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Updated: June 9, 2025
There was no doubt in his mind that these slaves, even though purchased, were deprived of their liberty so unjustly, that their deliverance was only a sacred duty, and that their owners had no right of property in them. If a British cruiser descended on a slave-ship, and released her freight, should he not also deliver the captive wherever he met him?
Toward the end of the eighteenth century there still existed a few hundred of the race in the island of St. Vincent. They were known as the black Caribs, because they were largely mixed with fugitive negro slaves from other islands and with the people of a slave-ship wrecked on their coast in 1685.
Then the sun grew hot, and my sufferings commenced, for except the draught of spirits that had been given me in the hold of the slave-ship, I had touched no drink for a day and a night.
A slave-ship had been, many years ago, wrecked near St. Vincent's. The slaves on board, who escaped to the island, were without necessaries; and, besides, were obliged to maintain a war with the native Caribbs: yet they soon multiplied to an astonishing number; and, according to Mr. Ottley, they were now on the increase.
It had been said again, that Negroes, when made free, never returned to their own country. But was not the reason obvious? If they could even reach their own homes in safety, their kindred and connexions might be dead. But would they subject themselves to be kidnapped again; to be hurried once more on board a slave-ship, and again to endure and survive the horrors of the passage?
There were many difficulties to be overcome, and in the winter of 1841-42 the case of the Creole added a fresh and dangerous complication. The Creole was a slave-ship, on which the negroes had risen, and, taking possession, had carried her into an English port in the West Indies, where assistance was refused to the crew, and where the slaves were allowed to go free.
Beyond doubt the lost ship was the Pandora. The story of the Pandora has been told in all its terrible details. A slave-ship, fitted out in England, and sailing from an English port, alas! not the only one by scores, manned by a crew of ruffians, scarce two of them owning to the same nationality. Such was the bark Pandora. Her latest and last voyage was to the slave coast, in the Gulf of Guinea.
Thus in an Address delivered March, 1833, we are told, "It ought never to be forgotten that the slave-trade between Africa and America, had its origin in a compassionate endeavor to relieve, by the substitution of negro labor, the toils endured by native Indians. It was the simulated form of mercy that piloted the first slave-ship across the Atlantic."
The first dock was opened in 1699, and strangely enough it was the African slave-trade that gave the Liverpool merchants their original start. The port sent out its first slave-ship in 1709, and in 1753 had eighty-eight ships engaged in the slave-trade, which carried over twenty-five thousand slaves from Africa to the New World that year.
Such close contact, even with our best friends, is never desirable; but in warm weather, in a close, confined air, with a manifest scarcity of clean linen, it became particularly inconvenient. The population here very far exceeded the limits usually allotted to human beings in any situation of life except in a slave-ship.
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