“Why, you’d freeze to death.”
“O, no, Missis! I can bear cold. I want to go where I can belong to myself, and do as I want to.”
The following communication has been given to the writer by Captain Austin Bearse, ship-master in Boston. Mr. Bearse is a native of Barnstable, Cape Cod. He is well known to our Boston citizens and merchants.
I am a native of the State of Massachusetts. Between the years 1818 and 1830 I was, from time to time, mate on board of different vessels engaged in the coasting trade on the coast of South Carolina.
It is well known that many New England vessels are in the habit of spending their winters on the southern coast in pursuit of this business. Our vessels used to run up the rivers for the rough rice and cotton of the plantations, which we took to Charleston.
We often carried gangs of slaves to the plantations, as they had been ordered. These slaves were generally collected by slave-traders in the slave-pens in Charleston,—brought there by various causes, such as the death of owners and the division of estates, which threw them into the market. Some were sent as punishment for insubordination, or because the domestic establishment was too large, or because persons moving to the North or West preferred selling their slaves to the trouble of carrying them. We had on board our vessels, from time to time, numbers of these slaves,—sometimes two or three, and sometimes as high as seventy or eighty. They were separated from their families and connections with as little concern as calves and pigs are selected out of a lot of domestic animals.
Our vessels used to lie in a place called Poor Man’s Hole, not far from the city. We used to allow the relations and friends of the slaves to come on board and stay all night with their friends, before the vessel sailed.
In the morning it used to be my business to pull off the hatches and warn them that it was time to separate; and the shrieks and heart-rending cries at these times were enough to make anybody’s heart ache.
In the year 1828, while mate of the brig Milton, from Boston, bound to New Orleans, the following incident occurred, which I shall never forget:
The traders brought on board four quadroon men in handcuffs, to be stowed away for the New Orleans market. An old negro woman, more than eighty years of age, came screaming after them, “My son, O, my son, my son!” She seemed almost frantic, and when we had got more than a mile out in the harbor we heard her screaming yet.