302 
BENGAZI. 
bodies) which they must necessarily breathe in the place of their 
confinement, will be more easily deplored than described. So 
oppressive is the heat, on many occasions, in the lower deck of the 
bullock-vessels, that the men employed to look after the unfortunate 
animals can scarcely stay more than ten minutes there, except imme- 
diately under the hatchways ; and such of the oxen as chance, from 
their situation, or other causes, to be more affected by the closeness 
of the atmosphere than the rest, are obliged to be dragged up con- 
tinually to the deck above, to prevent them from dying of suffoca- 
tion. 
AVe are sorry to say that our own experience enables us to speak 
decidedly on these points ; for as there was no other vessel in the 
harbour of Bengazi, when we left the coast, than a bullock-vessel, 
and no other expected to arrive, we were obliged to take a passage 
in the only one of them then remaining. As we experienced, nearly 
the whole voyage, the most provoking calms, our passage was an 
unusually long one ; and independently of the extreme incon- 
venience (to use the mildest term) which we experienced ourselves, 
we had to witness a scene of suffering which we shall never forget, 
and which we would willingly have gone through much more than 
we experienced to have avoided. It is indeed scarcely possible to 
conceive that human nature could be really so degraded from its 
rank in creation, as it appears to be in the persons of those who form 
the crew of a bullock-vessel. 
And yet many of them are not, on other occasions, cruel men 
but the constant habit of witnessing and inflicting sufferings, which 
