Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 5.djvu/404

390 beings were kept on these hot and smothering voyages, and the horrors of what was called the middle passage were terrible and fatal beyond description. It was calculated that up to that time the Europeans had consumed ten millions of slaves, and that the English alone were then carrying over forty-two thousand of Africans annually.



Besides the truths drawn by cross-examination from the witnesses for the slave-dealing merchants, who contended that even Sir William Dolben's bill would nearly ruin Liverpool, Captain Parry, who had been sent by Pitt to Liverpool to examine some of the slave ships, brought the directest proofs that the representations of these witnesses were most false, and the accommodation for the slaves most inhuman; Sir William Dolben himself had examined a slave-ship then fitting out in the Thames, and gave details which horrified the house. This bill went to prohibit any ship carrying more than one slave to a ton of its register; the only matter in which the house gave way was that none should carry more than five slaves to every three tons, and a very few years proved that this restriction had been the greatest boon to the dealers as well as the slaves in the preservation of the living cargoes. So much does selfishness stand in its own light generally! The bill met with some opposition in the lords, and the admirals Rodney and Heathfield, both naturally humane men, were amongst the strongest opponents. The measure, however, pissed, and received the royal assent on the 11th of July. Some well-meaning people thought that by legalising the freightage of slaves, England had acknowledged the lawfulness of the trade; but the advocates of the abolition made no secret of their determination to persevere, and this victory only quickened their exertions, and the numbers who thought with them daily and rapidly increased.

During this session a piece of justice was done to lord Newburgh, the grandson of Charles Radcliffe, who was beheaded in 1746 for his concern in the rebellion of 1715, in which his brother, James Radcliffe, the third earl of Derwentwater, was also engaged, and who suffered in 1716. As the estates of the Scotch rebels had been restored, it was now agreed to grant lord Newburgh two thousand five hundred pounds a-year out of the estates of his grandfather and great uncle. The estates themselves had been conferred on Greenwich Hospital, or they would undoubtedly have been wholly restored.