of one were placed over the hatchway
where the male portion of the slaves were confined. This precaution was
taken, because it was now deemed possible that the negroes might make
their way upon deck; and, should they succeed in doing so in their
infuriated state, woe to the white men who had hitherto ruled them!

Both sticks and bayonets were used freely upon the frantic creatures,
until the carpenter with ready tools had strengthened the grating and
battened it down, beyond the possibility of its being raised up, or
broken by those who were striving underneath.

What added to the sufferings of the slaves, as also to the apprehension
of the _Pandora's_ crew, was that the wind had suddenly ceased, and it
had fallen to a dead calm.

The heat of the sun, no longer fanned by the slightest breeze, had grown
intolerable. The pitch melted upon the ropes and in the seams of the
deck; and every article, whether of hemp, wood, or iron, was as hot as
if taken out of a fire. We had arrived in that part of the Atlantic
Ocean, known among Spanish seamen as the "horse latitudes," because that
there, during the early days of Spanish adventure, vessels often got
becalmed, and their cargoes of horses, dying of the heat, were thrown
overboard wholesale. This is one of the explanations given for the
singular appellation--though others have been assigned.

Into the "horse latitudes," then, had the _Pandora_ found her way; and
the complete calm into which the atmosphere had all at once fallen was
not only a source of suffering to all on board--but to the sailors an
object of new apprehension.

On first discovering the shortness of the supply of water, a calm sea
was the very thing they had most dreaded. A storm they feared not to
encounter. Through that--even though the wind were dead ahead--they
could still make way; but in a calm they could do nothing but lie quiet
upon the hot bosom of the sleeping ocean, wasting their days and hours--
wasting what was now more precious than all--their scanty supply of
water.

One and all were terrified at the prospect. They were all men who had
made many a trip across the line, and had run the torrid zone both
eastward and westward. They could read well the indications of the sky;
and from its present appearance most of them foresaw, and were not slow
to foretell, a long-continued calm. It might last a week, perhaps twice
or three times as long. Sometimes there is a month of such windles