onjecture, except from those passages in the evidence, where it appeared,
that their agents in Africa had systematically practised every fraud and
villainy, which the meanest and most unprincipled cunning could suggest, to
impose on the ignorance of those with whom they traded.

The same gentleman had also lamented, that the evidence had not been taken
upon oath. He himself lamented it too. Numberless facts had been related by
eye-witnesses, called in support of the abolition, so dreadfully atrocious,
that they appeared incredible; and seemed rather, to use the expression of
Ossian, like "the histories of the days of other times." These procured for
the trade a species of acquittal, which it could not have obtained, had the
committee been authorised to administer an oath. He apprehended also, in
this case, that some other persons would have been rather more guarded in
their testimony. Captain Knox would not then perhaps have told the
committee, that six hundred slaves could have had comfortable room at night
in his vessel of about one hundred and forty tons; when there could have
been no more than five feet six inches in length, and fifteen inches in
breadth, to about two thirds of his number.

The same gentleman had also dwelt upon the Slave-trade as a nursery for
seamen. But it had appeared by the muster-rolls of the slave-vessels, then
actually on the table of the House, that more than a fifth of them died in
the service, exclusive of those who perished when discharged in the West
Indies; and yet he had been instructed by his constituents to maintain this
false position. His reasoning, too, was very curious; for, though numbers
might die, yet as one half, who entered, were landsmen, seamen were
continually forming. Not to dwell on the expensive cruelty of forming these
seamen by the yearly destruction of so many hundreds, this very statement
was flatly contradicted by the evidence. The muster-rolls from Bristol
stated the proportion of landmen in the trade there at one twelfth, and the
proper officers of Liverpool itself at but a sixteenth, of the whole
employed. In the face again of the most glaring facts, others had
maintained that the mortality in these vessels did not exceed that of other
trades in the tropical climates. But the same documents, which proved that
twenty-three per cent, were destroyed in this wasting traffic, proved that
in West India ships only about one and a half per cent. were lost,
including ev