“And then came a canoe with the principal men from New Town to the _Duke of York_, demanding Amboe Robin John, the brother of the “grandee” of the rival town. And Amboe Robin John pleaded pitifully for his life. He put the palms of his hands together and beseeched and prayed his captor not so to violate the rights of hospitality. But he spoke to deaf ears. The captain of the _Duke of York_ only wanted a slave, and the men of New Town offered him one, named Econg, in exchange, and they forced their enemy into the canoe and struck off his head, and the slaver put in his place the man named Econg, who, like the thirty pieces of silver traded so long ago, was the price of blood.” Was ever there a more atrocious story of treachery? Nothing happened to those white men whereas when a slave struck for liberty in Jamaica--but I have told this story just because presently I shall have occasion to tell of slave risings in Jamaica, and if the slaves were fiendishly cruel--and they were--nothing can exceed the cruelty of the white men who first brought them hither. Clarkson says that the deputy town-clerk of Bristol, Mr Burges, said that he only knew of one captain from the port in the slave trade who did not deserve to be hanged. Perhaps the fate of those men of Old Calabar, whose dead bodies were washed up on the sands and caught in the mangrove swamps, was the most merciful, for those who were taken on board the ships truly had a terrible time. From the very beginning the last thing the slavers considered was the comfort of the slaves. No, “comfort” is the wrong word to use, such a word as comfort from the days of Queen Elizabeth to those of Victoria, was a word not in the language as far as the slaves were concerned. No one ever thought to see that these men and women, these living beings, to put them on the very lowest rung of the ladder, were likely to be free from discomfort, nay, free from actual pain. Spear tells how he read of “the new slaver built at Warren in the country of Bristole in the colony of Rhode Island, that was three feet ten inches between decks,” and Clarkson, who went up and down the country collecting information about the slavers and their doings, tells us of two little sloops which were fitting out for Africa, the one only of 25 tons which was said to be destined to carry seventy, and the other of only 11 tons which was to carry thirty slaves, and these were not to be used as tenders bringing small parties down the rivers to the bigger ships, but were to sail for the West Indies with the slaves themselves, and on their arrival, one if not both, were to be sold as pleasure boats. Then he gives the dimensions. In the larger one each slave “must sit down all the voyage, and contract his limbs within the narrow limits of 3 square feet, while in the smaller, each slave had 4 square feet to sit in, but since the height between decks was only 2 feet 8 inches, his head must touch the deck above. When the matter was investigated in