulama are unlike the rest of their species.”^{Footnote 106} By the early nineteenth century, some writers even started to turn the tables on the claims of idleness. G.A. Robertson, a merchant in Africa with clear pro-abolitionist tendencies, argued in 1819 that a number of people on the Windward and Gold Coasts and further inland were highly industrious, whereas a number of other people – primarily those who had been in contact with the Europeans for a longer period of time – had become less industrious as a consequence of the intercourse with the Europeans.^{Footnote 107} Another example comes from the book Anecdotes of Africans, published anonymously in 1827. One particular anecdote tells of the author being taken captive by some Arabs after being shipwrecked. After the author complains about the harshness of the captivity, the Arab slaver is claimed to have told the Englishman: “You are too lazy to work yourselves in your fields, and therefore you send your ships to the Negro coast.” The author later continues: “Although the purpose of my voyage had been very different from what Ahomed suspected, yet I felt the sting of his reproach, in a manner that I can never forget.”^{Footnote 108}