in later years furnished slaves to the new colony, and I think it more than possible that some were brought on this first voyage of D'Iberville's. However that may be, there were in the colony, in May, 1713, “four hundred persons, including twenty negroes.” Then it was that Cadillac, the founder, in July or August, 1701, of Detroit, arrived in the new colony to serve as governor general. The entire province, including all the region “between Carolina on the east and Old and New Mexico on the west,” had, by royal decree dated 14th September, 1712, been transferred, as far as commercial, mining and certain other privileges were concerned, to Sieur Antoine Crozat. Permission was granted him, “if he find it proper to have blacks in the said country of the Illinois,” to “send a ship every year to trade for them directly upon the coast of Guinea, taking permission from the Guinea company to do so.” But “before Crozat's plans were fairly organized, the operations of the treaty of Utrecht debarred him from the importation of Africans. Its provisions had, in fact, transferred the control of the slave trade to England, a plan far-reaching enough to make the mother country responsible for the long bondage of the negro in America.” - Nevertheless it must be said that though Crozat's plans in regard to the importation of negroes from Africa were defeated, it must have been for reasons that do not appear in the treaty, for designs of the same sort were successfully carried out by the many-named company of which John Law was, at first, the controlling spirit. “On the 6th of June,” 1719, two vessels “arrived from the coast of Guinea with five hundred negroes. * * In the beginning of July, 1720, “the ship l'Hercule, sixteen guns, arrived at Dauphin [Ship] Island from Guinea, with a cargo of negroes for the colony. * * On the 17th [of March, 1721], the frigate l'Africain arrived with one hundred and eighty negroes, being the remains of two hundred eighty which had embarked on board in Africa. On the 23d, le Duc du Maine, thirty-six guns, arrived with three hundred and ninety-four negroes, being the remains of four hundred and fifty-three who had sailed from Africa about the same time. On the 4th of April, M. Berranger was sent to Cape Francais to purchase corn for the negroes, who were dying with hunger at Biloxi (Fort Louis). * * On the 20th, the frigate la Nereide * * arrived with two hundred and ninety-four negroes, being the remains of three hundred and fifty which had been put on board." He reported that the frigate le Charles, with a cargo of negroes, had been burnt at sea within sixty miles of the coast.” We need not continue the dismal story-—told by Benard de La Harpe—any farther to be reminded of the fact that the monopoly granted to England by the 12th article of the treaty of Utrecht related to Spanish and not to French America.
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