But if
they went a second and a third time, their disposition became gradually
changed. It was impossible for them to be accustomed to carry away men and
women by force, to keep them in chains, to see their tears, to hear their
mournful lamentations, to behold the dead and the dying, to be obliged to
keep up a system of severity amidst all this affliction,--in short, it was
impossible for them to be witnesses, and this for successive voyages, to
the complicated mass of misery passing in a slave-ship, without losing
their finer feelings, or without contracting those habits of moroseness and
cruelty, which would brutalize their nature. Now, if we consider that
persons could not easily become captains (and to these the barbarities were
generally chargeable by actual perpetration, or by consent) till they had
been two or three voyages in this employ, we shall see the reason why it
would be almost a miracle, if they, who were thus employed in it, were not
rather to become monsters, than to continue to be men.
While I was at Bristol, I heard from an officer of the Alfred, who gave me
the intelligence privately, that the steward of a Liverpool ship, whose
name was Green, had been murdered in that ship.
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