gives requisite protection against the right of visit, search, and seizure; and our citizens, in all the characters of owners, consignees, or agents, and of masters and crews of our vessels, are concerned in the business, and partake of the profits of the African slave-trade, to and from the ports of Brazil, as fully as the Brazilians themselves, and others in conjunction with whom they carry it on. In fact, without the aid of our citizens and our flag, it could not be carried on with success at all."
To exhibit additional proof of the state of the slave-trade prior to the equipment clause, we have the following instances from parliamentary papers, and other British authority:
"La Jeune Estelle, being chased by a British vessel, inclosed twelve negroes in casks, and threw them overboard."
"M. Oiseau, commander of Le Louis, a French vessel, in completing his cargo at Calabar, thrust the slaves into a narrow space three feet high, and closed the hatches. Next morning fifty were found dead. Oiseau coolly went ashore to purchase others to supply their place."
The following extract is from a report by Captain Hayes to the admiralty, of a representation made to him respecting one of these vessels in 1832:
"The master having a large cargo of these human beings chained together, with more humanity than his fellows, permitted some of them to come on deck, but still chained together, for the benefit of the air, when they immediately commenced jumping overboard, hand in hand, and drowning in couples; and (continued the person relating the circumstance) without any cause whatever. Now these people were just brought from a situation between decks, and to which they knew they must return, where the scalding perspiration was running
from one to the other And men dying by their side, with full in their
view, living and dead bodies chained together; and the living, in addition to all their other torments, laboring under the most famishing thirst (being in very few instances allowed more than a pint of water a day); and let it not be forgotten that these unfortunate people had just been torn from their country, their families, their all 1 Men dragged from their wives, women from their husbands and children, girls from their mothers, and boys from their fathers; and yet in this man's eye (for heart and soul he could have none,) there was no cause whatever for jumping overboard and drowning. This, in truth, is a rough picture, but it is not highly colored. The men are chained in pairs, and as a proof they are intended so to remain to the end of the voyage, their fetters are not locked, but riveted by the blacksmith; and as deaths are frequently occurring, living men are often for a length of time confined to dead bodies: the living man cannot be released till the blacksmith has performed the operation of cutting the clinch of the rivet with his chisel; and I have now an officer on board the Dryad, who, on examining one of these slavevessels, found not only living men chained to dead bodies, but the latter in a putrid state."[1]
- ↑ Parliamentary papers presented 1832.
