Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/379

 and several vessels were afterwards captured by the Brazilian men-of-war. According to a report of the Brazilian government, there were 60,000 slaves imported from Africa in 1848, 54,000 in 1849. In 1851, the number had been reduced to 3,287, of which 1,000 were captured by a Brazilian cruiser; and in 1852 but one slave vessel is known to have landed on the coast.

Cuba is still the great mart of the slave-trade, as appears by the occasional capture of slavers bound for that island. Witness the statements of the captain of a captured vessel, as given in the following letter, dated Jamaica, April 23, 1857: "The newspapers which I send you will inform you of the slaver captured by the Arab off the coast of Cuba. On the day of her arrival, after the landing of her wretched cargo, I paid a visit to the vessel, and thus witnessed the horrible manner in which the negroes had been stowed. The slave deck was exactly two feet six inches in height, in a vessel of one hundred and fifty tons, and water casks were stowed beneath. Is it any wonder that out of five hundred human beings, one hundred and thirty-eight, including those the brutal captain shot, should have died in a passage of fifty-three days from Africa? Forty died in one day between Cuba and St. Ann's Bay, on this island, showing at what fearful rate the mortality was increasing. When captured, they had but one biscuit to each person on board.

"The captain states that he has run nine successful cargoes, and been captured six times, and that he has lost £6,000 by this trip, but he does not mind it, as, if he had succeeded in landing the cargo, he would have received £37,000 for the adventure. What mercantile speculation can compete with this hellish traffic? and is it any wonder that Spain has been cursed beyond all the nations upon the earth?

"On landing at Fort Augusta, where the slaves are kept until they recruit, I never saw such a picture of woe. In a large room, nearly twice the size of the slaver, were three hundred and twenty-two young men and boys, and in an adjoining one more than forty women and girls, all naked living spectres, with wasted limbs, and thighs about the circumference of a large walking-stick — in fact, mere skin and bone, eaten up with scurvy and the itch. Yet, strange to say, on a black soldier informing them that they were free, their eyes danced with delight, and with feeble strength they clapped their emaciated hands and shouted for joy. When their food was distributed, the whip had of necessity to be used, to save the weakest from being crushed to death in the scramble, so ravenously hungry were they.

"Although the room in which they were placed is so much larger than the vessel, I could scarcely walk amongst them, as they occupied the whole space, and it seems impossible that they could have been packed in the slave deck. It is stated that each individual had to sit down with wide extended legs, and another was then stowed in, and so on until the vessel was full; and thus they remained, with the rare exception of being aired in detachments, for the space of fifty-four days."