Page:Twenty years before the mast - Charles Erskine, 1896.djvu/55

 back that it came very near shivering my timbers. "Well!" said he, "what sort of a craft have you not sailed in, my lad?"

After our arrival at this place, two slavers were brought into port by an English man-of-war brig. I was on board  of one of them when they took off the hatches. Though quite a small brig, she had confined in her hold three  hundred negroes. When the hatches were opened, such a cloud of steam and such a horrible smell issued that it  staggered everybody on deck. They found only thirty living human beings out of three hundred. This was only one of the many horrors of the African slave-trade.

Sugarloaf Hill is so called from its shape. It is one immense, isolated rock, and lifts its almost perpendicular  sides to the clouds. It is about one thousand feet above the level of the sea. It is said that its summit has been reached by only one person, and he an Englishman, who  in triumph planted his country’s flag and left it there,  but was never seen afterwards. We ascended the mountain for the purpose of taking observations. We did not reach its summit till after dark, so had to remain  there all night. We had with us several fathoms of lead line with which we lashed ourselves together, so that none  of us could roll off while asleep. I have heard it said that a Scotch mist wets an Englishman through to the  skin, and that a Peruvian dew wets a true-blue through as well. Sure enough, in the morning we found ourselves wet through with the Sugarloaf dew. Up there we found the pitcher plant growing. It bore a small flower that looked just like a pitcher. It was the color of a purple morning-glory, only much handsomer. It hung