summons portended.  With blows and curses the sailors ranged them along the rail and bound them to the chain cable.  The anchor was cut loose, plunging into the sea it carried the cable and the shackled slaves with it to the bottom.  The men on the approaching man-of-war’s boats, heard a great wail of many voices, a rumble, a splash, then silence, and when they reached the ship its captain politely showed them that there were no slaves aboard, and laughed at their comments on the obvious signs of the recent presence of the blacks.

[Illustration:  “BOUND THEM TO THE CHAIN CABLE”]

A favorite trick of the slaver, fleeing from a man-of-war, was to throw over slaves a few at a time in the hope that the humanity of the pursuers would impel them to stop and rescue the struggling negroes, thus giving the slave-ship a better chance of escape.  Sometimes these hapless blacks thus thrown out, as legend has it Siberian peasants sometimes throw out their children as ransom to pursuing wolves, were furnished with spars or barrels to keep them afloat until the pursuer should come up; and occasionally they were even set adrift by boat-loads.  It was hard on the men of the navy to steel their hearts to the cries of these castaways as the ship sped by them; but if the great evil was to be broken up it could not be by rescuing here and there a slave, but by capturing and punishing the traders.  Many officers of our navy have left on record their abhorrence of the service they were thus engaged in, but at the same time expressed their conviction that it was doing the work of humanity.  They were obliged to witness such human suffering as might well move the stoutest human heart.  At times they were even forced to seem as merciless to the blacks as the slave-traders themselves; but in the end their work, like the merciful cruelty of the surgeon, made for good.

When a slaver was overhauled after so swift a chase that her master had no opportunity to get rid of his damning cargo, the boarding officers saw sights that scarce Inferno itself could equal.  To look into her hold, filled with naked, writhing, screaming, struggling negroes was a sight that one could see once and never forget.  The effluvium that arose polluted even the fresh air of the ocean, and burdened the breeze for miles to windward.  The first duty of the boarding officer was to secure the officers of the craft with their papers.  Not infrequently such vessels would be provided with two captains and two sets of papers, to be used according to the nationality of the warship that might make the capture; but the men of all navies cruising on the slave coast came in time to be expert in detecting such impostures.  The crew once under guard, the first task was to alleviate in some degree the sufferings of the slaves.  But this was no easy task, for the overcrowded vessel could not be enlarged, and its burden could in no way be decreased in mid-ocean.  Even if near the coast