Then Ruiz the captain, I'm glad he wasn't an Englishman, bought 400 negroes on the Dahomean Coast and “hauled our course for the Atlantic voyage. But this was to be my last trip in the blood-stained Gloria. Hardly were we out a fortnight before it was discovered that our roystering crew had neglected to change the sea water, which had served as our ballast in the lower casks, and which ought to have been replaced with fresh water in Africa. We were drawing from the last casks before this discovery was made, and the horror of our situation sobered Captain Ruiz. He gave orders to hoist the precious remnant abaft the main grating, and made me calculate how long it would sustain the crew and cargo. I found that half a gill a day would hold out to the Spanish main; and it was decided that, in order to save our cargo, we should allow the slaves a half gill and the crew a gill each a day. Then began a torture worse than death to the blacks. Pent in their close dungeons, to the number of nearly five hundred, they suffered continual torment. Our crew and drivers were unwilling to allow even the half gill per diem, and quarrelled fiercely over their own stinted rations. Our cargo had been stowed on the platforms closer than I ever saw slaves stowed before or since. Instead of lowering buckets of water to them, as was customary, it became necessary to pour the water into half-pint measures. These farthest from the gratings never got a drop.... In a short time at least a hundred men and women were shackled to dead partners.” It is a ghastly picture. Perhaps we could not expect any pity for the sufferings of the “cargo” from such a set of pirates. Everyone who was free on board drank hard “as well as myself,” said the frank narrator, and they did not trouble to throw the dead overboard, or presumably even to unshackle the living, for the captain finding his crew out of hand, ordered the hatches down, and “swore he would make the run on our regular water rations, and take the chances of his stock.” Three days those fiends continued their course, drinking in plenty, while “the negroes suffocated below.” And then came retribution swift and sure.