chandize, or any part
thereof." In manuscript was added: "This insurance is declared to be made
on one hundred slaves, valued at $40,000 and warranted by the insured to be
free from insurrection, elopement, suicide and natural death." The premium
was one and a quarter per cent, of the forty thousand dollars.[31] That
the insurers were not always free from serious risk is indicated by a New
Orleans news item in 1818 relating that two local insurance companies
had recently lost more than forty thousand dollars in consequence of the
robbery of seventy-two slaves out of a vessel from the Chesapeake by a
piratical boat off the Berry Islands.[32]

[Footnote 31: Original in private possession.]

[Footnote 32: Augusta, Ga., _Chronicle_, Sept. 23, 1818, quoting the
_Orleans Gazette_.]

Overland coffles were occasionally encountered and described by travelers.
Featherstonhaugh overtook one at daybreak one morning in southwestern
Virginia bound through the Tennessee Valley and wrote of it as follows: "It
was a camp of negro slave drivers, just packing up to start. They had about
three hundred slaves with them, who had bivouacked the preceding night
in chains in the woods. These they were conducting to Natchez on the
Mississippi River to work upon the sugar plantations in Louisiana. It
resembled one of the coffles spoken of by Mungo Park, except that they had
a caravan of nine wagons and single-horse carriages for the purpose of
conducting the white people and any of the blacks that should fall lame....
The female slaves, some of them sitting on logs of wood, while others were
standing, and a great many little black children, were warming themselves
at the fire of the bivouac. In front of them all, and prepared for the
march, stood in double files about two hundred men slaves, manacled and
chained to each other." The writer went on to ejaculate upon the horror of
"white men with liberty and equality in their mouths," driving black men
"to perish in the sugar mills of Louisiana, where the duration of life for
a sugar mill hand does not exceed seven years."[33] Sir Charles Lyell,
who was less disposed to moralize or to repeat slanders of the Louisiana
regime, wrote upon reaching the outskirts of Columbus, Georgia, in January,
1846: "The first sight we saw there was a long line of negroes, men, women
and boys, well dressed and very merry, talking and laughing, who stopped to
look at our coach. On inquiry we were told that it was a ga