raising their arms high above their heads, and in one case two who
died together clung to each other so that neither could swim. Every
imaginable way in which death could be sought was employed by these
hopeless blacks, though, indeed, the hardships of the voyage were such as
to bring it often enough unsought.

When the ship's hold was full the voyage was begun, while from the
suffering blacks below, unused to seafaring under any circumstances, and
desperately sick in their stifling quarters, there arose cries and moans
as if the cover were taken off of purgatory. The imagination recoils from
the thought of so much human wretchedness.

The publications of some of the early anti-slavery associations tell of
the inhuman conditions of the trade. In an unusually commodious ship
carrying over six hundred slaves, we are told that "platforms, or wide
shelves, were erected between the decks, extending so far from the side
toward the middle of the vessel as to be capable of containing four
additional rows of slaves, by which means the perpendicular height between
each tier was, after allowing for the beams and platforms, reduced to
three feet, six inches, so that they could not even sit in an erect
posture, besides which in the men's apartment, instead of four rows, five
were stowed by putting the head of one between the thighs of another." In
another ship, "In the men's apartment the space allowed to each is six
feet length by sixteen inches in breadth, the boys are each allowed five
feet by fourteen inches, the women five feet, ten by sixteen inches, and
the girls four feet by one foot each."

"A man in his coffin has more room than one of these blacks," is the terse
way in which witness after witness before the British House of Commons
described the miserable condition of the slaves on shipboard.

An amazing feature of this detestable traffic is the smallness and often
the unseaworthiness of the vessels in which it was carried on. Few such
picayune craft now venture outside the landlocked waters of Long Island
Sound, or beyond the capes of the Delaware and Chesapeake. In the early
days of the eighteenth century hardy mariners put out in little craft, the
size of a Hudson River brick-sloop or a harbor lighter, and made the long
voyage to the Canaries and the African West Coast, withstood the perils of
a prolonged anchorage on a dangerous shore, went thence heavy laden with
slaves to the West Indies, and so home. To cross th