But we must recollect that these figures represent only living negroes.
A yearly percentage of dead must be added, to complete the number taken
from the coast of Africa. The estimate was five per cent, to cover the
unavoidable losses incurred in a rapid and healthy passage; but such
passages were a small proportion of the whole number annually made, and
the mortality was irregular. It was sometimes frightful; a long calm
was one long agony: asphyxia, bloody flux, delirium and suicide,
and epidemics swept between the narrow decks, as fatally, but more
mercifully than the kidnappers who tore these people from their native
fields. The shark was their sexton, and the gleam of his white belly
piloted the slaver in his regular track across the Atlantic. What need
to revive the accounts of the horrors of the middle passage? We know
from John Newton and other Englishmen what a current of misery swept
in the Liverpool slavers into the western seas. The story of French
slave-trading is the same. I can find but one difference in favor of the
French slaver, that he took the shackles from his cargo after it had
been a day or two at sea. The lust for procuring the maximum of victims,
who must be delivered in a minimum of time and at the least expense,
could not dally with schemes to temper their suffering, or to make
avarice obedient to common sense.
Pages:
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62