276 Jean Fouchard
At all events, the arrival notices of the slave-ships enable us to conclude
with certainty that Bantus were in the majority in the final peopling of Santo
Domingo. They almost always say where the cargo is from, or give the name
of the African port from which the ship sailed.
Unfortunately, the Santo Domingo newspapers often give somewhat
contradictory information. Towards the end of the colonial period, and more
especially between 1783 and 1785, the papers habitually ascribed to the 'Gold
Coast' not only cargoes of Guiñean Ardas but also Kongos from the Bantu
group and Senegalese from the Sudanese group. The term 'Gold Coast' was
sometimes used to mean the Congo, Angola, Senegal, Dahomey of even Mozam-
bique, and to cover slaving centres such as Malimbe, Porto Novo, Ardre or
Adra, Aunis, Juda, Anamabou, Gorée and Badagris, which by no means all
belong to the geographical or ethnic region of the Gold Coast. We also see,
though this is not so serious, the term ' Kongos ' applied to cargos from Angola
and Mozambique—people belonging, it is true, to the same Bantu group.
The Santo Domingo newspapers and slave-traders were aware of these
occasional distortions. That was why they sometimes took the precaution of
specifying that some cargoes came from 'the real Gold Coast'.
We can therefore reach the following conclusions: from St Louis and
later from Gorée came the Senegalese, the Bambaras, Quiambas, Sudanese and
Fulani from Futa; the Mandingos were supplied by Gambia; the Aradas
represented the real Gold Coast or Slave Coast from Dahomey to eastern
Nigeria, and were grouped in the slaving centres of Juda, Porto Novo, Ouidah,
Abomey and Aliada.
The Mines and the Thimbas came from present-day Ghana, the Mocos
from Gabon, the Cotocolis from Togo, and the Nagos from south-west
Nigeria.
The Misérables and the Bouriquis came from the Malaguette Coast
(present-day Liberia), and the Mondongos from the kingdom of Benguele;
Angola's slaving ports were Cabinda and Loango. The Mandongos were
wrongly put in the same category as the neighbouring Kongos from the king-
dom of Congo, which lay between Capes Lopes and Negre, and thus between
Gabon and Angola.^4
On this basis we can rectify the few minor errors and inaccuracies
previously referred to. This is what I have tried to do in my appended sum-
mary account of the slave trade based on notices of slave-ship arrivals in the
various ports in Santo Domingo and of advertisements of public sales of their
cargoes.
According to the results of this inquiry, therefore, the Haitian commu-
nity's most immediate ancestors were mostly slaves belonging to the Bantu
group, which reinforced and then predominated over slaves imported from
the Guiñean group and over declining supplies from the Sudanese group.