Have our readers met with “Fifty Days on Board a Slaver,” by the Rev. Pascoe Grenfell Hill? That shows the value of armed suppression. Mr. Hill has done good service by exposing the horrors of British mercy. Mr. Hill was chaplain on board her Majesty’s ship the Cleopatra, when she captured the Progresso last April twelvemonth, in the Mozambique channel. When she fell in with the Progresso, the slave vessel had been laden but a few hours, and there had been no time to generate disease. However a change soon took place, and we must borrow Mr. Hill’s words: —
“A squall approached, of which I and others who had laid down on the deck received warning by a few heavy drops of rain. Then ensued a scene the horrors of which it is impossible to depict. The hands having to shorten sail suddenly, uncertain as to the force of the squall, found the poor helpless creatures lying about the deck an obstruction to getting at the ropes, and doing what was required. This caused the order to send them all below, which was immediately obeyed. The night, however, being intensely hot and close, 400 wretched beings thus crammed into a hold, twelve yards in length, seven in breadth, and only three feet and a half in height, speedily began to make an effort to reissue to the open air. Being thrust back, and striving the more to get out, the after hatch was forced down on them. Over the other hatchway in the fore-part of the vessel, a wooden grating was fastened. To this the sole inlet for the air, the suffocating heat of the hold, and, perhaps, panic from the strangeness of their situation, made them press, and thus great part of the space below was rendered useless. They crowded to the grating, and, clinging to it for air, completely barred its entrance. They strove to force their way through apertures in length fourteen inches, and barely six inches in breadth, and in some instances succeeded. The cries – the heat, I may say without exaggeration, the smoke of their torment – which ascended, can be compared to nothing earthly. One of the Spaniards gave warning that the consequences would be ‘many deaths.’ Thursday, April 13th, (Holy Thursday,) the Spaniard’s prediction of last night was this morning fearfully verified. Fifty-four crushed and mangled corpses lifted up from the slave deck; some were brought to the gangway and thrown overboard; some were emaciated from disease; many were bruised and bloody. Antonio tells me that some were found strangled – their hands still grasping each other’s throats – and tongues protruding from their mouths. The bowels of one were crushed out; they had been trampled to death, for the most part, the weaker under the feet of the stronger, in the madness and torment of suffocation from crowd and heat. It was a horrid sight as they passed one by one – the stiff distorted limbs smeared with blood and filth – to be cast into the sea; some still quivering were laid on the deck to die; salt water thrown on them to revive them, and a little fresh water poured into their mouths.”
But we hasten to the close of this scene of death.
“As soon as the Progresso anchored, we were visited by the health officer, who immediately admitted us to pratique. My friend Mr. Shea, then superintendent of the naval hospital, also paid us a visit, and I descended with him, for the last time, to the slave hold. Long accustomed as he has been to scenes of suffering, he was unable to endure a sight surpassing, he said, ‘all he could have conceived of human misery,’ and made a hasty retreat. One little girl, crying bitterly, was entangled between the planks, wanting strength to extricate her wasted limbs, till assistance was given her.”
In a voyage of fifty days, there occurred one hundred and sixty-three deaths! Can slavery be worse than this? if this melancholy tale teaches anything, it is evidently the uselessness of armed suppression.
And yet this wretched, this utterly inefficient system, is to be continued and extended. A new remedy has been proposed by the Honourable Captain Denman, which it appears Sir Robert Peel is about to sanction. Colonel Nicolls says, it will put the slave trade down in ten or twelve months, – this we more than doubt. A blockade which, to be effectual, must extend over six thousand miles of coast, is not so easy a thing as it may seem on paper. With Lord John Russell we believe, “that to suppress the slave trade by a marine guard is impossible, were the whole British navy employed in the attempt.” A British force may burn the baracoons, but as long as the demand exists, a supply from some quarter or other will be procured. To show that the Colonel’s logic is not absolutely perfect, we quote the following fact. It was thought the destruction of the baracoons at Gallinas, in 1840, would have prevented their re-formation, but this does not appear to have been the case. The commissioners observe, “We have received information that, during the last rains, no less than three slave factories were settled in the Gallinas, whither the factors and goods had been conveyed by an American vessel.” – (Slave Trade Papers, 1843.) Destroy the nests, and the birds will not breed, says Colonel Nicolls. The gallant colonel forgets that the demand for slaves, and not the existence of baracoons, creates the slave trade; to borrow an illustration from Adam Smith, a man is not rich because he keeps a coach and four horses; but he keeps a coach and four horses because he is rich. Men make but an indifferent hand at reasoning when they are unable to tell which is the cause, and which the effect.
Had this system been attended by any the smallest amount of good, we should have kept out of account altogether the last item in this part of our subject, to which we shall refer the reader – that of expense; but when we find the money thus squandered has produced no earthly good whatever, when all parties confess that past measures have ended in utter failure, and that the slave trade, so far from being put down in all its forms of abomination and cruelty, is more vigorous than before; it is but right that we should exclaim against the waste of money that has been so lavishly incurred. Sir Fowell Buxton estimates the expense, on the part of Great Britain, in carrying out the slave trade preventive system up to 1839, at £15,000,000. We here quote from Mr. Laird:
“Her Majesty’s late commissioner of inquiry on the coast of Africa, estimates the expense incurred there, independently of the salaries and contingencies at home, of officers connected with the Anti-Slavery Treaty Department, at £229,090 per annum; and by the finance accounts, I find, that for the year ending 5th January, 1842, £57,024 was paid out of the consolidated fund, to the officers and crews of her Majesty’s ships, for bounty on slaves, and tonnage on slave vessels. These gallant men, however, do not think they get what they ought to do; for there is a long correspondence about what they lose by the way the prizes are measured for tonnage-money; but it must be consolatory to them to know that they have, in one year, received £1,000 more prize money than their predecessors did in nine; the amount of prize money paid for capturing slaves, from 1814 to 1822, being only £56,017. In fact the African station has been improving in value, as a naval command, since the slave trade treaties; it is now the bonne bouche of the Admiralty, and as such was given to the last first lord’s brothers. The mixed commission courts cost the country about £15,000 per annum; and as any dispute between the Portuguese, Spanish, or Brazilian judges is settled by an appeal to the dice box, the monotony of their lives is agreeably diversified; having retiring salaries, the patronage is valuable. The whole annual cost may be taken at £300,000.” 6
So much for this part of our subject. We may fairly conclude, that such a system is evidently vicious in principle: it has certainly failed to answer the end proposed, and the sooner it is given up the better. But let it not be for one moment understood that we consider slavery always will remain the curse and shame of humanity. We believe that it can be extinguished, – that it must be extinguished, – that, sooner or later, God’s sun shall shine every where upon the free, and that slavery shall remain alone in the dark records of earth’s misery and crime.
Freedom is the antagonist of slavery. Free labour must drive out of the market the labour of the slave. We were told before emancipation, that the former was cheaper than the latter: we have yet to learn that it is not. A glance at the present condition of the sugar-producing countries will convince any one that the West India planter has immense advantages over his rival of Cuba or Brazil.
There is a great amount of misunderstanding on this subject. The soil of the West India Islands is always represented as exhausted, which is far from being actually the case. In Cuba, according to an estimate made by the patriotic society of Havanna, it appears that two hundred and fifteen acres of new land are expected to produce, in cane cultivation, thirteen hundred boxes of sugar, or 2172 lbs. per acre. We may reasonably infer, that the production in Brazil does not equal this. We find that the exports of sugar from the latter country have rather declined, while those of Cuba have been nearly doubled within the last few years; while from the evidence taken by a committee of the House of Commons, it appears that with the present imperfect system of cultivation, the following results have been obtained, including ratroons, or canes cut for several years successively. 7
A pretty fair result, it must be confessed, considering the exhausted condition of the soil. Another advantage the West India Islands possess over Brazil, arises from their facilities for water carriage. Their limited extent is anything but a drawback, – it makes them all sea coast. With labour and capital, they would be put in a position that would enable them to under-sell slave-grown sugar. The great disadvantage under which they suffer, is scarcity of labour. Antigua alone has, in this respect, a sufficient supply, and let us hear the result. The first witness we shall call is Captain Larlyle, governor of French Guiana. The captain was sent by the French government to visit most of the British West India Islands, and to see the working of the present system; the report he made has been published by government, in a work, entitled, “Abolition de l’Esclavage dans les Colonies Anglaises.” Evidently his prejudices are for the continuance of slavery, but with respect to Antigua, he was forced to bear witness of a contrary character. He observes, (our quotations are from the Anti-Slavery Reporter, of May 1st, 1844,) that “it has maintained, during the last seven years, a state of prosperity, which every impartial person cannot fail to acknowledge.” p. 189. “The exports have rather increased than diminished since emancipation.” pp. 194, 5. “If, under the system of slavery, labour had been as complete and productive as it ought to have been, if the negroes had employed the time to their best advantage, there is no doubt but they would have produced more than at present, when, in consequence of freedom, the fields have lost a third of their labourers. But I have had occasion to say, in my former reports, that forced labour has never answered the expectations that have been formed respecting it; and I find a new proof of this in the table of production in Antigua during fifteen years.” p. 196. Again, Captain Larlyle says, “If the colonists are to be believed, the plantations are worth, without the negroes, as much as they were worth formerly with their gangs of slaves.” Equally favourable is the evidence of a lady who resided in Antigua, both before and after the emancipation of the slaves, and who possessed the most ample opportunities for acquiring a knowledge of the working of either system. After referring to the depressed state of the island before the abolition of slavery, she observes: