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Updated: May 17, 2025
The rest, however, being from that time filled with apprehensions of being on some ground or other sold to the slave-ships, fled to the mountains of Sierra Leone, where they now dragged on a miserable existence. The son himself was sold, in his turn, soon after. In short, the whole of that unhappy peninsula, as he learnt from eye-witnesses, had been desolated by the trade in slaves.
With respect to the intellect and sensibility of the Africans, it was pride only, which suggested a difference between them and ourselves. There was a remarkable instance to the point in the evidence, and which he would quote. In one of the slave-ships was a person of consequence; a man, once high in a military station, and with a mind not insensible to the eminence of his rank.
Though these parts were not ordinarily frequented by slave-ships, he asked himself if these blacks, whose salvage he had just effected, were not the survivors of a cargo of slaves that the "Waldeck" was going to sell to some Pacific colony. At all events, if that was so, the blacks became free again by the sole act of setting foot on his deck, and he longed to tell it to them.
The Portuguese home government has not generally received the credit for sincerity in suppressing the slave-trade which I conceive to be its due. In 1839, my friend Mr. Gabriel saw 37 slave-ships lying in this harbor, waiting for their cargoes, under the protection of the guns of the forts.
A ship would land him at Mossamedes, a little port to the south of Angola, ordinarily frequented by slave-ships, and well-known by Negoro. It was there that the Portuguese would conduct James W. Weldon; and at a certain time Alvez's agent would bring thither Mrs. Weldon, Jack, and Cousin Benedict.
To allow the slave-ships of a Confederation formed for the extension of slavery to come and go free, and unexamined, between America and the African coast, would be to renounce even the pretence of attempting to protect Africa against the man-stealer, and abandon that Continent to the horrors, on a far larger scale, which were practised before Granville Sharp and Clarkson were in existence.
Falconbridge, however, dared not rescue him, lest, in the defenceless state of his own town, retaliation might be made upon him. At another time a young woman, living half a mile off, was sold, without any criminal charge, to one of the slave-ships. She was well acquainted with the agent's wife, and had been with her only the day before. Her cries were heard; but it was impossible to relieve her.
They can believe, too, all the horrors of the middle passage, the chains, suffocation, maimings, stranglings, starvation, drownings, and cold blooded murders, atrocities perpetrated on board these slave-ships by their own citizens, perhaps by their own townsmen and neighbors possibly by their own fathers: but oh! they 'can't believe that the slaveholders can be so hard-hearted towards their slaves as to treat them with great cruelty. They can believe that his Holiness the Pope, with his cardinals, bishops and priests, have tortured, broken on the wheel, and burned to death thousands of Protestants that eighty thousand of the Anabaptists were slaughtered in Germany that hundreds of thousands of the blameless Waldenses, Huguenots and Lollards, were torn in pieces by the most titled dignitaries of church and state, and that almost every professedly Christian sect, has, at some period of its history, persecuted unto blood those who dissented from their creed.
The pictures of these crowded slave-ships, with the cruelties of the slave system after they were brought to our country, often affected me to tears; and I often read until the midnight hour, and could not rest until I had read it twice through. My sympathies became too deeply enlisted for the poor negroes who were thus enslaved for time to efface.
Nature seems to have destined these lovely regions for the unmixed enjoyment of her creatures; but, alas! hard labour and a tyrant's whip have, to the unhappy Negro, transformed this Paradise into a place of torment. The sight of two slave-ships formed a revolting contrast to the enchantment of the prospect: they had that day arrived from Africa, and lay near us at anchor.
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