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There was one circumstance of peculiar importance, but quite new to me, which I collected from the information which Mr. Falconbridge had given me. This was, that many of the seamen, who left the slave-ships in the West Indies, were in such a weak, ulcerated, and otherwise diseased state, that they perished there.
Again, in 1800, there was an addition of more than five hundred maroons, or outlawed negroes, from Jamaica. And finally, since 1807, Sierra Leone has been the receptacle for the great numbers of native Africans liberated from slave-ships, on their capture by British cruisers. Pensioners, with their families, from the black regiments in the West Indies, have likewise been settled here.
Seamen, also, were boarded in these houses, who, when the slave-ships were going out, but at no other time, were encouraged to spend more than they had money to pay for; and to these, when they had thus exceeded, but one alternative was given, namely, a slave-vessel or a gaol.
To compel men to dance and be merry by authority, has rarely succeeded even on board of slave-ships, where it was formerly sometimes attempted by way of inducing the wretched captives to agitate their limbs and restore the circulation, during the few minutes they were permitted to enjoy the fresh air upon deck.
The scientific tools of housebreakers are known to be made by certain journeymen in the steel toy trade. On the other hand, hand-cuffs, leg-irons, and similar restraining instruments are manufactured for home use and exportation. Occasionally, London and Liverpool houses in the Brazilian or Cuban trade have ordered suits of chains, intended for the use of slave-ships.
Instead of disappearing, the exportation of slaves was found actually to increase, while the attending horrors were multiplied. Small, swift cutters took the place of the roomy slave-ships of older days, and the victims, hurriedly crowded into slave-decks but a few feet high, suffered ten-fold torments on the middle passage from inadequate supplies of food and water.
The only inhabitants are marines, and some negroes liberated from slave-ships, who are paid and victualled by government. There is not a private person on the island.
Slavery was once legalized in New England; and New England built slave-ships and manned these with New England seamen. In 1820 the slave population in the country amounted to 1,500,000. The number doubled every twenty years, and it was easy to see how it would progress from 1,500,000 to 3,000,000; to 6,000,000; to 12,000,000; to 24,000,000. "Twenty-four millions of slaves!
With the same view of saving the Indians, the Jerome fathers, who governed the Antilles in 1518, requested the emperor's permission to fit out slave-ships themselves and send them to the coast of Africa for negroes.
As Mary sat, tired with her week's work, in her pew in the church on Sunday, and thought of Livingstone's call to Africa, she saw visions of far-off places of which she heard from the pulpit and read in her magazines visions of a steaming river on the West Coast of Africa where the alligators slid from the mud banks into the water; visions of the barracoons on the shore in which the captured negroes were penned as they waited for the slave-ships; pictures of villages where trembling prisoners dipped their hands in boiling oil to test their guilt, and wives were strangled to go with their dead chief into the spirit-land; visions of the fierce chiefs who could order a score of men to be beheaded for a cannibal feast and then sell a hundred more to be hounded away into the outer darkness of slavery the Calabar where the missionaries of her church were fighting the black darkness of the most savage people of the world.
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