eastward, it is probable that Mombas would have still been retained under our dominion; for such a possession would have enabled us to exercise an effectual control in that quarter:  as it is, it gives additional reason to regret that the place was ever abandoned.  The horrors of the passage—­horrors which no imagination can heighten, no pen adequately portray—­are by this alteration in the chief seat of the accursed trade most fearfully augmented.  The poor victims of cruelty and fraud and avarice, in their most repulsive forms, are packed away between decks scarcely three feet high, in small vessels of 30 or 40 tons, and thus situated have to encounter the cold and stormy passage round the Cape:  the average mortality is of course most frightful, but the smallness of the vessels employed decreases the risk of the speculators in human flesh, who consider themselves amply repaid, if they save one living cargo out of every five embarked!

Moral condition of the negroes.

In the meantime cargoes of slaves are almost weekly landed in the neighbourhood of Bahia:  the thousand evils of the vile system are each day increasing, and with a rapid but unregarded footstep the fearful hour steals on, when a terrible reckoning of unrestrained revenge will repay all the accumulated wrongs of the past, and write in characters of blood an awful warning for the future!

So far as we could learn, no attempts are made by the masters to introduce the blessings of Christianity among those whom they deprive of temporal freedom.  The slave is treated as a valuable animal and nothing more:  the claims of his kindred humanity so far forgotten as they relate to his first unalienable right of personal freedom, are not likely to be remembered in his favour, in what concerns his coheritage in the sublime sacrifice of atonement once freely offered for us all!  He toils through long and weary years, cheered by no other hope than the far distant and oft delusive expectation that a dearly purchased freedom—­if for freedom’s blessings any price can be too costly—­will enable him to look once more upon the land of his nativity; and then close his eyes, surrounded by the loved few whom the ties of kindred endear even to his rude nature.

It would swell this portion of the work to an unreasonable extent, to give any lengthened details of the working of a system, about which among my readers no two opinions can exist.  Let it suffice to say, that the Europeans are generally better and less exacting masters than the Brazilians.  Among the latter it is a common practice to send so many slaves each day to earn a certain fixed sum by carrying burdens, pulling in boats, or other laborious employment; and those who return at night without the sum thus arbitrarily assessed as the value of their day’s work, are severely flogged for their presumed idleness.

Middy’s grave.