72 ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS ON 



As in many such cases the emergency could only be met by 

 deliberation. It was already night-fall when I found a pale con- 

 clave gathered in our Assembly House, and engaged in ex- 

 amining a revenue officer. Xhis seemed the only person that 

 had visited the stranger, whose long, low hull, and taunt, raking 

 masts, now imperfectly visible through the moon-beams, gave no 

 bad idea of " the phantom ship." He spoke to having seen se- 

 veral cutlasses on deck, with other signs of an armed craft ; that 

 three of a crew, rather ill-favored than numerous, were yi 

 the last stage of a sea scurvy, and that they had been on 

 a long cruize. Fears of our weakness were fast converting 

 these into signs of a pirate, when some one ventured to hint 

 at that nameless thing here, " the black business." In short, 

 on further inquiry, the state of her hold, with the manacles, &c., 

 found there, indicated how matters stood ; she had landed a 

 human freight to windward, probably at Ciuadaloupe. We 

 thought then of sending a medical deputation on board, and his 

 lionor — whoso debut in life was as surgeon of a slaver — might, 

 rank apart, have headed it; but the motion failed and we sepa- 

 rated, leaving the Joan Baut to seek, as they purposed with day- 

 light, her honest owners elsewhere. 



To find a slave vessel equipping in the Danish ports here, is 

 matter of commonest occurrence ; but there was something un- 

 usual, almost poetic, in the derelict whose deck now constituted 

 our refectory. 



The deserted vessel, fallen in with at sea, presents a solitude; 

 but that, if I may so term it, is as the waste in nature, not with- 

 out some remnants of life and motion even through her searest 

 desolation. The abandoned bark Boating under us seemed like 

 a wreck on the Asphaltes — desecrated and shunned of man. 

 Her deck indeed appeared clean ; it had been long bleached and 

 riven under the flare of torrid summers ; but below all was dis- 

 array and confusion as if her unhallowed freight had only just 

 disembarked. Str.tngc ! witli what nonchalence my companions, 

 and 1 fear the Creoles generally> speak of this infamous traffic. 

 A good old planter will relate his former speculations in tlie 

 slave-market, with all the single-heartedness of Sir John Haw- 

 kins, when he tells us — after encountering a storm on his nefarious 

 voyage, that " the Lord would not suffer his elect to perish ! '* 



The village capital of St. Jan's, which skirts along a small 

 inlet on the north-west coast of the island, presents nothing very 

 remarkable. Unlike Iloadtown, that peers out under its tall 



