The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) — John Shaqi
The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839)Clarkson, Thomas
History
The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839)
Clarkson, Thomas
Slave trade -- Africa
On this subject it must strike us, that the misery and the crimes
included in the evil, as it has been found in Africa, were not like
common maladies, which make a short or periodical visit and then are
gone, but that they were continued daily. Nor were they like diseases,
which from local causes attack a village or a town, and by the skill of
the physician, under the blessing of Providence, are removed; but they
affected a whole continent. The trade with all its horrors began at the
river Senegal, and continued, winding with the coast, through its
several geographical divisions to Cape Negro; a distance of more than
three thousand miles. In various lines or paths formed at right angles
from the shore, and passing into the heart of the country, slaves were
procured and brought down. The distance, which many of them travelled,
was immense. Those, who have been in Africa, have assured us, that they
came as far as from the sources of their largest rivers, which we know
to be many hundred miles inland, and the natives have told us, in their
way of computation, that they came a journey of many moons.
It must strike us again, that the misery and the crimes, included in the
evil, as it has been shown in the transportation, had no ordinary
bounds. They were not to be seen in the crossing of a river, but of an
ocean. They did not begin in the morning and end at night, but were
continued for many weeks, and sometimes by casualties for a quarter of
the year. They were not limited to the precincts of a solitary ship, but
were spread among many vessels; and these were so constantly passing,
that the ocean itself never ceased to be a witness of their existence.
And it must strike us, finally, that the misery and crimes, included in
the evil as it has been found in foreign lands, were not confined within
the shores of a little island. Most of the islands of a continent, and
many of these of considerable population and extent, were filled with
them. And the continent itself, to which these geographically belong,
was widely polluted by their domain. Hence, if we were to take the vast
extent of space occupied by these crimes and sufferings from the heart
of Africa to its shores, and that which they filled on the continent of
America and the islands adjacent, and were to join the crimes and
sufferings in one to those in the other, by the crimes and sufferings
which took place in the track of the vessels successively crossing the
Atlantic, we should behold a vast belt as it were of physical and moral
evil, reaching through land and ocean to the length of nearly half the
circle of the globe.
The next view which I shall take of this evil will be as it relates to
the difficulty of subduing it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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