f procuring them, that I was
determined to make myself acquainted with their whole history; for I
found by report that they were not only personally ill-treated, as I
have already painfully described, but that they were robbed by artifice
of those wages, which had been held up to them as so superior in this
service. All persons were obliged to sign articles that, in case they
should die or be discharged during the voyage, the wages then due to
them should be paid in the currency where the vessel carried her slaves,
and that half of the wages due to them on their arrival there should be
paid in the same manner, and that they were never permitted to read over
the articles they had signed. By means of this iniquitous practice the
wages in the Slave Trade, though nominally higher in order to induce
seamen to engage in it, were actually lower than in other trades. All
these usages I ascertained in such a manner, that no person could doubt
the truth of them. I actually obtained possession of articles of
agreement belonging to these vessels, which had been signed and executed
in former voyages. I made the merchants themselves, by sending those
seamen who had claims upon them to ask for their accounts current with
their respective ships, furnish me with such documents as would have
been evidence against them in any court of law. On whatever branch of
the system I turned my eyes, I found it equally barbarous. The trade
was, in short, one mass of iniquity from the beginning to the end.

I employed myself occasionally in the Merchant's-hall, in making copies
of the muster-rolls of ships sailing to different parts of the world,
that I might make a comparative view of the loss of seamen in the Slave
Trade, with that of those in the other trades from the same port. The
result of this employment showed me the importance of it: for, when I
considered how partial the inhabitants of this country were to their
fellow-citizens, the seamen belonging to it, and in what estimation the
members of the legislature held them, by enforcing the Navigation Act,
which they considered to be the bulwark of the nation, and by giving
bounties to certain trades, that these might become so many nurseries
for the marine, I thought it of great importance, to be able to prove,
as I was then capable of doing, that more persons would be found dead in
three slave-vessels from Bristol, in a given time, than in all the other
vessels put together, numerous as they w