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Updated: May 8, 2025
The horrid howling of the blacks, crowded to suffocation below their cries of entreaty, and, at times, of menace were a foretaste of what I should be compelled to listen to for weeks, perhaps months. Oh! it would be a fearful existence. In my heart I prayed that we should be captured. I was beginning to draw hope from the behaviour of the slave-captain and his mate.
Again, when General Rooke commanded at Goree, a number of the natives, men, women, and children, came to pay him a friendly visit. All was gaiety and merriment. It was a scene to gladden the saddest, and to soften the hardest, heart. But a slave-captain was not so soon thrown off his guard.
I remembered the advice of Brace, and submitted, with as good grace as I could, to the hospitalities of his black majesty. I drank a portion of his rum, and even appeared jolly! He seemed greatly pleased with my behaviour, and evidently esteemed me a good bargain; though the slave-captain had screwed him far above his original offer.
Guiding myself thus, I advanced at about the same rate as the vessel was going, and every now and then had her under my eye through the openings in the trees. I had no difficulty in making her out, for, contrary to the wish of the slave-captain, the night was a bright one, with a clear moon coursing through a sky that was without a single cloud.
The cutter had failed to beat in to the shore. She had given up, and cast anchor at about two miles' distance from the river's mouth, there to await a change in the wind, or the light of another day. It was the very course that the slave-captain had desired her to take, and which he had expected.
Norris had been formerly a slave-captain, but had quitted the trade, and settled as a merchant in a different line of business. He was a man of quick penetration, and of good talents, which he had cultivated to advantage, and he had a pleasing address both as to speech and manners. He received me with great politeness, and offered me all the information I desired.
The slave-captain with chagrin observed this change in the wind, and with an apprehension he had not before felt. Had the wind continued in the same quarter as when the cruiser was first reported, he knew that he could easily run out past her.
Since the time when Clarkson, Wilberforce and Fox made the horrors of the slave-trade understood, the slave-captain, or slave-jockey, is spontaneously and almost universally regarded with dislike and horror. Even in the slaveholding states it is deemed disreputable to associate with a professed slave-trader, though few perhaps would think it any harm to bargain with him.
I hobbled on deck as well as my burnt foot which by this time was excruciatingly painful would permit, and finding a suitable bit of line, and securing the assistance of two of our lads, the slave-captain, as he eventually proved to be, was speedily bound hand and foot, conveyed on deck, and propped up in a reclining position against the bulwarks, well aft out of the way, in such a position as seemed least likely to encourage the bleeding of his wound.
Again, when General Rooke commanded at Goree, a number of the natives, men, women, and children, came to pay him a friendly visit. All was gaiety and merriment. It was a scene to gladden the saddest, and to soften the hardest heart. But a slave-captain was not so soon thrown off his guard.
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