But we must recollect that these figures represent only living negroes.  A yearly percentage of dead must be added, to complete the number taken from the coast of Africa.  The estimate was five per cent, to cover the unavoidable losses incurred in a rapid and healthy passage; but such passages were a small proportion of the whole number annually made, and the mortality was irregular.  It was sometimes frightful; a long calm was one long agony:  asphyxia, bloody flux, delirium and suicide, and epidemics swept between the narrow decks, as fatally, but more mercifully than the kidnappers who tore these people from their native fields.  The shark was their sexton, and the gleam of his white belly piloted the slaver in his regular track across the Atlantic.  What need to revive the accounts of the horrors of the middle passage?  We know from John Newton and other Englishmen what a current of misery swept in the Liverpool slavers into the western seas.  The story of French slave-trading is the same.  I can find but one difference in favor of the French slaver, that he took the shackles from his cargo after it had been a day or two at sea.  The lust for procuring the maximum of victims, who must be delivered in a minimum of time and at the least expense, could not dally with schemes to temper their suffering, or to make avarice obedient to common sense.  It was a transaction incapable of being tempered.  One might as well expect to ameliorate the act of murder.  Nay, swift murder would have been affectionate, compared with this robbery of life.

Nor is the consumption of negroes by the sea-voyage the only item suggested by the annual number actually landed.  We should have to include all the people maimed and killed in the predatory excursions of native chiefs or Christian kidnappers to procure their cargoes.  A village was not always surprised without resistance.  The most barbarous tribes would defend their liberty.  We can never know the numbers slain in wars which were deliberately undertaken to stock the holds of slavers.

Nor shall we ever know how many victims dropped out of the ruthless caravan, exhausted by thirst and forced marches, on the routes sometimes of three hundred leagues from the interior to the sea.  They were usually divided into files containing each thirty or forty slaves, who were fastened together by poles of heavy wood, nine feet long, which terminated in a padlocked fork around the neck.  When the caravan made a halt, one end of the pole was unfastened and dropped upon the ground.  When it dropped, the slave was anchored; and at night his arm was tied to the end of the pole which he carried, so that a whole file was hobbled during sleep.  If any one became too enfeebled to preserve his place, the brutal keepers transferred him to the swifter voracity of the hyena, who scented the wake of the caravan across the waste to the sea’s margin, where the shark took up the trail.