“They were ironed, or chained, two together, and when they were hung, a rope was put around their necks and they were drawn up to the yard-arm clear of the sail.  This did not kill them, but only choked or strangled them.  They were then shot in the breast and the bodies thrown overboard.  If only one of two that were ironed together was to be hung, the rope was put around his neck and he was drawn up clear of the deck, and his leg laid across the rail and chopped off to save the irons and release him from his companion, who at the same time lifted up his leg until the other was chopped off as aforesaid, and he released.  The bleeding negro was then drawn up, shot in the breast and thrown overboard.  The legs of about one dozen were chopped off this way.

“When the feet fell on the deck they were picked up by the crew and thrown overboard, and sometimes they shot at the body while it still hung, living, and all sorts of sport was made of the business.”

Forty-six men and one woman were thus done to death:  “When the woman was hung up and shot, the ball did not take effect, and she was thrown overboard living, and was seen to struggle some time in the water before she sunk;” and deponent further says, “that after this was over, they brought up and flogged about twenty men and six women.  The flesh of some of them where they were flogged putrified, and came off, in some cases, six or eight inches in diameter, and in places half an inch thick.”

This was in 1839, a time when Americans were very sure that for civilization, progress, humanity, and the Christian virtues, they were at least on as high a plane as the most exalted peoples of the earth.

Infectious disease was one of the grave perils with which the slavers had to reckon.  The overcrowding of the slaves, the lack of exercise and fresh air, the wretched and insufficient food, all combined to make grave, general sickness an incident of almost every voyage, and actual epidemics not infrequent.  This was a peril that moved even the callous captains and their crews, for scurvy or yellow-jack developing in the hold was apt to sweep the decks clear as well.  A most gruesome story appears in all the books on the slave trade, of the experience of the French slaver, “Rodeur.”  With a cargo of 165 slaves, she was on the way to Guadaloupe in 1819, when opthalmia—­a virulent disease of the eyes—­appeared among the blacks.  It spread rapidly, though the captain, in hopes of checking its ravages, threw thirty-six negroes into the sea alive.  Finally it attacked the crew, and in a short time all save one man became totally blind.  Groping in the dark, the helpless sailors made shift to handle the ropes, while the one man still having eyesight clung to the wheel.  For days, in this wretched state, they made their slow way along the deep, helpless and hopeless.  At last a sail was sighted.  The “Rodeur’s” prow is turned toward it, for there is hope, there rescue!  As the stranger draws nearer, the straining