Page:Trials of the Slave Traders Samo, Peters and Tufft (1813).pdf/34

 language of pathos, sincerity, and submission, and bound the petitioners to abandon the abominable slave traffic, and to do all in their power to bring it to a total termi- tion, upon the condition that Samo should be discharged by virtue of the royal pardon, and restored to his friends. To have the "father of the trade," converted into its avowed enemy, and all his African connexion solemnly pledged to assist him in the humane work of abolition, was a great point gained, and infinitely preferable to sacrificing an individual slave trader to the rigour of the law. Governor Maxwell, having consulted the Chief Justice; determined that he would exercise the delightful prerogative with which he was invested, of extending the royal pardon to the unhappy convict.

On the day appointed, Samuel Samo was put to the bar to hear the sentence the law directs for the crime of which he stood convicted. Mr. Biggs moved, in arrest of judgement, that the royal pardon might be read, which being done by the Clerk of the Crown, the learned Chief Justice addressed the prisoner in a manner that not only impressed him, but moved every heart in the Court. He enjoined, and explained the gratitude the prisoner ought to feel at being released from a most ignominious punishment, which, from his age and frame, must have accelerated a death, whose terrors (from the habits of his life) he must be unprepared to encounter. He mentioned, that on a former occasion he had stated many of the miseries the negro suffered, from the moment he was caught till he was shipped, to all of which the slave factor was accessary. The horrid scenes the prisoner must have witnessed on board a ship in the Rio Pongas, when the slave factors were carousing at dinner with one William Browne, (master of a Liverpool slave ship) might have deterred him from this pursuit. The rum in the cabin being exhausted, a person was dispatched to the hold to open a fresh cask