Besides, when the slave is not a soldier, he is money which has circulation; even in Egypt and at Bornou, officers and functionaries are paid in that money.

William Lejean has seen it and has told of it.
Such is, then, the actual state of the trade.
Must it be added that a number of agents of the great European powers are not ashamed to show a deplorable indulgence for this commerce.
Nevertheless, nothing is truer; while the cruisers watch the coasts of the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, the traffic goes on regularly in the interior, the caravans walk on under the eyes of certain functionaries, and massacres, where ten blacks perish to furnish one slave, take place at stated periods! So it will now be understood how terrible were those words just pronounced by Dick Sand.
"Africa! Equatorial Africa! Africa of slave-traders and slaves!" And he was not deceived; it was Africa with all its dangers, for his companions and for himself.
But on what part of the African continent had an inexplicable fatality landed him?
Evidently on the western coast, and as an aggravating circumstance, the young novice was forced to think that the "Pilgrim" was thrown on precisely that part of the coast of Angola where the caravans, which clear all that part of Africa, arrive.
In fact it was there.

It was that country which Cameron on the south and Stanley on the north were going to cross a few years later, and at the price of what efforts! Of this vast territory, which is composed of three provinces, Benguela, Congo, and Angola, there was but little known then except the coast.

It extends from the Nourse, in the south, as far as the Zaire in the north, and the two principal towns form two ports, Benguela and St.Paul' de Loanda, the capital of the colony which set off from the kingdom of Portugal.
In the interior this country was then almost unknown.

Few travelers had dared to venture there.