30 
ST. HELENA. 
pretty enough to satisfy tlie tastes of any English gentleman with 
an income of ten or fifteen thousand a year, was thus to be shorn of 
much of its ancient glory ; and many other old, time-honoured 
institutions suffered in a similar degree. The establishment, how- 
ever, continued to be composed of a Governor and Council, a large 
civil staff,* and a moderate garrison. As doubtless many of the 
labouring classes also felt this change, a small amount of emigration 
to the Cape of Good Hope toot place in 1S3S, the same year which 
was rendered memorable in the annals of the Island by a short visit 
from Prince William Henry Frederick, a grandson of William I., 
King of Holland. 
In the year 1840, H.M. Government established a Vice-Ad- 
miralty Court at the Island for the trial of vessels engaged 
in the slave trade on the western coast of Africa. Many of these 
vessels were taken to the Island during the following ten years, 
condemned, sold, and broken up ; while their human cargoes were 
fed, clothed, and retained at a depot formed for the purpose in 
Rupert’s Valley, until they were sufficiently recovered from their 
emaciated condition to bear a voyage to the British West Indian 
possessions, where a demand existed for their labour. f A visit to a 
full-freighted slaveship arriving at St. Helena is not easily to be 
forgotten ; a scene so intensified in all that is horrible almost defies 
description. The vessel, scarcely a hundred tons burthen at most, 
contains perhaps little short of a thousand souls, which have been 
closely packed, for many weeks together, in the hottest and most 
polluted of atmospheres. I went on board one of these ships as 
she cast anchor off Rupert’s Valley in 1861, and the whole deck, as 
I picked my way from end to end, in order to avoid treading upon 
them, was thickly strewn with the dead, dying, and starved bodies 
of what seemed to me to be a species of ape which I had never seen 
before. One’s sensations of horror were certainly lessened by the 
impossibility of realizing that the miserable, helpless objects being 
picked up from the deck and handed over the ship’s side, one by one, 
living, dying, and dead alike, were really human beings. Their arms 
and legs were worn down to about the size of a walking-stick. Many 
# A Supreme Court was established also in 1839. 
f When able, during the interval before embarkation, they were employed on the Public 
Works in the Island. 
