Meantime, the captain had thrown overboard his writing-desk, but it failed to sink. It was picked up and papers were found in it showing the captain was an American citizen and that three-fifths of the ship belonged to an American merchant in Rio.
On seizing and searching her, the lieutenant found one hundred and seventy-six casks of water holding one hundred and fifty gallons each, and one hundred and fifty barrels of farina for food. A slave-deck was laid. There were big iron boilers for cooking the farina; there were irons for securing the slaves; there were wooden spoons for feeding them. The captain then admitted that he was after slaves, and said that but for the arrival of the Perry he would have got away that night with 1,800 of them. He was playing for a great stake. The Martha, with her crew in irons, was sent to New York and there condemned.
After this, Foote captured the American brigantine Chatsworth. There was sufficient evidence to convince Foote of her character but not enough for a court, and she was let go. Later she was again overhauled, and this time it appeared that she had two complete sets of papers to cover the assorted cargo of an honest trader, and she was sent home and condemned.
Foote, in writing about this capture to a friend, under date of September 25, 1850, said:
“Our orders are so stringent that no commander will capture a slaver unless he assume great responsibility. I took the Chatsworth in the face of a protest of $22,000 from her captain and supercargo; and still she and the Martha must be condemned.”
Under the law the officers, and even the crews, of condemned slavers were guilty of piracy. That they justly merited the penalty of death will not now be questioned. We are forgetting the tales of the horrors of the passage across the Atlantic—the tortures of those who were “kennelled in a picaroon,” the “slaves that men threw overboard;” but we remember enough to know that the slaver crews deserved the death the law prescribed. But how was a nation that coddled the slave-owner to hang a slave-dealer? It could not and it never did do so.
In short, the American naval officers cruised to and fro under the tropical sun until the pitch melted from the deck-seams. They occasionally met another cruiser, and, on the theory that misery loves company, they found some relief in exchanging visits. They saw some strange scenes on the African shore. They learned something of tornadoes and other freaks of the weather. They occasionally found a slaver with the slaves on board, and, in the face of protests, they took ships that posed as honest traders but were really slavers.
On some cruises they took the fever and died. On the Perry not a man was lost in two years. Foote was the original prohibitionist of the Navy. It was he who, as the sailors used to sing,
Raised our pay
Ten cents a day