en one sail was seen for two weeks after
leaving the Gulf of Guinea. But there were incidents enough on board,
many horrid ones, of which I shall spare the reader the details.

One I must relate in all its particulars. It will be found to contain
horrors enough for a thousand, which I would spare the reader if
possible; but by doing so my narrative must come to a sudden
termination, since in this incident lies the continuation of my story.

Incident is hardly the name for what I am about to relate. It was more
than a mere occurrence; it was a dread and awful calamity; and in a
retrospect of the events of my life, this is the one which rises upon my
memory the saddest and darkest; indeed, at the time of its occurrence it
made upon my mind an impression so appalling, that it was a long while
before I could think of anything else. Even now, long years after the
terrible drama, I was witness of, and partly an actor in, is often
passed in review before the eye of memory; and its horrid scenes appear
to me with all the painful vividness of reality.

Listen, then! and I shall make known the nature of this dread
occurrence.

As already stated, we had been about two weeks out to sea, with a
favouring wind nearly all the time, and had arrived in mid-Atlantic--
that is, about half-way between Cape Palmas in Africa and the most
easterly point of South America--of course, therefore, we were many
hundreds of miles from either shore.

The breeze continued fair, for we were sailing under the southern
trade-wind, and everything seemed to promise a quick passage to the
coast of Brazil. I was myself gratified at our progress, for I looked
upon every day as a week of misery, and every hour a day, not only to
myself but to the poor creatures who lived only in torments, and by
these torments daily died. Not daily, but hourly, I might almost say,
were they dying; and the plunge of their bodies, as they were
unceremoniously tumbled over the side, had become of as frequent
occurrence as the ringing of the watch bells. Over the side were they
pitched in all their ghastly nakedness--just as a dead dog would have
been thrown--with not even a shot or a stone tied to them to sink their
corpses below the surface of the water. On the contrary, many of their
bodies, swollen in an unnatural manner after death, remained upon the
surface of the sea, and could be seen in our wake bobbing up and down
upon the waves that had been made by the kee