“Our orders are so stringent that no commander will capture a slaver unless he assume great responsibility. I took the _Chatsworth_ in the face of a protest of $22,000 from her captain and supercargo; and still she and the _Martha_ must be condemned.” Under the law the officers, and even the crews, of condemned slavers were guilty of piracy. That they justly merited the penalty of death will not now be questioned. We are forgetting the tales of the horrors of the passage across the Atlantic--the tortures of those who were “kennelled in a picaroon,” the “slaves that men threw overboard;” but we remember enough to know that the slaver crews deserved the death the law prescribed. But how was a nation that coddled the slave-owner to hang a slave-dealer? It could not and it never did do so. In short, the American naval officers cruised to and fro under the tropical sun until the pitch melted from the deck-seams. They occasionally met another cruiser, and, on the theory that misery loves company, they found some relief in exchanging visits. They saw some strange scenes on the African shore. They learned something of tornadoes and other freaks of the weather. They occasionally found a slaver with the slaves on board, and, in the face of protests, they took ships that posed as honest traders but were really slavers. On some cruises they took the fever and died. On the _Perry_ not a man was lost in two years. Foote was the original prohibitionist of the Navy. It was he who, as the sailors used to sing, Raised our pay Ten cents a day And stopped our grog forever. By caring for the sanitary conditions of the ship he saved his crew, and it was to this rather than to the efficiency of his work against slavers, that he owed the favor with which his cruise was regarded by the officials of the Navy Department.