But we hasten to the close of this scene of death.
“As soon as the Progresso anchored, we were visited by the health officer, who immediately admitted us to pratique. My friend Mr. Shea, then superintendent of the naval hospital, also paid us a visit, and I descended with him, for the last time, to the slave hold. Long accustomed as he has been to scenes of suffering, he was unable to endure a sight surpassing, he said, ‘all he could have conceived of human misery,’ and made a hasty retreat. One little girl, crying bitterly, was entangled between the planks, wanting strength to extricate her wasted limbs, till assistance was given her.”
In a voyage of fifty days, there occurred one hundred and sixty-three deaths! Can slavery be worse than this? if this melancholy tale teaches anything, it is evidently the uselessness of armed suppression.
And yet this wretched, this utterly inefficient system, is to be continued and extended. A new remedy has been proposed by the Honourable Captain Denman, which it appears Sir Robert Peel is about to sanction. Colonel Nicolls says, it will put the slave trade down in ten or twelve months,—this we more than doubt. A blockade which, to be effectual, must extend over six thousand miles of coast, is not so easy a thing as it may seem on paper. With Lord John Russell we believe, “that to suppress the slave trade by a marine guard is impossible, were the whole British navy employed in the attempt.” A British force may burn the baracoons, but as long as the demand exists, a supply from some quarter or other will be procured. To show that the Colonel’s logic is not absolutely perfect, we quote the following fact. It was thought the destruction of the baracoons at Gallinas, in 1840, would have prevented their re-formation, but this does not appear to have been the case. The commissioners observe, “We have received information that, during the last rains, no less than three slave factories were settled in the Gallinas, whither the factors and goods had been conveyed by an American vessel.”—(Slave Trade Papers, 1843.) Destroy the nests, and the birds will not breed, says Colonel Nicolls. The gallant colonel forgets that the demand for slaves, and not the existence of baracoons, creates the slave trade; to borrow an illustration from Adam Smith, a man is not rich because he keeps a coach and four horses; but he keeps a coach and four horses because he is rich. Men make but an indifferent hand at reasoning when they are unable to tell which is the cause, and which the effect.