ABSTRACT
“According to the news that many Negroes in the West Indies have given me of their fate, I see that most of them were captured in open warfare.” Thus wrote the Moravian missionary Georg Oldendorp, who interviewed dozens of slaves in the Danish West Indies to collect linguistic information in 1767–68. 1 Oldendorp was not unique in reporting this fact: other missionaries and travellers in the Americas noted the same thing.
