not move and when the wind was strong. I looked upon the sky, it was always blue, there were no clouds from dawn-time to sun-setting: there was no rain to cool our lips; our tongues swelled and our throats were dry—as dry as the hole which the scorpion burrows in the hot sand. The people died one by one. When, they died they lay upon the deck where they fell; they rotted there amongst us, but we did not move to throw them to the sharks. At last there were ten men and women dead, to one man or woman living; then we spoke and we talked who would die next. One said he would, and another, that he would. When we die we fly back to Africa, and we said one to the other, “If you die first, you say we are coming: you say we are flying in the air behind you to Africa, to the dark woods and the dark river.” Then I sent messages to my father, who was killed in war, and to the king; I sent them by a young man who was very weak, and whose eyes were glazed. He lay close by me. I watched him well. His breath came longer and longer—then it ceased, as a branch you move ceases gradually to swing—and the jaw dropped down. I said, “Ha! my messenger has departed; I am glad.” That night there were but five left. I was the strongest of the five, but I could not rise from my seat amid the corpses. The breeze came fresh in the night; clouds came with it, and out of the clouds rain fell. We held up our mouths and we were refreshed. So, by means of the sweet rain, four out of the five lived until the grey light came out and showed fogs hanging on the water. The wind was small, and the sea smooth; and as the sun climbed out of the ocean, the fogs rose up and melted away, and we all gave a faint shout together, for not half an hour from us, a great ship, with many sails, glided like a bird upon the sea. As we looked, a canoe, with white men, came from the great ship, paddling fast towards us, and soon the white men leaped up among the corpses on the deck. They gave a great cry of horror when they saw all the planks covered with bodies, some sitting, some lying, some piled up upon each other in heaps—where fathers and sons, and brothers and sisters, and husbands and wives, had died together—and they were about to go back hastily into their canoe, but we all cried as with one voice for water. Then they turned and beheld us, and after some talking, they lifted us up and put us into the canoe, and rowed us to their ship. So was it that we became slaves again. Then they spread forth all sail, and our old ship, with its cargo of corpses, was left drifting about on the sea.