slave trade may not have significantly penetrated the coastal rainforest. The peoples who migrated into Sierra Leone from this time would have had greater contact with the indigenous slave trade, either practicing it or escaping it. When Europeans first arrived at Sierra Leone, slavery among the African peoples of the area was believed to be rare. According to historian Walter Rodney, the Portuguese mariners kept detailed reports, and so it is likely if slavery had been an important local institution that the reports would have described it. There was mention of a very particular kind of slavery in the region, which was: According to Rodney, such a person would likely have retained some rights and had some opportunity to rise in status as time passed. The European colonization of the Americas soon led to labor demands from nascent colonies; this led Europeans to seek a supply of slaves to transport to the Americas. Initially, European slavers launched raids on coastal villages to abduct Africans and sell them into slavery. However, they soon established economic alliances with local leaders, as many chiefs were willing to sell undesirable members of their tribe to Europeans. Other African chiefs launched raids on rival tribes in order to sell captives of such raids into slavery. This early slaving was essentially an export business. The use of slaves as labourers by the local Africans appears to have developed only later. It may first have occurred under coastal chiefs in the late 18th century: For example, in the late 18th century, William Cleveland, a Scottish leader in Africa had a large "slave town" on the mainland opposite the Banana Islands, whose inhabitants "were employed in cultivating extensive rice fields, described as being some of the largest in Africa at the time". The existence of an indigenous slave town was recorded by an English traveler in 1823. Known in the Fula language as a rounde, it was connected with the Sulima Susu's capital city, Falaba. Its inhabitants worked at farming. Rodney has postulated two means by which slaving for export could have caused a local practice of using slaves for labour to develop: Not all war captives offered for sale would have been bought by the Portuguese, so their captors had to find something else to do with them. Rodney believes that executing them was rare and that they would have been used for local labour. There is