ent accessible that more than one fifth of those who were
shipped were flung to the sharks before the end of the voyage. The human
cargoes were stowed close in the holds of small vessels. So little space
was allowed that the wretches, many of whom were still tormented by
unhealed wounds, could not all lie down at once without lying on one
another. They were never suffered to go on deck. The hatchway was
constantly watched by sentinels armed with hangers and blunderbusses.
In the dungeon below all was darkness, stench, lamentation, disease
and death. Of ninety-nine convicts who were carried out in one vessel,
twenty-two died before they reached Jamaica, although the voyage was
performed with unusual speed. The survivors when they arrived at their
house of bondage were mere skeletons. During some weeks coarse biscuit
and fetid water had been doled out to them in such scanty measure that
any one of them could easily have consumed the ration which was assigned
to five. They were, therefore, in such a state that the merchant to whom
they had been consigned found it expedient to fatten them before selling
them. [455]

Meanwhile the property both of the rebels who had suffered death, and
of those more unfortunate men who were withering under the tropical sun,
was fought for and torn in pieces by a crowd of greedy informers. By law
a subject attainted of treason forfeits all his substance; and this law
was enforced after the Bloody Assizes with a rigour at once cruel
and ludicrous. The brokenhearted widows and destitute orphans of the
labouring men whose corpses hung at the cross roads were called upon by
the agents of the Treasury to explain what had become of a basket, of a
goose, of a flitch of bacon, of a keg of cider, of a sack of beans, of
a truss of hay. [456] While the humbler retainers of the government were
pillaging the families of the slaughtered peasants, the Chief Justice
was fast accumulating a fortune out of the plunder of a higher class of
Whigs. He traded largely in pardons. His most lucrative transaction of
this kind was with a gentleman named Edmund Prideaux. It is certain that
Prideaux had not been in arms against the government; and it is probable
that his only crime was the wealth which he had inherited from his
father, an eminent lawyer who had been high in office under the
Protector. No exertions were spared to make out a case for the crown.
Mercy was offered to some prisoners on condition that they woul