'tween deck height and nearly doubling the
floor space on which the slaves were to be stowed. Whatever the size of the
ship, it loaded slaves if it could get them to the limit of its capacity.
Bosnian tersely said, "they lie as close together as it is possible to be
crowded."[34] The women's room was divided from the men's by a bulkhead,
and in time of need the captain's cabin might be converted into a hospital.

[Footnote 34: Bosnian's _Guinea_, in Pinkerton's _Voyages_, XVI, 490.]

While the ship was taking on slaves and African provisions and water the
negroes were generally kept in a temporary stockade on deck for the sake
of fresh air. But on departure for the "middle passage," as the trip to
America was called by reason of its being the second leg of the ship's
triangular voyage in the trade, the slaves were kept below at night and in
foul weather, and were allowed above only in daylight for food, air and
exercise while the crew and some of the slaves cleaned the quarters and
swabbed the floors with vinegar as a disinfectant. The negro men were
usually kept shackled for the first part of the passage until the chances
of mutiny and return to Africa dwindled and the captain's fears gave place
to confidence. On various occasions when attacks of privateers were to be
repelled weapons were issued and used by the slaves in loyal defense of
the vessel.[35] Systematic villainy in the handling of the human cargo
was perhaps not so characteristic in this trade as in the transport of
poverty-stricken white emigrants. Henry Laurens, after withdrawing from
African factorage at Charleston because of the barbarities inflicted by
some of the participants in the trade, wrote in 1768: "Yet I never saw an
instance of cruelty in ten or twelve years' experience in that branch equal
to the cruelty exercised upon those poor Irish.... Self interest prompted
the baptized heathen to take some care of their wretched slaves for a
market, but no other care was taken of those poor Protestant Christians
from Ireland but to deliver as many as possible alive on shoar upon the
cheapest terms, no matter how they fared upon the voyage nor in what
condition they were landed."[36]

[Footnote 35: _E. g_., Gomer Williams, pp. 560, 561.]

[Footnote 36: D.D. Wallace, _Life of Henry Laurens_ (New York, 1915), pp.
67, 68. For the tragic sufferings of an English convict shipment in 1768
see _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 372-373]

William Snelgrave, long a