328 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY prosperous success, and much gayne to himself and the aforesaid adventurers, he came home, and arrived in the month of September 1563." The names quoted by Hakluyt are evidently names to be respected, yet the account given by Hawkins himself of his methods in a subsequent expedition of 1567 differs in nothing from the accounts given by eyewitnesses of Arab slave-raids of the present day. He not only traded, he raided. " There came to us," he says, '*a negro sent from a king oppressed by other kings, his neighbours, desiring our aide, with promise that as many negroes as by these warres might be obtained, as well of his part as of ours, should be at our pleasure." As a result, " I went myselfe, and with the helpe of the king of our side assaulted the towne both by land and sea, and very hardly with fire (their houses being covered with dry palm leaves) obtained the towne and put the inhabitants to flight, where we took 250 persons, men, women, and children ; and by our friend, the king of our side, there were taken 600 prisoners, whereof we hoped to have had our choise, but the negro (in which nation is seldom or never found truth) meant nothing lesse." The negro king decamped in the night with his prisoners, and Hawkins was left with the '' few which we had gotten ourselves."

It is interesting to observe, in Hawkins' letters describing these and other expeditions, the perfect reliance of the mariners upon the Almighty to be on their side, and to bring them out of all their dangers with **good store of negroes" for sale. On one occasion they were becalmed for eighteen days, and in great danger of death from starvation, having so great a company of negroes on board ; but *' Almighty God, who never suffereth His elect to perish," sent, we are told, a special wind to carry the slave-raiders safe to their destination, and when they reached it they obtained licence to sell their cargo on the ground that their vessel was '*a shippe of the Queen's Majestie of England," and that the cargo