s and Stripes was virtually immune from capture. In 1842 a treaty with
Great Britain bound us to keep a considerable squadron on that coast, and
thereafter there was at least some show of American hostility to the
infamous traffic.

The vitality of the traffic in the face of growing international hostility
is to be explained by its increasing profits. The effect of the laws
passed against it was to make slaves cheaper on the coast of Africa and
dearer at the markets in America. A slave that cost $20 would bring $500
in Georgia. A ship carrying 500 would bring its owners $240,000, and there
were plenty of men willing to risk the penalties of piracy for a share of
such prodigious profits. Moreover, the seas swarmed then with adventurous
sailors--mostly of American birth--to whom the very fact that slaving was
outlawed made it more attractive. The years of European war had bred up
among New Englanders a daring race of privateersmen--their vocation had
long been piracy in all but name, a fact which in these later days the
maritime nations recognize by trying to abolish privateering by
international agreement. When the wars of the early years of the
nineteenth century ended the privateersmen looked about for some seafaring
enterprise which promised profit. A few became pirates, more went into the
slave-trade. Men of this type were not merely willing to risk their lives
in a criminal calling, but were quite as ready to fight for their property
as to try to save it by flight. The slavers soon began to carry heavy
guns, and with desperate crews were no mean antagonists for a man-of-war.
Many of the vessels that had been built for privateers were in the trade,
ready to fight a cruiser or rob a smaller slaver, as chance offered. We
read of some carrying as many as twenty guns, and in that sea classic,
"Tom Cringle's Log," there is a story--obviously founded on fact--of a
fight between a British sloop-of-war and a slaver that gives a vivid idea
of the desperation with which the outlaws could fight. But sometimes the
odds were hopeless, and the slaver could not hope to escape by force of
arms or by flight. Then the sternness of the law, together with a foolish
rule concerning the evidence necessary to convict, resulted in the murder
of the slaves, not by ones or twos, but by scores, and even hundreds, at a
time. For it was the unwise ruling of the courts that actual presence of
slaves on a captured ship was necessary to prove that sh