e Atlantic was a matter
of eight or ten weeks; the whole voyage would commonly take five or six
months. Nor did the vessels always make up in stanchness for their
diminutive proportions. Almost any weather-beaten old hulk was thought
good enough for a slaver. Captain Linsday, of Newport, who wrote home from
Aumboe, said: "I should be glad I cood come rite home with my slaves, for
my vessel will not last to proceed far. We can see daylight all round her
bow under deck." But he was not in any unusual plight. And not only the
perils of the deep had to be encountered, but other perils, some bred of
man's savagery, then more freely exhibited than now, others necessary to
the execrable traffic in peaceful blacks. It as a time of constant wars
and the seas swarmed with French privateers alert for fat prizes. When a
slaver met a privateer the battle was sure to be a bloody one for on
either side fought desperate men--one party following as a trade legalized
piracy and violent theft of cargoes, the other employed in the violent
theft of men and women, and the incitement of murder and rapine that their
cargoes might be the fuller. There would have been but scant loss to
mankind in most of these conflicts had privateer and slaver both gone to
the bottom. Not infrequently the slavers themselves turned pirate or
privateer for the time--sometimes robbing a smaller craft of its load of
slaves, sometimes actually running up the black flag and turning to piracy
for a permanent calling.

In addition to the ordinary risks of shipwreck or capture the slavers
encountered perils peculiar to their calling. Once in a while the slaves
would mutiny, though such is the gentle and almost childlike nature of the
African negro that this seldom occurred. The fear of it, however, was ever
present to the captains engaged in the trade, and to guard against it the
slaves--always the men and sometimes the women as well--were shackled
together in pairs. Sometimes they were even fastened to the floor of the
dark and stifling hold in which they were immured for months at a time. If
heavy weather compelled the closing of the hatches, or if disease set in,
as it too often did, the morning would find the living shackled to the
dead. In brief, to guard against insurrection the captains made the
conditions of life so cruel that the slaves were fairly forced to revolt.
In 1759 a case of an uprising that was happily successful was recorded.
The slaver "Perfect," Cap