There lay in the River the ships _Indian Queen, Duke of York, Nancy_ and _Concord_ of Bristol, the _Edgar_ of Liverpool, and the _Canterbury_ of London, slavers all, and the slaves were not coming in in this year 1767. Therefore they planned among themselves as coolly as if the black men had been deer or elephants, or pheasants, how they might best fill their between decks. The Calabar River is hot and it is unhealthy, for the percentage of moisture in the air is so great that very gladly I have sat over a fire when the thermometer registered over 90° in the shade, so that it is hardly a pleasant place of residence for a white man. Also the old inhabitants were not very tender of each other, or very careful of human life, for as I sat there watching a most glorious sunset a woman, who had come there in the early days, and she was not then, I think, fifty, told me how she hated to walk along the shore--the Calabar River is really an arm of the sea--because of the living sacrifices, generally young girls offered to the envious gods and bound to stakes, waiting for the tide to come up and put an end to their misery. Still the blood-thirstiness of the natives does not excuse that of the slavers. I only mention it because I find that while the advocates for slavery painted the slave in the blackest colours, the opponents generally depicted the poor black man as a noble martyr. He wasn't. He was suffering humanity neither better nor worse than his station in life allowed, often rising to heights of heroism, but often out-heroding his tormentors in blackguardism.