Increasing still the sorrows of those storms,
  His jaws horrific arm’d with three-fold fate,
  Here dwells the direful shark.  Lured by the scent
  Of steaming crowds, of rank disease, and death;
  Behold! he rushing cuts the briny flood,
  Swift as the gale can bear the ship along,
  And from the partners of that cruel trade;
  Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons,
  Demands his share of prey, demands themselves. 
  The stormy fates descend:  one death involves
  Tyrants and slaves; when straight their mangled limbs
  Crashing at once, he dyes the purple seas
  With gore, and riots in the vengeful meal.

Neither was Richard Savage forgetful in his poems of the Injured Africans:  he warns their oppressors of a day of retribution for their barbarous conduct.  Having personified Public Spirit, he makes her speak on the subject in the following manner:—­

  Let by my specious name no tyrants rise,
  And cry, while they enslave, they civilize! 
  Know, Liberty and I are still the same
  Congenial—­ever mingling flame with flame! 
  Why must I Afric’s sable children see
  Vended for slaves, though born by nature free,
  The nameless tortures cruel minds invent
  Those to subject whom Nature equal meant? 
  If these you dare (although unjust success
  Empowers you now unpunished, to oppress),
  Revolving empire you and yours may doom—­
  (Rome all subdu’d—­yet Vandals vanquish’d Rome)
  Yes—­Empire may revolt—­give them the day,
  And yoke may yoke, and blood may blood repay.

Wallis, in his System of the Laws of Scotland, maintains, that “neither men nor governments have a right to sell those of their own species.  Men and their liberty are neither purchaseable nor saleable.”  And, after arguing the case, he says, “This is the law of nature, which is obligatory on all men, at all times, and in all places.—­Would not any of us, who should be snatched by pirates from his native land, think himself cruelly abused, and at all times entitled to be free?  Have not these unfortunate Africans, who meet with the same cruel fate, the same right?  Are they not men as well as we?  And have they not the same sensibility?  Let us not, therefore, defend or support an usage, which is contrary to all the laws of humanity.”

In the year 1750, the reverend Griffith Hughes, rector of St. Lucy, in Barbados, published his Natural History of that island.  He took an opportunity, in the course of it, of laying open to the world the miserable situation of the poor Africans, and the waste of them by hard labour and other cruel means, and he had the generosity to vindicate their capacities from the charge, which they who held them in bondage brought against them, as a justification of their own wickedness in continuing to deprive them of the rights of men.