Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 Excerpt: ...bid against him, and he bought the vessel back for one-quarter of its value. The negroes could be bought for fifteen or twenty dollars apiece, on the slave coast, and sold in the South for five or six hundred; there were, therefore, millions in one successful voyage, and it was no wonder the business flourished. Under the law it was death, and confiscation of the vessel; but even the latter penalty was seldom enforced--as one may gather from the record in the Senate Documents of the Thirty-seventh Congress, in which appears the quaint fact that "the bark Cora and cargo" were arrested and bonded in New York on June 23, 1860, and arrested again on the slave coast, December 10 of the very same year! It was declared by the New York Leader (Democratic) that "an average of two vessels each week clear out of our harbor, bound for Africa and a human cargo." The London Times called New York "the greatest slave-trading mart in the world." Most horrible are the stories recorded of this traffic; the slavers were built as a rule with decks five feet apart, and between these was a shelf, so that two layers of negroes were laid within this space. Cases had been known, after the trade had been outlawed, in which the wretches were packed in a space only eighteen inches high, and others where they were seated, each man with another crowded upon his lap, as on a toboggan. Thus they remained sealed up tight for days, if a storm chanced to arise; it is recorded that the naval vessels cruising on the slave coast could detect a vessel five miles up the wind by the odor. It was necessary, if the slaver were to be held, that she should be taken with the negroes actually on board; and the captain of one, stopped in the night-time, tied six hundred slave...
