Cost price of 500 at 15 dollars, or 3_l._ 5_s._ £1,625 each Selling price at Rio of 500, at 41_l._ 10_s._ £20,750
Have our readers met with “Fifty Days on Board a Slaver,” by the Rev. Pascoe Grenfell Hill? _That_ shows the value of armed suppression. Mr. Hill has done good service by exposing the horrors of British mercy. Mr. Hill was chaplain on board her Majesty’s ship the Cleopatra, when she captured the Progresso last April twelvemonth, in the Mozambique channel. When she fell in with the Progresso, the slave vessel had been laden but a few hours, and there had been no time to generate disease. However a change soon took place, and we must borrow Mr. Hill’s words:—
“A squall approached, of which I and others who had laid down on the deck received warning by a few heavy drops of rain. Then ensued a scene the horrors of which it is impossible to depict. The hands having to shorten sail suddenly, uncertain as to the force of the squall, found the poor helpless creatures lying about the deck an obstruction to getting at the ropes, and doing what was required. This caused the order to send them all below, which was immediately obeyed. The night, however, being intensely hot and close, 400 wretched beings thus crammed into a hold, twelve yards in length, seven in breadth, and only three feet and a half in height, speedily began to make an effort to reissue to the open air. Being thrust back, and striving the more to get out, the after hatch was forced down on them. Over the other hatchway in the fore-part of the vessel, a wooden grating was fastened. To this the sole inlet for the air, the suffocating heat of the hold, and, perhaps, panic from the strangeness of their situation, made them press, and thus great part of the space below was rendered useless. They crowded to the grating, and, clinging to it for air, completely barred its entrance. They strove to force their way through apertures in length fourteen inches, and barely six inches in breadth, and in some instances succeeded. The cries—the heat, I may say without exaggeration, the smoke of their torment—which ascended, can be compared to nothing earthly. One of the Spaniards gave warning that the consequences would be ‘many deaths.’ Thursday, April 13th, (Holy Thursday,) the Spaniard’s prediction of last night was this morning fearfully verified. Fifty-four crushed and mangled corpses lifted up from the slave deck; some were brought to the gangway and thrown overboard; some were emaciated from disease; many were bruised and bloody. Antonio tells me that some were found strangled—their hands still grasping each other’s throats—and tongues protruding from their mouths. The bowels of one were crushed out; they had been trampled to death, for the most part, the weaker under the feet of the stronger, in the madness and torment of suffocation from crowd and heat. It was a horrid sight as they passed one by one—the stiff distorted limbs smeared with blood and filth—to be cast into the sea; some still quivering were laid on the deck to die; salt water thrown on them to revive them, and a little fresh water poured into their mouths.”