Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/302

 same trade the next. With regard to the crews, Sir Powell Buxton remarks, that the law by which Great Britain, Brazil, and North America have made slave-dealing piracy, and liable to capital punishment, is, practically, a dead letter, there being no instance of an execution for that crime.

Perhaps never has the inefficacy of all that has yet been done towards the suppression of the slave-trade been more strikingly made out than in the harrowing pamphlet published by the Rev. Pascoe Grenfell Hill, entitled "Fifty Days on Board a Slave-Vessel in the Mozambique Channel, in April and May, 1843." The Progresso, a Brazilian slaver, was captured on the 12th of April, on the coast of Madagascar, by the British cruiser Cleopatra, on board of which Mr. Hill was chaplain. The slaver was then taken charge of by a British crew, who were to navigate her to the Cape of Good Hope. Mr. Hill, at his own request, accompanied her; and his pamphlet is a narrative of what took place during the fifty days which elapsed before their arrival at the Cape. We cannot here quote the details of the description of the treatment of the negroes given by Mr. Hill; but the following account of the horrors of a single night will suffice. Shortly after the Progresso parted company with the Cleopatra, a squall arose, and the negroes, who were breathing fresh air on deck, and rolling themselves about for glee, and kissing the hands and clothes of their deliverers, were all sent below. "The night," says Mr. Hill, "being intensely hot, 400 wretched beings thus crammed into a hold 12 yards in length, 7 feet in breadth, and only 3 feet in height, speedily began to make an effort to re-issue to the open air. Being thrust back, and striving the more to get out, the after-hatch was forced down on them. Over the other hatchway, in the fore part of the vessel, a wooden grating was fastened. To this, the sole inlet for the air, the suffocating heat of the hold, and perhaps panic from the strangeness of their situation, made them press; and thus a great part of the space below was rendered useless. They crowded to the grating, and clinging to it for air, completely barred its entrance. They strove to force their way through apertures in length 14 inches, and barely 6 inches in breadth, and in some instances succeeded. The cries, the heat — I may say without exaggeration, 'the smoke of their torment' — which ascended, can be compared to nothing earthly. One of the Spaniards gave warning that the consequence would be 'many deaths.'" Next day the prediction of the Spaniard "was fearfully verified. Fifty-four crushed and mangled corpses lifted up from the slave deck have been brought to the gangway and thrown overboard. Some were emaciated from disease, many bruised and bloody. Antonio tells me that some were found strangled, their hands still grasping each other's throats, and tongues protruding from their mouths. The bowels of one were crushed out. They had been trampeled to death for the most part, the weaker under the feet of the stronger, in the madness and torment of suffocation from crowd and heat. It was a horrid sight as they passed one by one — the stiff, distorted limbs smeared with blood and filth — to be cast into the sea. Some, still quivering, were laid on the deck to die; salt water thrown on them to revive them, and a little fresh water poured into their mouths. Antonio reminded me of his last night's