many have I seen, with tears in their
eyes, put into boats, and conveyed to vessels, which were then lying at the
Black Rock, and which were only waiting to receive them to sail away!

The manner of paying them in the currency of the Islands was the same as at
Bristol. But this practice was not concealed at Liverpool, as it was at the
former place. The articles of agreement were printed, so that all, who
chose to buy, might read them. At the same time it must be observed, that
seamen were never paid in this manner in any other employ; and that the
African wages, though nominally higher for the sake of procuring hands,
were thus made to be actually lower than in other trades.

The loss by death was so similar, that it did not signify whether the
calculation on a given number was made either at this or the other port. I
had, however, a better opportunity at this, than I had at the other, of
knowing the loss as it related to those, whose constitutions had been
ruined, or who had been rendered incapable, by disease, of continuing their
occupation at sea. For the slave-vessels, which returned to Liverpool,
sailed immediately into the docks, so that I saw at once their sickly and
ulcerated crews. The number of vessels, too, was so much greater from this,
than from any other port, that their sick made a more conspicuous figure in
the infirmary. And they were seen also more frequently in the streets.

With respect to their treatment, nothing could be worse. It seemed to me to
be but one barbarous system from the beginning to the end. I do not say
barbarous, as if premeditated, but it became so in consequence of the
savage habits gradually formed by a familiarity with miserable sights, and
with a course of action inseparable from the trade. Men in their first
voyages usually disliked the traffic; and, if they were happy enough then
to abandon it, they usually escaped the disease of a hardened heart. But if
they went a second and a third time, their disposition became gradually
changed. It was impossible for them to be accustomed to carry away men and
women by force, to keep them in chains, to see their tears, to hear their
mournful lamentations, to behold the dead and the dying, to be obliged to
keep up a system of severity amidst all this affliction,--in short, it was
impossible for them to be witnesses, and this for successive voyages, to
the complicated mass of misery passing in a slave-ship, without losing
their finer feeli