Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/330

 from his bearing and appearance, I recognized at once as the master of some merchant ship. He was speaking with great vehemence, and apparently complaining of some injury.

I gathered from what he said, that his vessel belonged to Boston, in the state of Massachusetts, and that, having encountered a severe storm while on a voyage to the Havana, he had been obliged to put into Charleston to refit. Not only was his cook a colored man, but of the eight sailors, by whom the brig was manned, no less than five were colored, all, as the captain said, natives of Massachusetts, born on Cape Cod, and as able seamen as ever trod a deck.

These colored men — so the captain was complaining in pretty hard terms — had just been taken out of his ship and carried off to jail; and he wished to know of the Charleston merchants, who, it seemed, were the correspondents of his owners, whether there was no security against this outrage, as inconvenient to him as it was injurious to the men.

"Why," said the merchant to whom he addressed himself, with a significant glance at his partner, and a mischievous sort of a look at the captain, "there has just arrived here, I understand, a commissioner from Massachusetts, appointed by the governor of that state, under a resolve of the legislature, to bring this very question of the imprisonment of colored seamen of that state to a legal issue. The commissioner is staying at such a hotel," naming the very one at which I had put up; "that is, unless he has been turned away, for notice has already been issued to all the hotel keepers not to harbor him. You had better apply to him, and quick too, or you may not find him. He is the very man for you, and yours is the very case for him. Try and see what he. and the United States laws, and the state of Massachusetts, will do for you."

The ironical, sneering tone in which this was said was evident enough to me; but the honest sea captain to whom it was addressed seemed to take it all