The slaves are so crouded below, that it is impossible to walk among them without treading upon them. Dr. Trotter has seen the slaves drawing their breath with all those laborious and anxious efforts for life, which are observed in expiring animals, subjected by experiment to foul air, or in the exhausted receiver of an air pump: they cry out--‘we are dying,’ and many are irrecoverably lost by suffocation, having had no previous signs of indisposition. They are closely wedged together, and have not so much room as a man in his coffin, either in length or breadth. They sometimes go down well at night, and are found dead in the morning. Alexander Falconbridge was never among them for ten minutes together below, but his shirt was as wet as if dipped in water. Sometimes the dead and living are found shackled together. They lie on the bare blanks, and the prominent parts of their bones, about the shoulder-blade and knees, have frequently been seen bare. No situation can be conceived so dreadful and disgusting as that of slaves when ill of the flux. In the Alexander (A. Falconbridge says) the deck was covered with blood and mucus, and resembled a slaughter-house; the stench and foul air were intolerable. The slaves, shackled together, frequently quarrel, and make a great disturbance. Some refuse food and medicine, and declare they want to die. In such cases compulsion is used. The ships are so fitted up as to prevent, by net-work, the slaves jumping overboard; notwithstanding which they often attempt it, and sometimes succeed, shewing signs of exultation in the very jaws of death. Some employ other means to destroy themselves, and others go mad: Some resolve to starve, and means are ineffectually used to wrench open their teeth: they persist in their resolution, and effect their purpose, in spite of the utmost pains to prevent it. When severely chastised for not taking their food they have looked up with a smile and said, “presently we shall be no more.” The thumbscrew is an instrument of torture, the application of it sometimes occasions mortifications, of which the negroes die. An instance occurs of the cruelty of a captain to an infant only nine months old, which one would suppose too shocking to be true, were it not corroborated by other specimens of as great cruelty in various parts of the evidence. After a series of tortures the infant expired, and its savage murderer, not yet satiated, would suffer none of the people on deck to throw the body overboard, but called the Mother, the wretched Mother, to perform this last sad office to her murdered child. Unwilling as it might naturally be supposed she was, to comply, “he beat her,” regardless of the indignant murmurs of her fettered countrymen, whom in the barbarous plenitude of secure tyranny, he permitted to be spectators of this horrible scene--“he beat her, until he made her take up the child and carry it to the side of the vessel, and then she dropped it