Parliament, it was stated that if the space between decks in a slaver reached 4 feet--it never seems to have exceeded 5 feet 8 inches--they invariably put up a shelf to the width of 5 feet, so that another layer of slaves might be placed on top of the first. The men were ironed together two and two by the ankles, and sometimes their wrists were handcuffed together, and a chain usually fastened the irons to ringbolts, either on the deck above or below. The women and children were left unironed, and the men were stowed forward and the women aft. If they could get a cargo--and they generally waited on that sweltering coast, rolling in the surf, until they did--the slaves covered the entire deck.” In Parliament, at the end of the eighteenth century, they took the dimensions of the slaver Brookes, picking her at haphazard from a long list of slavers given them. They found that if each man was allowed 6 feet by 1 foot 4 inches, every woman 5 feet by 1 foot 4 inches, every boy 5 feet by 1 foot 2 inches, and every girl 4 feet 6 inches by 1 foot, they could stow in her 432. There is a plan given in Clarkson's book with every slave in place, and you could not put a pin between them. Certainly it was utterly impossible for any one to move amongst them, at least I should have said so. And yet it was proved that on a previous voyage the _Brookes_ had carried no less than 609 slaves! And the slave ships were on the coast, the stifling Guinea Coast, from three to ten months, and from six to ten weeks crossing the Atlantic. It was quite possible for a slave to be on board in that ghastly stinking slave deck, stinking is a mild word to use for so foul a den, for over a year. In this place they must stay for at least sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, when the weather was bad, or even when it was wet, they were kept there for days together. Nothing that breathed, it seems to me, but must have died in such a place. It was stated in Parliament that “if the ship was full their situation was terribly distressing. They sometimes drew their breath with anxious and laborious efforts, and some died of suffocation.” “Thus crammed together like herrings in a barrel,” said Sir William Dolben, “they contracted putrid and fatal disorders, so that they who came to inspect them,” (how could they inspect them save by tramping over them), “in the morning had occasionally to pick dead slaves out of their rows, and to unchain their carcases from the bodies of their wretched fellow sufferers to whom they had been fastened.” We do well to remember too, that there were no sanitary arrangements upon a slave ship. All the calls of Nature had to be performed upon the spot to which the wretched beings were shackled. And when they were sea sick------ But no words of mine can convey the horror of it.