Page:Trials of the Slave Traders Samo, Peters and Tufft (1813).pdf/29

 subjects, not as Africans. The prisoner has derived every advantage and protection from the English law; he must not now violate it with impunity; we cannot suffer this state of oscillation; is he one moment to be within the pale of our laws and protection, and the next out of the pale of its coercion? Under the strict rule of considering indictments, I allow this one to be faulty, but precision as to dates cannot be attained where the inhabitant marked time by the number of moons, the rainy or the dry seasons, or the entrance of a man of war into the river. Even one of the best witnesses did not know the name of the month in which he celebrated Christmas. If we attended to the same exactness of day and date required in England, it is not the blessing of English jurisprudence we should bring into Africa, but the curse of legal precision; for no offender could be convicted. I conceive the indictment to be as precise as the modes, customs and manners, and information of the inhabitants, would allow; as to the prisoner's having resided in a foreign country, whose laws were the rule of his conduct, and that he is not to be brought before a tribunal whose authority he does not acknowledge, I cannot allow to be a fair statement; I have already shewn that he must be considered as a British subject, and amenable to our law; but English law is the rule of action even in the Rio Pongas. The conduct of the white inhabitants is regulated, and all their dealings in trade determined by its rule; the legislature considered this difficulty when they allowed us to try offenders against the 51st of the King, chap. 23., according to the ordinary course of law, or by the 25th of Henry the Eighth, or the 33d of the same reign, or the 11th and 12th of William the Third, British I subjects have been tried in England for acts committed against the British law in Asia, in America, in Africa, and the Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, and in Europe in the center of the French government. The indictment could not be quashed.