It was a transaction incapable of
being tempered. One might as well expect to ameliorate the act of
murder. Nay, swift murder would have been affectionate, compared with
this robbery of life.
Nor is the consumption of negroes by the sea-voyage the only item
suggested by the annual number actually landed. We should have to
include all the people maimed and killed in the predatory excursions
of native chiefs or Christian kidnappers to procure their cargoes. A
village was not always surprised without resistance. The most barbarous
tribes would defend their liberty. We can never know the numbers slain
in wars which were deliberately undertaken to stock the holds of
slavers.
Nor shall we ever know how many victims dropped out of the ruthless
caravan, exhausted by thirst and forced marches, on the routes sometimes
of three hundred leagues from the interior to the sea. They were usually
divided into files containing each thirty or forty slaves, who were
fastened together by poles of heavy wood, nine feet long, which
terminated in a padlocked fork around the neck. When the caravan made a
halt, one end of the pole was unfastened and dropped upon the ground.
When it dropped, the slave was anchored; and at night his arm was tied
to the end of the pole which he carried, so that a whole file was
hobbled during sleep. If any one became too enfeebled to preserve his
place, the brutal keepers transferred him to the swifter voracity of the
hyena, who scented the wake of the caravan across the waste to the sea's
margin, where the shark took up the trail.
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