“Ruiz and four of the men were taken suddenly ill with a disease that baffled my medical knowledge. Their tongues swelled and grew black; their flesh turned yellow, and in six hours they were dead. The first mate went next, and then three others of the crew, and a black driver whose body became leprous with yellow spots. I began to notice a strange fetid smell pervading the vessel, and a low heavy fog on deck, almost like steam. Then the horrid truth became apparent. Our rotting negroes under hatches had generated the plague, and it was a malaria or death mist I saw rising. At this time all our men but three and myself had been attacked; and we abandoned the _Gloria_ in her long boat, taking the remnant of water, a sack of biscuit, and a rum beaker, with what gold dust and other valuables we could hastily gather up. We left nine of our late comrades dead and five dying on the _Gloria's_ deck.” I have only read the extract that Spear gives in his book, but if it is true--and it may well be--judging by what I have read elsewhere--this ship's surgeon appears to have been a pretty considerable villain himself. The “cargo,” I suppose, must have been dead. It was hardly likely one could have survived so long without water in the tropics, but what about the dying comrades he abandoned on the decks? As a matter of fact, the slavers themselves often did so suffer, for it is hardly possible to generate disease, live over it, and escape scot-free. One of the most ghastly cases is that of the French slaver _Rôdeur._ In the year in which Queen Victoria was born, she was on her way to the West Indies with 162 slaves, when ophthalmia appeared among them. Probably it was not treated properly, but in any case, crowded as they were between decks, it was bound to spread rapidly, and at last, the captain with a view to saving the majority repeated the horror of the _Zong_, and threw thirty-six of them, the ones of least value, I presume, alive to the sharks. But this living sacrifice did not stop the disease. As it was bound to, being a filth disease, it spread to the crew, and presently there was but one man among the crew who could see. And this one man steering, and with all the work of the ship upon his shoulders, saw with thankfulness a sail, and steered towards her. But there was something strange about that sail. As he approached the ship he saw she was drifting as if derelict, though men were wandering about her decks. And she, too, was a slaver. On the _Rôdeur_ they might have known that by the smell, if custom had not deadened in them that sense. In answer to a hail the crew of the stranger came crowding to the rail begging, praying for aid, and everyone on board that ship was blind. She was, they said, the Spanish slaver _Leon_, and among their slaves, too, ophthalmia had broken out, and had spread to the crew, and there they lay rolling on the Atlantic helpless.