ed in half an hour after she
was on board the ship. Resistance having been made to these violent
proceedings, some of the sailors were wounded, and one was killed. Some
weeks after this affray, a chieftain of the name of Quarmo went on board
the same vessel to borrow some cutlasses and muskets. He was going, he
said, into the country to make war; and the captain should have half of his
booty. So well understood were the practices of the trade, that his request
was granted. Quarmo, however, and his associates, finding things favourable
to their design, suddenly seized the captain, threw him overboard, hauled
him into their canoe, and dragged him to the shore; where another party of
the natives, lying in ambush, seized such of the crew as were absent from
the ship. But how did these savages behave, when they had these different
persons in their power? Did they not instantly retaliate by murdering them
all? No--they only obliged the captain to give an order on the vessel to
pay his debts. This fact came out only two months ago in a trial in the
court of common pleas--not in a trial for piracy and murder--but in the
trial of a civil suit, instituted by some of the poor sailors, to whom the
owners refused their wages, because the natives, on account of the
villanous conduct of their captain, had kept them from their vessel by
detaining them as prisoners on shore. This instance, he said, proved the
dreadful nature of the Slave-trade, its cruelty, its perfidy, and its
effect on the Africans as well as on the Europeans, who carried it on. The
cool manner, in which the transaction was conducted on both sides, showed
that these practices were not novel. It showed also the manner of doing
business in the trade. It must be remembered too, that these transactions
were carrying on at the very time when the inquiry concerning this trade
was going forward in Parliament, and whilst the witnesses of his opponents
were strenuously denying not only the actual, but the possible, existence
of any such depredations.

But another instance happened only in August last. Six British ships, the
Thomas, Captain Phillips; the Wasp, Captain Hutchinson; the Recovery,
Captain Kimber, of Bristol; and the Martha, Captain Houston; the Betsey,
Captain Doyle; and the Amachree, (he believed,) Captain Lee, of Liverpool;
were anchored off the town of Calabar. This place was the scene of a
dreadful massacre about twenty years before. The captains of these vessels