Page:Benezet's A caution and warning to Great Britain and her colonies.pdf/33

[ 31 ] our plantations in America, and may be two orthree months on the voyage, during which time, from the filth and stench that is among them, distempers frequently break out, which carry off a great many, a fifth, a fourth, yea sometimes a third of them; so that taking all the slaves together that are brought on board our ships yearly, one may reasonably suppose, that at least ten thousand of them die on the voyage. And in a printed account of the State of the Negroes in our plantations, it is supposed that a fourth part, more or less, die at the different Islands, in what is called the seasoning. Hence it may be presumed, that, at a moderate computation of the slaves, who are purchased by our African merchants in a year, near thirty thousands die upon the voyage and in the seasoning. Add to this, the prodigious number who are killed in the incursions and intestine wars, by which the Negroes procure the number of slaves wanted to load the vessels: How dreadful then is this Slave-Trade, whereby so many thoufands of our fellow-creatures, free by nature, endued with the same rational faculties, and called to be heirs of the same salvation with us, lose their lives, and are truly, and properly speaking, murdered every year. For it is not necessary, in order to convict a man of murder, to make it appear, that he had an intention to commit murder. Whoever does, by unjust force or violence, deprive another of his Liberty; and, while he has him in his power, reduces him, by cruel treatment, to such a condition as evidently endangers his life; and the event occasions his death, is actually guilty of murder. It is no less shocking to read the accounts given by Sir Hans Sloan, and others, of the inhuman and unmerciful treatment those Blacks meet with, who survive the seasoning in the Islands, often