In the Ninth Chapter we find that the seamen employed in the slave trade are in general barbarously used. They are worse fed both in quantity and quality of food than the seamen in other trades. They have little or no shelter night or day from the inclemency of the weather during the whole of the middle passage. They are inhumanly treated when ill, and subjected to the fury of the impassioned officers for very trifles. A boy, to avoid the cruel treatment of his officer, jump’d overboard, and was drowned. A man was killed with a hand spike for being very ill and unable to work. Six men were chained together by their necks, legs, and hands, for making their escape from the vessel; they were allowed only a plantain a day; they all died in their chains; one of them (Thomas Jones a very good seaman) raving mad! The evidence proves that instances of wanton cruelty, and inhuman treatment in general, are numerous, various and frequent. One man, with both his legs in irons and his neck in an iron collar, was chained to the boat for three months, and very often most inhumanly beaten for complaining of his situation, both by the captain and other officers. His allowance of provisions was so small that (after his release from the boat, on account of extreme weakness) he begged something to eat, saying that if it were not given him he should die:--the captain reproached him, beat him, and bid him die and be damned. The man died in the night. This was in the Ship Sally, on board of which ill-treatment was common. Another man was deliberately, by a series of shocking barbarities, murdered. Sir Geo. Young remarks that a ship of the line might be presently manned by the sailors who wish to escape from the miseries of African ships. One poor young man, when dying in consequence of the ill treatment he had received from the captain, said (which were the last words A. Falconbridge heard him speak) “I cannot punish him (meaning the captain) but God will.” The sailors when sick are beaten for being lazy, till they die under the blows! “If this be the real situation of things, how happens it (the reader may perhaps ask) that the objects of such tyranny and oppression should not obtain redress, and that our courts of law should not have to decide upon more cases of this kind, than they have at present?” It is answered, “these objects are generally without friends and money, without which the injured will seek for justice but in vain; and because the peculiarity of their situation is an impediment to their endeavours for redress.” Whoever wishes for a more particular answer to this question, may meet with it in “Clarkson’s Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave-Trade,” (page 52) from which the question and the above general reply are quoted.