Page:Abstract of the evidence for the abolition of the slave-trade 1791.djvu/59

( 29 ) soon slaved on account of his promise, and the number of prisoners made that day; but he refused to deliver the king's two brothers, according to his promise, and carried them to the West Indies, and sold them. It happened in process of time, that they escaped to Virginia, and from thence, after three years, to Bristol, where the captain who brought them, fearing he had done wrong, meditated carrying, or sending them back, but Mr. Jones of Bristol, who had ships trading to Old Calabar, and hearing who they were, had them taken from the ship, (where they were in irons) by Habeas Corpus. After inquiry how they were brought from Africa, they were liberated, and put in one of Mr. Jones's ships for Old Calabar, where Captain Hall was, when they arrived in the ship Cato, Langdon.

So satisfied were the people of Old Town, in 1767, of the sincerity of the captains who invited them, and of the New Town people, towards a reconciliation, that the night before the massacre, the chief man of Old Town gave to the chief man of New Town, one of his favourite women as a wife. It was said that from three to four hundred persons were killed that day, in the ships, in the water, or carried off the coast.

The king escaped from the ship he was in, by killing two of the crew, who attempted to seize him. He then got into a one-man canoe, and paddled to the shore. A six pounder from one of the ships struck the canoe to pieces; he then swam on shore to the woods near the ships, and reached his own town, though closely pursued. It was said he received eleven wounds from musket shot.

Captain Hall, in his first voyage on board the Neptune, had this account from the boatswain, Thomas Rutter, who, in 1767, had been boatswain to the Canterbury, Captain Sparkes, of London, and concerned in the said massacre. Rutter told him the story exactly as related, and never varied in it. He had it also from the kings two brothers, who agreed exactly with Rutter.

Captain Hall also saw at Calabar, in the possession of the king's two brothers, their depositions taken at Bristol, and of Mr. Floyd, who was mate of one of the ships when the transaction happened, but he took no copy.

Mr.