piloted the slaver in his regular track across the Atlantic. What need
to revive the accounts of the horrors of the middle passage? We know
from John Newton and other Englishmen what a current of misery swept
in the Liverpool slavers into the western seas. The story of French
slave-trading is the same. I can find but one difference in favor of the
French slaver, that he took the shackles from his cargo after it had
been a day or two at sea. The lust for procuring the maximum of victims,
who must be delivered in a minimum of time and at the least expense,
could not dally with schemes to temper their suffering, or to make
avarice obedient to common sense. It was a transaction incapable of
being tempered. One might as well expect to ameliorate the act of
murder. Nay, swift murder would have been affectionate, compared with
this robbery of life.

Nor is the consumption of negroes by the sea-voyage the only item
suggested by the annual number actually landed. We should have to
include all the people maimed and killed in the predatory excursions
of native chiefs or Christian kidnappers to procure their cargoes. A
village was not always surprised without resistance. The most barbarous
tribes would defend their liberty. We can never know the numbers slain
in wars which were deliberately undertaken to stock the holds of
slavers.

Nor shall we ever know how many victims dropped out of the ruthless
caravan, exhausted by thirst and forced marches, on the routes sometimes
of three hundred leagues from the interior to the sea. They were usually
divided into files containing each thirty or forty slaves, who were
fastened together by poles of heavy wood, nine feet long, which
terminated in a padlocked fork around the neck. When the caravan made a
halt, one end of the pole was unfastened and dropped upon the ground.
When it dropped, the slave was anchored; and at night his arm was tied
to the end of the pole which he carried, so that a whole file was
hobbled during sleep. If any one became too enfeebled to preserve his
place, the brutal keepers transferred him to the swifter voracity of the
hyena, who scented the wake of the caravan across the waste to the sea's
margin, where the shark took up the trail.

The census of the slaves in San Domingo was annually taken upon the
capitation-tax which each planter had to pay; thus the children, and
negroes above forty-five years of age, escaped counting. But in 1789,
Schoelcher says that the