Page:Trials of the Slave Traders Samo, Peters and Tufft (1813).pdf/35

 which caught fire from a candle; the ship was soon in flames; the inebriated factors saved themselves in their boats. Twenty-five slaves, not in irons, were drowned, and above seventy in irons, in the hold, were consumed to ashes! yet one of the wretches who was present, and who had just returned from the Matanzas, had assured him (the learned Judge) that the miseries he saw the negroes suffer in Cuba, so far exceeded any thing he imagined, that he had determined to decline the trade for ever.

He next spoke of the ship Caracai, that had been sent to Bahia with eleven hundred slaves; five hundred died on their passage, and of the six hundred landed, it was not supposed many could survive. A vessel that had foundered at sea, and the whole cargo of slaves perished, while the master and the men escaped in the boats, was also dwelt upon, and the pangs thus wantonly caused by the trade in human flesh, forcibly impressed on the recollection of the prisoner. The barbarous cruelties practised by Huggins and Hodge, in the West Indies, were very properly referred to with the indignation and abhorrence they are calculated to excite; when he described the negro woman under the torturing lash becoming a mother, every spectator seemed to be convulsed. "Conceive," said the learned Judge, "the mandate of this miscreant monster obeyed, until the offspring of unhallowed joy was prematurely precipitated from the source of life into the valley of death!" Here he made an apostrophe on the English law, and described justice in defence of the poorest African boy, dragging the richest West India planter to the bar, and from thence to the scaffold.

After depicting these scenes of horrid cruelty, his Lordship remarked, that if there were no slave factors, the unoffending, unprotected beings of Africa would not be seized, and torn from their native land, from those whom they loved, and from every thing estimable in life, to a