“The master having a large cargo of these human beings _chained together_, with more humanity than his fellows, permitted some of them to come on deck, _but still chained together_, for the benefit of the air, when they immediately commenced jumping overboard, hand in hand, and drowning in couples; and (continued the person relating the circumstance) without any cause whatever. Now these people were just brought from a situation between decks, and to which they knew they must return, where the scalding perspiration was running from one to the other.... And men dying by their side, with full in their view, living and dead bodies chained together; and the living, in addition to all their other torments, laboring under the most famishing thirst (being in very few instances allowed more than a pint of water a day); and let it not be forgotten that these unfortunate people had just been torn from their country, their families, their all! Men dragged from their wives, women from their husbands and children, girls from their mothers, and boys from their fathers; and yet in this man’s eye (for heart and soul he could have none), there was no cause whatever for jumping overboard and drowning. This, in truth, is a rough picture, but it is not highly colored. The _men are chained in pairs_, and as a proof they are intended so to remain to the end of the voyage, _their fetters are not locked, but riveted by the blacksmith_; and as deaths are frequently occurring, _living men are often for a length of time confined to dead bodies_: the living man cannot be released till the blacksmith has performed the operation of cutting the clinch of the rivet with his chisel; and I have now an officer on board the Dryad, who, on examining one of these slave-vessels, found _not only living men chained to dead bodies, but the latter in a putrid state_.”[4] In the notorious Spanish slaver, the _Veloz Passageira_, captured with five hundred and fifty-six slaves, after a severe action, the captain made the slaves assist to work the guns against their own deliverers. Five were killed and one desperately wounded.