The following is the medical report on the state of the Brazilian schooner Mensageira, captured in 1830 with 353 slaves :—' A hundred and sixty on deck without accommodation for them below; and the whole number, 353, suffering so much from their crowded state, from dysentery, ophthalmia, and ulcers, that we recommend their being immediately landed, to save their lives.'*

The Apta, condemned in 1834 at Sierra Leone, was only thirty feet in length, and eleven in beam; and besides eleven other persons, she had fifty-four slaves on board: in all, sixty-five human beings. This case was the subject of an indignant remonstrance by the Duke of Wellington in the month following his accession to the Foreign Office. †

The two next cases are taken from 'The present State of the Foreign Slave-Trade,' published only four years ago, which vouches, as its principal authority, the papers laid before parliament, but gives the substance in a more compendious form:

'La Jeune Estelle, being chased by a British vessel, ENCLOSED TWELVE NEGROES IN CASKS, AND THREW THEM OVERBOARD.' 'M. Oiseau, commander of Le Louis, a French vessel, in completing his cargo at Malabar, thrust the slaves into a narrow space, three feet high, and closed the hatches. Next morning fifty were found dead. Oiseau coolly went ashore to purchase others to supply their place.'

The following extract is from a report by Captain Hayes to the Admiralty, of a representation made to him respecting one of these vessels, in 1832:

The master, having a large cargo of these human beings chained together, with more humanity than his fellows, permitted some of them to come on deck, but still chained together, for the benefit of the air; when they immediately commenced jumping overboard hand in hand, and drowning in couples; and, continued the person (relating the circumstance), "without any cause whatever." Now, these people were just brought from a situation between decks, and to which they knew they must return, where the scalding perspiration was running from one to the other, covered also with their own filth, and where it is no uncommon occurrence for women to be bringing forth children, and men dying by their side, with full in their view living and dead bodies chained together; and the living, in addition to all their other torments, labouring under the most famishing thirst (being in very few instances allowed more than a pint of water a day); and, let it not be forgotten, that these unfortunate people had just been torn from their country, their families, their all! Men dragged from their wives, women from their husbands and children, girls from their mothers, and boys from their fathers; and yet in this

* Parliamentary Papers, presented 1830, A. p. 59.

+ Ibid. 1835, B. p. 21.

man's

man's eye (for heart and soul he could have none) there was no cause whatever for jumping overboard and drowning. This in truth is a rough picture, but it is not highly coloured. The men are chained in pairs, and, as a proof they are intended so to remain to the end of the voyage, their fetters are not locked, but riveted by the blacksmith, and as deaths are frequently occurring, living men are often for a length of time confined to dead bodies; the living man cannot be released till the blacksmith has performed the operation of cutting the clench of the rivet with his chisel; and I have now an officer on board the Dryad, who, on examining one of these slave-vessels, found not only living men chained to dead bodies, but the latter in a putrid state; and we have now a case reported here, which, if true, is too horrible and disgusting to be described.'*

In the notorious Spanish slaver, the Veloz Passageira, captured with 556 slaves after a severe action, the captain made the slaves assist to work the guns against their own deliverers. Five were found killed, and one desperately wounded.

appear

This Veloz Passageira had acquired so atrocious a reputation, that it became an object with our commanders to make a special search for her. Captain Arabin, of the North Star, having information on his homeward voyage that she would cross his course near the equator, made preparations to attack her, though the North Star was of much inferior strength. Dr. Walsh, who was coming home in the British vessel, relates, that at breakfast, while the conversation was turning on the chances of meeting with the slaver, a midshipman entered the cabin, and said in a hurried manner, that a sail was visible to N.W. All rushed on deck, and setting their glasses, distinctly saw a large ship of three masts, apparently crossing their way. In about an hour she tacked, as if not liking their ance, and stood away before the wind. The English captain gave chase. The breeze freshened, her hull became distinctly visible, and she was now ascertained to be a slaver. Escape seemed impracticable. She doubled, however, in all directions, and seemed to change her course each moment, to avoid her pursuers. Five guns were successively fired, and the English union flag hoisted, but without effect; and the wind now dying away, the North Star began to drop astern. We kept a sharp look out,' says Dr. Walsh, with intense interest, leaning over the netting, and silently handing the glass to one another, as if a word spoken would impede our way.' Thus closed the night. When morning dawned, we saw her, like a speck on the horizon, standing due north.' The breeze increased, and again the British captain gained on the slaver. Again long shots were sent after her, but she only crowded more sail to escape.

*Parliamentary Papers, presented 1832, B. pp. 170, 171.

At

twelve 'we were entirely within gun-shot, and one of our long bow-guns was again fired at her. It struck the water alongside, and then, for the first time, she showed a disposition to stop. While we were preparing a second, she hove to, and in a short time we were alongside her, after a most interesting chase of thirty hours, during which we ran 300 miles.'

After all, she was not the ship for which Captain Arabin had been looking out, but she was full of slaves. Behind her foremast was an enormous gun, turning on a broad circle of iron, and enabling her to act as a pirate if her slaving speculation had failed.' She had taken in, on the coast of Africa, 562 slaves, and had been out seventeen days, during which she had thrown overboard fifty-five.'

The slaves were all enclosed under grated hatchways, between decks. The space was so low, that they sat between each other's legs, and stowed so close together, that there was no possibility of their lying down, or at all changing their position, by night or day. As they belonged to, and were shipped on account of, different individuals, they were all branded like sheep, with the owner's marks, of different forms. These were impressed under their breasts, or on their arms, and, as the mate informed me, with perfect indifference, "burnt with the red-hot iron." Over the hatchway stood a ferociouslooking fellow, with a scourge of many twisted thongs in his hand, who was the slave-driver of the ship, and whenever he heard the slightest noise below, he shook it over them, and seemed eager to exercise it. I was quite pleased to take this hateful badge out of his hand, and I have kept it ever since as a horrid memorial of reality, should I ever be disposed to forget the scene I witnessed.

'As soon as the poor creatures saw us looking down at them, their dark and melancholy visages brightened up. They perceived something of sympathy and kindness in our looks, which they had not been accustomed to, and feeling instinctively that we were friends, they immediately began to shout and clap their hands. One or two had picked up a few Portuguese words, and cried out " Viva! viva!" The women were particularly excited. They all held up their arms, and when we bent down and shook hands with them, they could not contain their delight; they endeavoured to scramble upon their knees, stretching up to kiss our hands, and we understood that they knew we were come to liberate them. Some, however, hung down their heads in apparently hopeless dejection; some were greatly emaciated, and some, particularly children, seemed dying. But the circumstance which struck us most forcibly was, how it was possible for such a number of human beings to exist, packed up and wedged together as tight as they could cram, in low cells, three feet high, the greater part of which, except that immediately under the grated hatchways, were shut out from light and air, and this, when the thermometer, exposed to the open sky, was standing in the shade on our deck, at

.....

89°. The space between decks was divided into two compartments, 3 feet 3 inches high; the size of one was 16 feet by 18, and of the other 40 by 21; into the first were crammed the women and girls; into the second the men and boys; 226 fellow-creatures were thus thrust into one space 288 feet square; and 336 into another space 800 feet square, giving to the whole an average of 23 inches; and to each of the women not more than 13 inches, though many of them were pregnant. We also found manacles and fetters of different kinds; but it appears that they had all been taken off before we boarded. The heat of these horrid places was so great, and the odour so offensive, that it was quite impossible to enter them, even had there been room. They were measured as above when the slaves had left them. The officers insisted that the poor suffering creatures should be admitted on deck to get air and water. . . . . . On looking into the places where they had been crammed, there were found some children next the sides of the ship, in the places most remote from light and air; they were lying nearly in a torpid state, after the rest had turned out. The little creatures seemed indifferent as to life or death; and when they were carried on deck, many of them could not stand. After enjoying, for a short time, the unusual luxury of air, some water was brought; it was then that the extent of their sufferings was exposed in a fearful manner. They all rushed like maniacs towards it. No entreaties, or threats, or blows could restrain them; they shrieked and struggled, and fought with one another, for a drop of this precious liquid, as if they grew rabid at the sight of it. There is nothing which slaves, in the mid-passage, suffer from so much as want of water. It is sometimes usual to take out casks filled with sea-water as ballast; and when the slaves are received on board, to start the casks, and re-fill them with fresh. On one occasion, a ship from Bahia neglected to change the contents of the casks, and, on the midpassage, found, to their horror, that they were filled with nothing but salt water. All the slaves on board perished.—Walsh, vol. ii., pp. 474-484.

At the time of this seizure, Brazil was precluded from the slave-trade north of the equator; but the period had not arrived when, by treaty, the southern trade was also to be extinguished. The captain of this slaver was provided with papers, which exhibited an apparent conformity to the law, and which, false as they may have been, yet could in no way be absolutely disproved. The accounts of the slaves themselves, who stated that they had originally come from parts of Africa north of the line, the course which the slaver was steering,-her flight from the English cruiser,-were circumstances raising suspicion the most violent; but the reader will be not a little disappointed to learn, that, with all this, the case was deemed too doubtful, in point of legal proof, to bear out a detention; and the slaver, therefore, after nine hours of close investigation, was finally set at liberty,

liberty, and suffered to proceed. It was dark when we separated, and the last parting sounds we heard from the unhallowed ship were the cries and shrieks of the slaves, suffering under some bodily infliction.'

Dr. Walsh proceeds thus :

'I was informed by my friends, who had passed so long a time on the coast of Africa, and visited so many ships, that this was one of the best they had seen. The height sometimes between decks was only eighteen inches; so that the unfortunate beings could not turn round, or even on their sides, the elevation being less than the breadth of their shoulders; and here they are usually chained to the decks by the neck and legs. In such a place the sense of misery and suffocation is so great, that the negroes, like the English in the Black Hole at Calcutta, are driven to frenzy. They had, on one occasion, taken a slave vessel in the river Bonny; the slaves were stowed in the narrow space between decks, and chained together. They heard a horrid din and tumult among them, and could not imagine from what cause it proceeded. They opened the hatches, and turned them up on deck. They were manacled together in twos and threes. Their horror may be well conceived, when they found a number of them in different stages of suffocation; many of them were foaming at the mouth, and in the last agonies,—many were dead. A living man was sometimes dragged up, and his companion was a dead body; sometimes, of the three attached to the same chain, one was dying, and another dead. The tumult they had heard was the frenzy of these suffocating wretches in the last state of fury and desperation, struggling to extricate themselves. When they were all dragged up, nineteen were irrevocably dead. Many destroyed one another in the hopes of getting room to breathe; men strangled those next them, and women drove nails into each other's brains. Many unfortunate creatures, on other occasions, took the first opportunity of leaping overboard, and getting rid, in this way, of an intolerable life. They often found the poor negroes impressed with the strongest terror at their deliverers. The slave-dealers persuaded them that the English were cannibals, who only took them to eat them. When undeceived, their joy and gratitude were proportionably great. Sometimes a mortal malady had struck them before they were captured, from which they never could recover. They used to lie down in the water of the lee-scuppers, and notwithstanding every care, pined away to skin and bone, wasted with fever and dysentery; and when at length they were consigned to the deep, they were mere skeletons.'-Ibid.

p. 485.

Mr. Villiers, the British minister at Madrid, represented but the other day to the Spanish government, that

it is now common to see the slave-vessels powerfully armed and manned, in order to seize upon such weaker ships as they may encounter freighted with captives, and thus save themselves the risk and expense of a distant voyage. The sufferings of the victims, while

VOL. LV. NO. CIX.

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the