Note 1 — LETTER III. MAIN PRINCIPLE OF ACTION.

And in ‘Laird’s Expedition to Africa, &c.’ a work recently published in England, this assertion of the slave trader is fully sustained. Laird relates that ‘there is proof of the horrid fact, that several of the wretches engaged in this traffic, when hotly pursued, consigned whole cargoes to the deep.’ He then goes on to state several such instances, from which I select the following: ‘In 1833, the Black Joke and Fair Rosamond fell in with the Hercule and Regule, two slave vessels off the Bonny River. On perceiving the cruisers, they attempted to regain the port, and pitched overboard upwards of 500 human beings, chained together, before they were captured; from the abundance of sharks in the river, their track was literally a blood-stained one. The slaver not only does this, but glories in it: the first words uttered by the captain of the Maria Isabelle, seized by captain Rose, were, ‘that if he had seen the man of war in chase an hour sooner, he would have thrown every slave in his vessel overboard, as he was fully insured.’