The Slavers : 231 



pressure of wind to steady the vessel and the yards or the gaff and 

 boom swing and sway and slap in ceaseless noisy idleness. Under 

 such conditions a week is an eternity. With the passage of time, 

 water in the casks gets putrid as well as hot, stores rot or become 

 exhausted, disease and death mount. 



The doldrums were not the only hazard. Close to the African 

 coast it is possible for a sailing vessel to utilize land and sea breezes 

 that alternate around the clock but between the coast and the trade- 

 wind belts there was often an area of alternating calms and storms. 

 There was also the matter of hurricanes which in the warm weather 

 months originate in the westerly section of the trade-wind belts. Slav- 

 ing vessels are known to have run into hurricanes but on the whole 

 this risk was not as great as would appear. Hurricanes at the time 

 that they originate in these areas have very high rotary wind speed 

 but they are tightly knit and compact. They do not spread over a 

 large area as they do after they have recurved and come into more 

 northerly sections of the Atlantic. Thus, it is usually possible to avoid 

 this kind of storm. 



At the time of the Civil War there were less than 4,000,000 Negroes 

 in the United States. The presence of millions of colored people in 

 the population of the United States has always been and continues 

 to be a political and social problem but it is continually improving 

 and is less acute today than at any time in the past. Census figures 

 show that today Negroes make up less than one-tenth of the total 

 population. This is a lower proportion than prevailed in the active 

 days of slavery and in the intervening period. The peak was reached 

 in 1790 when the Negroes made up 19 per cent of the total popula- 

 tion. At this time there were common expressions of fear over 

 the rapid growth of the Negro population. However, from that time 

 on the proportion began to decline. Concentration was reflected in 

 the fact that at this time in South Carolina the ratio of Negroes to 

 whites was two to one. 



It is now almost a century since slavery was abolished in the 

 United States and it has generally disappeared in the Western World. 

 Even at its height, American slavery involved less than 4,000,000 

 people. In the meantime the Old World has developed new forms of 

 political and economic slavery. The slave-labor — prison-camp systems 

 that existed in Hitler's Germany and that exist today in Communist 

 countries exceed in numbers and rival in barbarity anything the 

 world saw even in the most exuberant days of Negro slavery. 



