eyes of the French helmsman discerns something strange and terrifying about her appearance.  Her rigging is loose and slovenly, her course erratic, she seems to be idly drifting, and there is no one at the wheel.  A derelict, abandoned at sea, she mocks their hopes of rescue.  But she is not entirely deserted, for a faint shout comes across the narrowing strip of sea and is answered from the “Rodeur.”  The two vessels draw near.  There can be no launching of boats by blind men, but the story of the stranger is soon told.  She, too, is a slaver, a Spaniard, the “Leon,” and on her, too, every soul is blind from opthalmia originating among the slaves.  Not even a steersman has the “Leon.”  All light has gone out from her, and the “Rodeur” sheers away, leaving her to an unknown fate, for never again is she heard from.  How wonderful the fate—­or the Providence—­that directed that upon all the broad ocean teeming with ships, engaged in honest or in criminal trade, the two that should meet must be the two on which the hand of God was laid most heavily in retribution for the suffering and the woe which white men and professed Christians were bringing to the peaceful and innocent blacks of Africa.

It will be readily understood that the special and always menacing dangers attending the slave trade made marine insurance upon that sort of cargoes exceedingly high.  Twenty pounds in the hundred was the usual figure in the early days.  This heavy insurance led to a new form of wholesale murder committed by the captains.  The policies covered losses resulting from jettisoning, or throwing overboard the cargo; they did not insure against loss from disease.  Accordingly, when a slaver found his cargo infected, he would promptly throw into the sea all the ailing negroes, while still alive, in order to save the insurance.  Some of the South American states, where slaves were bought, levied an import duty upon blacks, and cases are on record of captains going over their cargo outside the harbor and throwing into the sea all who by disease or for other causes, were rendered unsalable—­thus saving both duty and insurance.

In the clearer light which illumines the subject to-day, the prolonged difficulty which attended the destruction of the slave trade seems incredible.  It appears that two such powerful maritime nations as Great Britain and the United States had only to decree the trade criminal and it would be abandoned.  But we must remember that slaves were universally regarded as property, and an attempt to interfere with the right of their owners to carry them where they would on the high seas was denounced as an interference with property rights.  We see that even to-day men are very tenacious of “property rights,” and the law describes them as sacred—­however immoral or repugnant to common sense and common humanity they may be.  So the effort to abolish the “right” of a slaver to starve, suffocate, mutilate, torture, or murder a black man in whom he had acquired a property right by the simple process of kidnapping required more than half a century to attain complete success.