logs, and the like, the being found "north of the line" was easily and audaciously accounted for by gales, currents, &c.; and thus, suspicion with every ample circumstantiality to confirm it, yet lacking the actual proof in the shape of the shackled slave, they were permitted to go on their way rejoicing, laughing to scorn the whole power of the blockade thus set in paralyzed array against them.

Not long ago a Portuguese vessel shipped some twelve hundred slaves for the Brazilian States, of whom five hundred perished on the passage, and about three hundred more as soon as landed. To baffle search they were jammed under a false deck, and piled there, a mass of living, weltering corruption. Children were born among them, and some of the slaves strangled each other, while other evidences betrayed the instincts of the cannibal. They were fettered together the living to the dead, the flesh ulcerated to the bone, and pent up in a space not thirty inches high! The marvel is that a single living creature was landed. All this was detailed in a "blue book," and sickening reading it is. It was no uncommon thing for women to be among the "consignees," of these human cargoes, and the names of four ladies, among whom was the daughter of the Governor of Princess Island, appear among the charterers. In some of the vessels fierce bloodhounds were kept to hold watches over the hatchways, lest in their madness the cramped stowage below should attempt to gain the deck for fresh air. They are spoken of as "ebony," cargoes of that "sort," shipments of that "article," "logs," "wood," and so on. Among the sufferings they underwent in addition to their floating dungeons of filth, disease, and death, must be that mental anguish of being brutally snatched away from family, friends, and home, the mother torn from the father, the child cast aside into some other "lot," while the embittered feelings attendant on his future lot and condition, which he must judge from present experience to be tenfold more hideous and dreadful, are scarcely to be realised by the imagination. Suicide was common enough among them, and while some would leap in couples into the sea, the instant prey of the ravenous shark, others have been known to cause suffocation by doubling up the tongue and thrusting it into the oesophagus. Fire and sword were let loose on peaceful villages far in the interior by the machinations of the "factors," and after one chief or king made war upon another, the captives irrespectively were brought down to the shores in droves, heavily chained by the ankles, arms, or necks, and lotted off in factories, "barracoons," &c., till the purchase and the branding were over, after which the usual process of embarkation and transit commenced.

It was no unfrequent thing, however, for the market to be overstocked and no purchasers at hand. The king or chief to whom such stock was captive, fell under the necessity of supporting them-or not. The old, the infirm, or sickly, were then separated from the sound and healthy, and next day perhaps were pinioned and driven to the banks of a river, where weights being attached to them, they were rowed to the middle and flung like dogs into the stream to drown and perish without compunction. Even those rejected by the merchants only shared the same fate, for what was the use of keeping worn or damaged "goods" on hand? The following are among a few of the succinct episodes extending over the last dozen or twenty years with which the

blockade service of the African coast has made us familiar, and which we have condensed for the fuller information of such readers as may feel an interest in this sad subject.

Among the craft captured on one occasion, was a mere cock-boat of seven tons, belonging to that miracle of femininity, the governor's daughter mentioned. The place where thirty human beings were thrust between the water-casks and the beams was but seventeen inches in height! Ten persons were there found dead, and the remainder were in the last stage of suffering. The boats of two cruisers captured two vessels, one of seventy and the other of a hundred and thirty tons, and in 'tween-decks not three feet high seven hundred slaves were jammed as if by hydraulic pressure. The consequence was, while placing these under the care of the medical officers of the ships, fever and dysentery attacked their crews and almost decimated them. Ten traders boarded in the Bight of Biafra, having boilers, water-casks, platforms, shackles, &c., ready for the reception of cargoes at Bonny or Calabar (though they professed to be going far south of the line), escaped capture on that plea. From the rudder-chains of one, a little negro boy was picked up; he had been thrust overboard by the master when the cruiser appeared, and had only saved his life by clinging to the horrible ship. On that she was seized as an exception, and so condemned.

Once on a favourable opportunity the commodore of the station ordered the boats of a couple of man-of-war cruisers to proceed into the Bonny. Crossing the bar in the early morning they saw seven sail lying at anchor off the town. When the boats were within a league or so, they displayed their colours. The slavers, without showing any, instantly opened fire upon them, thinking to sink them without difficulty. The several boats now opened a severe fire in turn from howitzers and small-arms, and after a desperate struggle succeeded in boarding and capturing the whole.

Some of the crew of one Spanish vessel, after she had surrendered went below, and, arming the slaves with muskets, the ruffians forced them to fire up the hatches upon the men who were on deck. This was retaliated by the infuriated sailors and marines heaving the Spaniards whom they dragged from below, bodily overboard-a fate the scoundrels well merited.

A second Spanish schooner, when boarded, was found to have a lighted match slowly burning over the magazine-hatch, placed there by the villanous crew before they made for shore. This was seen by one of our seamen, who, with equal coolness and prudence, put his hat beneath the perilous combustible and carefully removed it. There was a large quantity of powder in the magazine, and nearly four hundred souls might have been sent to eternity in a moment. A wretch who was taken regretted, with a horrible blasphemous jest, that his project had thus signally failed.

On board of a third, a young slave-girl in irons, fastened again to a thick heavy iron chain, was found. A hideous tragic story was identified in her. The captain of the slaver was in turn invested with the same manacles and chain, but the monster was found the next morning suffocated by a " trick of the tongue" not unusual with these desperadoes, and which the negroes had probably taught them, while the

girl herself became a raging maniac. On this occasion nearly fifteen hundred slaves were set free at Sierra Leone, only to be captured and resold within a week.

One morning a British vessel was in chase of a fast-sailing Havre brigantine, and, beginning by superior handling to come up within long range of her, she found herself obliged to heave-to no less than five times in order to pick up a dozen negroes headed up in casks who had been deliberately thrown overboard to retard the cruiser's progress, and by which means she ultimately escaped. The infernal ingenuity of this process illustrates the lengths to which these miscreants will go, and details now lie before us so harrowing that we cannot present them to the reader.

A British captain receives information that a notorious, quick-sailing, strongly-manned, and heavily-armed Spanish slaver is on her passage, and that on his homeward voyage he will very likely fall in with her on the Equator. This slaver, in addition to the known desperation and ferocity of her captain, is in all respects superior, in guns, men, and strength, to the cruiser. Nevertheless the chance is too good to be thrown away, and she is anxiously looked for. One morning a midshipman announces a sail in sight. The decks are instantly alive, and glasses are levelled at the stranger, which proves to be a large threemasted ship of most suspicious appearance apparently crossing their way. As sail is now packed upon the cruiser, the stranger tacks and stands away freely before the wind; the chase is now begun in earnest, the breeze freshens, the hull is distinctly visible, and from unerring signs she is pronounced to be a "slaver." The chased ship flies, she tacks, she doubles, she changes her course, and is one cloud of canvas from the decks to her trucks. Guns are fired and the English Union hoisted. No reply. She has got on a favourite point of sailing, and, while she carries a breeze along with her the wind dies away with the cruiser, and leaning over the netting with murmurs of disappointment among the officers and a growling undercurrent among the men at the slaver's luck, night falls on the ocean, and she vanishes in the universal void.

Meantime, with the slaver, when the square rig, peculiar hoist, and other unmistakeable signs announce to its captain that a British vessel is coming up over his weather quarter, daring as he may be, and knowing his power, even he knows also the value of getting off scot free, and so he makes sail, alters his course, closes down the hatches upon the gasping and suffocating cargo he carries, and so there ensue beneath his decks scenes of unutterable horror. He sees his advantages, and, otherwise than depriving his freight of air, he does not have recourse to the usual system of noyades, does not sink them with weights into the sea, and rid himself of them, and he will now fight or fly just as the case may be. If he finds himself shorthanded he will put his manacled negroes to work his guns, and tutor their proceedings pistol in hand. He has dropped the cruiser below the horizon, however, and so far

"all's well."

Nevertheless they on board her Britannic Majesty's vessel do not give up their hopes. At the first dawn of the morning she is again anxiously looked for, and is seen standing dead north, and appearing

a mere speck on the horizon. The breeze has freshened by this, the cruiser's rate of sailing is increased, everything that will draw is set, and once again, ere very long, while the slaver staggers on under a heavy press of canvas, the cruiser has overhauled her and begins to play at long shots, and finally, coming up, discharges a broadside into her; and the slaver, who now strips his ship like a man who means work and mischief too, replies, and for some twenty minutes a hot action is carried on, till, with a British cheer, the boarders tread the decks, and stumble over the dead, or among the scuppers overflowing with blood and brine, and the prize is all our own after a chase of thirty hours, and a run of three hundred miles.

But what a scene below! If her decks are strewn with carnage and wreck, her steaming, noisome hold is rank with pestilential effluvia, and with death in its most grisly form. Men, women, and children, living and dead, some from our own shot and splinters, manacled and branded, the grated hatchways guarded by truculent ruffians armed with huge knotted whips; these are drawn up, or crawl upon deck, where the thermometer in the shade is 89 degrees. They are counted to the number of five hundred and sixty-two, the space the men occupy having an average of twenty-three inches, while those of the women, and many pregnant, is not even fourteen. Even then children stupified, and trampled down in the sides of the hold, are lifted out, and when water is brought them they rave, and shriek, and fight like maniacs for it. The mortality of the month's middle passage before the suppression of the slave-trade is reckoned to have been nine per cent.; subsequently this increased to twenty-five per cent., and the cargo of this dreadful vessel was almost wholly consumed by dysentery and plague. On one occasion, too, a slaver having in her haste neglected to change the salt water in the casks (carried as ballast) for fresh, every slave on board perished, and the tortures of that floating Gehenna must have been something that beggars the imagination to contemplate even for a moment.

Let us finally glance at the enormous sacrifice England has made, and, as it would seem, almost fruitlessly, for the suppression of the slave-trade.

By way of confirming her sympathies with the wrongs and sufferings of the African, she paid "down on the nail," as it were, the sum of twenty millions sterling for his emancipation in the British colonies, which became in August 1834 a law of the land. Did this inhibit or suppress slavery? In spite of her armaments and efforts, the average export from Africa for the five years ending 1845 was 43,500, while for the succeeding five years ending 1850 this amounted to no less than an annual average of 68,000! and while the West-India planters are wailing over depopulation, and tremendous and even irreparable injury done to their commerce, while Quashee, free and independent, is sunk in rum, pumpkin, and indolence, it is asserted that a frightful aggravation of slavery and the slave-trade (of course in other possessions) has been the only result. The traffic has only been removed, not restrained, and we have suffered fearfully in consequence of our generosity. Miserable to think that in that unbearable climate, amidst the putrescence and miasma of reeking rivers, where the heat of the tropic sun

alternates with the venomous dews of night, our cruisers have been little better than hospitals, our stations on shore converted into lazarhouses or cemeteries, and our best and boldest suffered decimation, in the pursuance of a duty to which they brought every energetic and manly quality to bear, and all uselessly. The cost of these ships, these crews, these stations, must be something startling,-£100,000 a-year being the estimated expense of the blockade; while, on the other hand, the competition between free and slave-grown produce brought the planters in the British possessions to the verge of ruin and beggary, and, while forcing the traffic, increased the mortality of the "middle passage" by nearly twenty per cent.!

The expedition of the Niger and the Tchaddah conducted by Macgregor Laird terminated in a commercial failure that makes men shrink to this day, besides the deaths of forty men out of eight and forty. Of a second expedition, out of 145 picked Europeans who went up the Niger, forty lie buried on its swampy and pestilential banksall for the amelioration of the African and the suppression of the slave-trade! Have we not by this time learned by very costly and bitter experience that it is best, if not to "leave well alone," to make the bad no worse? If nations professing Christianity do not see the necessity of combining to discountenance, discourage, and destroy slavery, one and all acting in unity together, our efforts have been in vain, and our liberal expenditure a lavish waste. We are not dealing with the ethics of slavery, nor the ethnology and palpable uses of the negro in the moral scale of the creation; but as the question has been one that has come very much home to us, as for instance the waste of English lives, wealth, energies, sympathies, and the rest of it, this résumé, which with us so far closes the subject, will not be without its uses in suggesting that there are far better fields of operation probably to be found than in blockading half a continent, while the prospects of an advantageous return are also far more likely to be satisfactory to all concerned, in the new Argonaut" to be propounded.

66

PACIFIC PROSPECTS IN RUSSIA.

Ir is with views and feelings quite opposed to those of a few weeks ago that we now look at the map of Russia. Then, a chain of mountains was considered solely with regard to military strategy; a river or creek was an inlet for a disembarking force; and a plain was studied for its likelihood to furnish water for cavalry or wood for camp purposes. Now, a Black Sea port is an entrepôt; the prospective terminus of a railway connecting the vast resources of the interior with the merchant navies of Europe, giving no doubt facilities for concentrations of troops such as Russia has not hitherto possessed, but, as has been lately repeatedly remarked, creating germs of power, opulence, and splendour, likely to divert her from those schemes of military conquest for which she has paid so severe a penalty in latter times.

Whatever obstacles Russia may place in the way of discussions