part of the coast, where they did not mean to
continue or to go again. Hence it was (as several captains of the navy and
others had declared on their examination) that the natives, when at sea in
their canoes, would never come near the men of war, till they knew them to
be such. But finding this, and that they were not slave-vessels, they laid
aside their fears, and came and continued on board with unsuspecting
cheerfulness.

With respect to the miseries of the Middle Passage, he had said so much on
a former occasion, that he would spare the feelings of the committee as
much as he could. He would therefore simply state that the evidence, which
was before them, confirmed all those scenes of wretchedness, which he had
then described; the same suffering from a state of suffocation by being
crowded together; the same dancing in fetters; the same melancholy singing;
the same eating by compulsion; the same despair; the same insanity; and all
the other abominations which characterized the trade. New instances however
had occurred, where these wretched men had resolved on death to terminate
their woes. Some had destroyed themselves by refusing sustenance, in spite
of threats and punishments. Others had thrown themselves into the sea; and
more than one, when in the act of drowning, were seen to wave their hands
in triumph, "exulting" (to use the words of an eye-witness) "that they had
escaped." Yet these and similar things, when viewed through the African
medium he had mentioned, took a different shape and colour. Captain Knox,
an adverse witness, had maintained, that slaves lay during the night in
tolerable comfort. And yet he confessed, that in a vessel of one hundred
and twenty tons, in which he had carried two hundred and ninety slaves, the
latter had not all of them room to lie on their backs. How comfortably then
must they have lain in his subsequent voyages! for he carried afterwards in
a vessel of a hundred and eight tons four hundred and fifty and in a vessel
of one hundred and fifty tons, no less than six hundred slaves. Another
instance of African deception was to be found in the testimony of Captain
Frazer, one of the most humane captains in the trade. It had been said of
him, that he had held hot coals to the mouth of a slave, to compel him to
eat. He was questioned on this point; but not admitting, in the true spirit
of African logic, that he who makes another commit a crime, is guilty of it
himself, he denied the ch