June.] 



HORRID BARBARITY. 



325 



seeing and, if necessary, administering to those sufferers whose audible 

 complaints had so powerfully excited my sympathy. The captain 

 gave orders that my demand should be complied with ; and, gracious 

 Heaven ! what a horrible spectacle was presented to my view ! 



If the reader has ever been on board of a Hudson River market- 

 sloop, loaded with calves and sheep for the city slaughter-houses, he 

 may form some faint idea of this Brazilian slave brig. A range of 

 pens, or bins, occupied each side of the main-deck, from the cat-head to 

 the main-chains, in which were confined such a number of the slaves 

 as were permitted to come upon deck at one time. In a line with the 

 main hatchway, on each side, was erected a bulkhead, or partition, 

 separating the men from the women ; while a narrow passage remained 

 open to the gangway, abaft the sternmost pen, or between that and the 

 quarter-deek. 



The slaves, perfectly naked, were stowed in rows, fore and aft, in a 

 sitting or crouching posture ; and most of the men had their faces be- 

 tween their knees, either indulging in a moody silence, or mournfully 

 chanting, in a low voice, some plaintive song of their native villages. 

 The feelings of the females were of course more clamorously ex- 

 pressed, in spite of all their tyrants' exertions to keep them quiet. In 

 passing along the deck between these two ranges of despairing Ijuman 

 beings, I encountered such mute imploring glances, such appealing 

 looks of misery, such piteous supplicating expressions of countenance, 

 such torrents of tears, that looked like pearls on ebony, as completely 

 and totally unmanned me. My own tears fell like rain, and the poor 

 negroes gazed on the strange phenomenon of a white man's sympathy 

 with wonder, doubt, and admiration. Even the females had not been 

 allowed a rag to cover their nakedness. 



After having taken a cursory view of the whole heart-sickening 

 scene, my attention was attracted to the after range of pens on the star- 

 board side, which contained about one-half the females then on deck. 

 Here, as on the opposite side of the deck, the two sexes were separated 

 by a partition or bulkhead eight feet in height ; near which were two 

 women evidently writhing in the agonies of death. Partly from the 

 officers, and partly from their fellow-sufferers, I gathered the shameful 

 facts that these two dying wretches had been reduced to their present 

 situation by repeated applications of the lash, as a punishment for their 

 piteous cries and heart-rending wailings. This worse than savage 

 brutality had elicited those shrieks and groans which first arrested my 

 attention on board the Antarctic. They were wives and mothers ; 

 their infants had been torn from their breasts and thrown upon the 

 ground, either to perish with hunger among the grass, or to become 

 the prey of beasts, or the victims of venomous reptiles — or, possibly, 

 to be preserved and nourished by strangers. In the phrensied paroxysms 

 of maternal anguish, they had called for their infants — for their hus- 

 bands — for their parents — for their brothers, sisters, and friends ; and 

 for this natural involuntary ebullition of feeling, their bodies had been 

 cruelly lacerated with stripes, until nature sank exhausted, no more to 

 revive. Their breasts were distended with the undrawn nutriment for 

 the lack of which their helpless babes perhaps were perishing — it 



