Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/226

 their part in return. The neighboring villages were surrounded and set on fire in the night. The inhabitants were seized when making their escape; and, being brought to the agent, were by him forwarded to his principal on the coast. Mr. How, a botanist in the service of government, stated that on the arrival of an order for slaves from Cape Coast Castle, while he was there, a native chief immediately sent forth armed parties, who brought in a supply of all descriptions in the night.

All these atrocities, he said, were fully substantiated by the evidence; and here he should do injustice to his cause if he were not to make a quotation from the speech of Mr. Bryan Edwards in the assembly of Jamaica, who, though he was hostile to his propositions, had yet the candor to deliver himself in the following manner there: "I am persuaded," says he, "that Mr. Wilberforce has been rightly informed as to the manner in which slaves are generally procured. The intelligence I have collected from my own negroes abundantly confirms his account; and I have not the smallest doubt, that in Africa the effects of this trade are precisely such as he has represented them. The whole, or the greatest part of that immense continent, is a field of warfare and desolation; a wilderness in which the inhabitants are wolves towards each other That this scene of oppression, fraud, treachery, and bloodshed, if not originally occasioned, is in part (I will not say wholly) upheld by the slave-trade, I dare not dispute. Every man in the sugar islands may be convinced that it is so, who will inquire of any African negroes, on their first arrival, concerning the circumstances of their captivity. The assertion that it is otherwise is mockery and insult."

It was another effect of this trade that it corrupted the morals of those who carried it on. Every fraud was used to deceive the ignorance of the natives by false weights and measures, adulterated commodities, and other impositions of a like sort, These frauds were even acknowledged by many who had themselves practiced them in obedience to the orders of their superiors. For the honor of the mercantile character of the country, such a traffic ought immediately to be suppressed.

With respect to the miseries of the middle passage, he had said so much on a former occasion, that he would spare the feelings of the committee as much as he could. He would therefore state that the evidence which was before them confirmed all those scenes of wretchedness, which he had then described; the same suffering from a state of suffocation by being crowded together; the same dancing in fetters; the same melancholy singing; the same eating by compulsion; the same despair; the same insanity; and all the other abominations which characterized the trade. New instances, however, had occurred, where these wretched men had resolved on death to terminate their woes Some had destroyed themselves by refusing sustenance, in spite of threats and punishments. Others had thrown themselves into the sea; and more than one, when in the act of drowning, were seen to wave their hands in triumph, "exulting (to use the words of an eye-witness) that they had escaped." Yet these and similar things, when viewed through the African medium he had mention-