iness."

Forty-six men and one woman were thus done to death: "When the woman was
hung up and shot, the ball did not take effect, and she was thrown
overboard living, and was seen to struggle some time in the water before
she sunk;" and deponent further says, "that after this was over, they
brought up and flogged about twenty men and six women. The flesh of some
of them where they were flogged putrified, and came off, in some cases,
six or eight inches in diameter, and in places half an inch thick."

This was in 1839, a time when Americans were very sure that for
civilization, progress, humanity, and the Christian virtues, they were at
least on as high a plane as the most exalted peoples of the earth.

Infectious disease was one of the grave perils with which the slavers had
to reckon. The overcrowding of the slaves, the lack of exercise and fresh
air, the wretched and insufficient food, all combined to make grave,
general sickness an incident of almost every voyage, and actual epidemics
not infrequent. This was a peril that moved even the callous captains and
their crews, for scurvy or yellow-jack developing in the hold was apt to
sweep the decks clear as well. A most gruesome story appears in all the
books on the slave trade, of the experience of the French slaver,
"Rodeur." With a cargo of 165 slaves, she was on the way to Guadaloupe in
1819, when opthalmia--a virulent disease of the eyes--appeared among the
blacks. It spread rapidly, though the captain, in hopes of checking its
ravages, threw thirty-six negroes into the sea alive. Finally it attacked
the crew, and in a short time all save one man became totally blind.
Groping in the dark, the helpless sailors made shift to handle the ropes,
while the one man still having eyesight clung to the wheel. For days, in
this wretched state, they made their slow way along the deep, helpless and
hopeless. At last a sail was sighted. The "Rodeur's" prow is turned toward
it, for there is hope, there rescue! As the stranger draws nearer, the
straining eyes of the French helmsman discerns something strange and
terrifying about her appearance. Her rigging is loose and slovenly, her
course erratic, she seems to be idly drifting, and there is no one at the
wheel. A derelict, abandoned at sea, she mocks their hopes of rescue. But
she is not entirely deserted, for a faint shout comes across the narrowing
strip of sea and is answered from the "Rodeur." The two vessels draw near.
There