“When our slaves are aboard,” he says again, “we shackle them two and two while we lie in port, and in sight of their own country, for 'tis then they attempt to make their escape or mutiny, to prevent which we always keep sentinels upon the hatchways, and have a chest of small arms ready loaden and trim'd, constantly lying at hand upon the quarterdeck together with some granada shells, and two of our quarterdeck guns pointing on the deck thence, and two more out of the steerage, the door of which is always kept shut and well barred. “They are fed twice a day, at 10 in the morning, and 4 in the evening, which is the time they are apt to mutiny, being all upon the deck; therefore, all that time what of our men who are not employed in distributing their victuals to them and settling them, stand to their arms with lighted matches at the great guns that yawn upon them, loaden with cartridge, till they have done and gone below to their kennels between decks.” What a picture of life aboard a slaver! “Great mortality among the slaves,” he writes wearily later on, “which together with their stink and nastiness”--and he goes on feelingly to tell of a Dutch skipper, Clause, who said if his owners would give him £100 per month to go and carry negroes again, he would not take it, but would sooner go elsewhere a common sailor, for 20 guilders a month. No wonder. Out of 700 taken on board the _Hannibal_ some died every day, and by the time they reached Barbadoes they had thrown overboard 320 of them, and all the comment her master makes is that it was a clear loss to the owners, the African Company, of £10 for every negro that so died. But there is another thing he notices with intense surprise. He was “forced to clap one Lord, the trumpeter, in irons, for his being the promoter of unseasonable carousing bouts,” we can understand it would never have done for the crew to indulge in such bouts with such a cargo, “and though he remained upon the poop day and night in irons for two months, without any other shelter than the canopy of heaven, he was never troubled with any sickness, but made good the proverb that 'Naught's never in danger.'” And while he goes on complaining of enduring so “much misery and stench among a parcel of creatures nastier than swine,” it never occurs to him, or to anybody else for that matter, for many a long day, that he had provided his recreant trumpeter with at least one safeguard in plenty of air.