might do with him what he pleased.  Seamen, also, were boarded in these houses, who, when the slave-ships were going out, but at no other time, were encouraged to spend more than they had money to pay for; and to these, when they had thus exceeded, but one alternative was given, namely, a slave-vessel or a gaol.  These distressing scenes I found myself obliged frequently to witness, for I was no less than nineteen times occupied in making these hateful rounds; and I can say from my own experience, and all the information I could collect from Thompson and others, that no such practices were in use to obtain seamen for other trades.

The treatment of the seamen employed in the Slave Trade had so deeply interested me, and now the manner of procuring them, that I was determined to make myself acquainted with their whole history; for I found by report that they were not only personally ill-treated, as I have already painfully described, but that they were robbed by artifice of those wages, which had been held up to them as so superior in this service.  All persons were obliged to sign articles that, in case they should die or be discharged during the voyage, the wages then due to them should be paid in the currency where the vessel carried her slaves, and that half of the wages due to them on their arrival there should be paid in the same manner, and that they were never permitted to read over the articles they had signed.  By means of this iniquitous practice the wages in the Slave Trade, though nominally higher in order to induce seamen to engage in it, were actually lower than in other trades.  All these usages I ascertained in such a manner, that no person could doubt the truth of them.  I actually obtained possession of articles of agreement belonging to these vessels, which had been signed and executed in former voyages.  I made the merchants themselves, by sending those seamen who had claims upon them to ask for their accounts current with their respective ships, furnish me with such documents as would have been evidence against them in any court of law.  On whatever branch of the system I turned my eyes, I found it equally barbarous.  The trade was, in short, one mass of iniquity from the beginning to the end.

I employed myself occasionally in the Merchant’s-hall, in making copies of the muster-rolls of ships sailing to different parts of the world, that I might make a comparative view of the loss of seamen in the Slave Trade, with that of those in the other trades from the same port.  The result of this employment showed me the importance of it:  for, when I considered how partial the inhabitants of this country were to their fellow-citizens, the seamen belonging to it, and in what estimation the members of the legislature held them, by enforcing the Navigation Act, which they considered to be the bulwark of the nation, and by giving bounties to certain trades, that these might become so many nurseries for the marine, I thought it of great importance, to be able to prove, as I was then capable of doing, that more persons would be found dead in three slave-vessels from Bristol, in a given time, than in all the other vessels put together, numerous as they were, belonging to the same port.