Page:The American Slave Trade (Spears).djvu/119

 Louisa on three hundred and twenty-six slaves cleared £19,133. The Bloom, belonging to another house, on three hundred and seven slaves cleared £8,123. An average of six voyages shows a clean profit of £43 per slave. And to this profit was added that on the West India goods carried to Liverpool when the ship went home to refit.

Other estimates of single voyages give profits ranging from £12 up to £40 per head landed.

An important element in the trade was the cost of the ship. The records show that a good ship fit to carry from three hundred to four hundred slaves could be built for £7,500. Such a ship would make a clean profit of from £7,000 to £20,000 each voyage, and it is certain that some of them made as high as five voyages before they became so foul that they had to be abandoned.

Of the profits made when the trade was declared to be piracy we have abundant records, even though it was a smuggling business.

Captain Theodore Canot in his autobiography, "Twenty Years of an African Slaver" (it is practically an autobiography), has the following (p. 101):

As the reader may scarcely credit so large a profit, I subjoin an account of the fitting of a slave vessel from Havana in 1827, and the liquidation of her voyage in Cuba: