Or, stretched at ease where broad palmettos shower
Delicious coolness in his shadowy bower,
He feasts on tales of witchcraft, that give birth
To breathless wonder or ecstatic mirth: 
Yet most delighted when, in rudest rhymes,
The minstrel wakes the song of elder times,
When men were heroes, slaves to Beauty’s charms,
And all the joys of life were love and arms. 
Is not the Negro blest?  His generous soil
With harvest plenty crowns his simple toil;
More than his wants his flocks and fields afford: 
He loves to greet a stranger at his board: 
“The winds were roaring and the White Man fled;
The rains of night descended on his head;
The poor White Man sat down beneath our tree: 
Weary and faint and far from home was he: 
For him no mother fills with milk the bowl,
No wife prepares the bread to cheer his soul. 
Pity the poor White Man, who sought our tree;
No wife, no mother, and no home has he.” 
Thus sung the Negro’s daughters;—­once again,
O that the poor White Man might hear that strain! 
Whether the victim of the treacherous Moor,
Or from the Negro’s hospitable door
Spurned as a spy from Europe’s hateful clime,
And left to perish for thy country’s crime,
Or destined still, when all thy wanderings cease,
On Albion’s lovely lap to rest in peace,
Pilgrim! in heaven or earth, where’er thou be,
Angels of mercy guide and comfort thee!

A note to the same poem gives the following record of facts, substantiated in a court of justice, in which there can be only one answer to the question, “Which were the savages?”

“In this year (1783) certain underwriters desired to be heard against Gregson and others of Liverpool, in the case of the ship Zong, Captain Collingwood, alleging that the captain and officers of the said vessel threw overboard one hundred and thirty-two slaves alive into the sea, in order to defraud them by claiming the value of the said slaves, as if they had been lost in a natural way.  In the course of the trial which afterwards came on, it appeared that the slaves on board the Zong were very sickly; that sixty of them had already died, and several were ill and likely to die, when the captain proposed to James Kelsal, the mate, and others to throw several of them overboard, stating that ’if they died a natural death, the loss would fall upon the owners of the ship, but that if they were thrown into the sea, it would fall upon the underwriters.’  He selected accordingly one hundred and thirty-two of the most sickly of the slaves.  Fifty-four of these were immediately thrown overboard, and forty-two were made to be partakers of their fate on the succeeding day.  In the course of three days afterwards the remaining twenty-six were brought upon deck to complete the number of victims.  The first sixteen submitted to be thrown into the sea, but the rest, with a noble resolution, would not suffer the offices to touch them, but leaped after their companions and shared their fate.