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With a schooner that cost $3,700 and a total capital all told, amounting to less than $21,000, the net profit in six months was $41,488.54.

Writing on the same subject, Captain Philip Drake tells about one voyage he made in the schooner Napoleon.

The Napoleon was a ninety-ton Baltimore clipper, a model for speed and symmetry. She came out from Cuba, in ballast, as a new craft, and made two successful trips before, at Don Pedro's request, I supplied the place of mate and surgeon in her last voyage, when she sailed freighted with two hundred and fifty full-grown men and one hundred picked boys and girls for the Cuban market. By actual calculation the average cost per head of the three hundred and fifty was $16, and in Havana the market average was $360, yielding a profit for the whole, if safely delivered, at $360 a head, of $120,400 on the slaves. Subtracting $20,000 from this, the average cost of the clipper's round trip, including commissions, and her earnings would be $100,000 in round numbers. Such were the enormous profits of the slave-trade in 1835."

An official report on the first voyage of the beautiful Baltimore clipper ship Venus [See House Ex. Doc. 115, 26th Cong. 2d Sess.] says:

With regard to the ship Venus, otherwise the Duquesa de Braganza, we should state that the original