e was engaged in
the unlawful trade. Her hold might reek with the odor of the imprisoned
blacks, her decks show unmistakable signs of their recent presence,
leg-irons and manacles might bear dumb testimony to the purpose of her
voyage, informers in the crew might even betray the captain's secret; but
if the boarders from the man-of-war found no negroes on the ship, she went
free. What was the natural result? When a slaver, chased by a cruiser,
found that capture was certain, her cargo of slaves was thrown overboard.
The cruiser in the distance might detect the frightful odor that told
unmistakably of a slave-ship. Her officers might hear the screams of the
unhappy blacks being flung into the sea. They might even see the bodies
floating in the slaver's wake; but if, on boarding the suspected craft,
they found her without a single captive, they could do nothing. This was
the law for many years, and because of it thousands of slaves met a cruel
death as the direct result of the effort to save them from slavery. Many
stories are told of these wholesale drownings. The captain of the British
cruiser "Black Joke" reports of a case in which he was pursuing two slave
ships:

"When chased by the tenders both put back, made all sail up the river, and
ran on shore. During the chase they were seen from our vessels to throw
the slaves overboard by twos, shackled together by the ankles, and left in
this manner to sink or swim as best they could. Men, women, and children
were seen in great numbers struggling in the water by everyone on board
the two tenders, and, dreadful to relate, upward of 150 of these wretched
creatures perished in this way."

In this case, the slavers did not escape conviction, though the only
penalty inflicted was the seizure of their vessels. The pursuers rescued
some of the drowning negroes, who were able to testify that they had been
on the suspected ship, and condemnation followed. The captain of the
slaver "Brillante" took no chance of such a disaster. Caught by four
cruisers in a dead calm, hidden from his enemy by the night, but with no
chance of escaping before dawn, this man-stealer set about planning murder
on a plan so large and with such system as perhaps has not been equaled
since Caligula. First he had his heaviest anchor so swung that cutting a
rope would drop it. Then the chain cable was stretched about the ship,
outside the rail, and held up by light bits of rope, that would give way
at any stou