-^ The Slave Trade 



slaves became more numerous, I put him in irons, like the 

 rest, on which he lost his spirits irrevocably. He complained 

 of a pain at his heart, and would not eat. The usual means ^ was 

 tried, but in vain ; for he rejected food altogether, except when 

 I stood by and made him eat. I offered him the best things 

 in the ship, and left nothing untried ; for I had set my heart 

 on saving him. I am sure he would have brought me three 

 hundred dollars in the West Indies ; but nothing would do. 

 He said from the first he was determined to die, and he did, 

 after lingering nine days." 



"I shall give the substance of a conversation with an 

 English slave factor who has lived some years a little way 

 to the south, and is well acquainted with all the practices of 

 the slave trade. The factor, having mentioned the Mulatto- 

 trader ^ (of whose ravages the proprietors ^ have heard so much) 

 as a very gentleman- like, well educated and respectable kind 

 of man, I was induced to ask whether he had not been guilty 

 of many excesses all round. 



" ' Excesses ! No. He would make war sometimes on 

 the head-men that owed him just debts, and sell some of 

 their people, if he could catch them ; or he might perhaps 

 carry off the inhabitants of a town when the king or father 

 of it gave him express permission. He was a good man 

 on the whole, and a man of humanity ; for he did not shed 

 all the blood he might, nor sell every one he had a right to 

 sell. For instance, the chief now living near Freetown, and 

 all his generation, were adjudged to be his property ; but the 

 chief himself has never yet been sold, which is a mere act 

 of forbearance in the Mulatto-trader. But I consider the sentence 

 still in force against him.' 



' The " cat," it is elsewhere explained. ^ Possibly Ormond. See p. 163. 

 ^ i,e. the Directors of the Sierra Leone Company. 



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