On arriving within a mile of the land she took in sail, until every inch of canvas was furled upon her yards. Then the sharp rattling of the chain, as it dragged through the iron ring of the hawse-hole, announced the dropping of an anchor.
In a few moments after the ship swung round; and, drifting till the chain cable became taut, lay motionless upon the water.
The object for which the slaver had thus anchored short of the harbour will be learnt by our going aboard of her—though this was a privilege not granted to the idle or curious. Only the initiated were permitted to witness the spectacle of which her decks now became the theatre: only those who had an interest in the disposal of her cargo.
Viewed from a distance, the slaver lay apparently inert; but for all that a scene of active life was passing upon her deck—a scene of rare and painful interest.
She carried a cargo of two hundred human beings—“bales,” according to the phraseology of the slave-trader. These bales were not exactly alike. It was, as her skipper jocularly styled it, an “assorted cargo”—that is, one shipped on different points of the African coast, and, consequently, embracing many distinct varieties of the Ethiopian race. There was the tawny, but intelligent Mandingo, and by his side the Jolof of ebon hue. There the fierce and warlike Coromantee, alongside the docile and submissive Pawpaw; the yellow Ebo, with the visage of a baboon, wretched and desponding, face to face with the cannibal Moco, or chained wrist to wrist with the light-hearted native of Congo and Angola.
None, however, appeared of light heart on board the slaver. The horrors of the “middle passage” had equally affected them all, until the dancing Congese, and the Lucumi, prone to suicide, seemed equally to suffer from dejection. The bright picture that now presented itself before their eyes—a landscape gleaming with all the gay colours of tropical vegetation—was viewed by them with very different emotions. Some seemed to regard it with indifference; others it reminded of their own African homes, from which they had been dragged by rude and ruffian men; while not a few gazed upon the scene with feelings of keen apprehension—believing it to be the dreaded Koomi, the land of the gigantic cannibals—and that they had been brought thither to be eaten!
Reflection might have convinced them that this would scarcely be the intention of the Tobon-doo—those white tyrants who had carried them across the ocean. The hard, unhusked rice, and coarse maize corn—their only food during the voyage—were not viands likely to fatten them for the feast of Anthropophagi; and their once smooth and shining skins now exhibited a dry, shrivelled appearance, from the surface coating of dandruff, and the scars of the hideous cra-cra.
The blacks among them, by the hardships of that fearful voyage, had turned ashy grey and the yellows of a sickly and bilious hue. Males and females—for there were many of the latter—appeared to have been alike the objects of ill-usage, the victims of a starved stomach and a stifled atmosphere.
Some half-dozen of the latter—seen in the precincts of the cabin—presented a different aspect. These were young girls, picked from the common crowd on account of the superiority of their personal charms; and the flaunting vestments that adorned their bodies—contrasting with the complete nudity of their fellow-voyagers—told too plainly why they had been thus distinguished. A horrid contrast—wantonness in the midst of woe!
On the quarter-deck stood the slave-skipper—a tall, lathy individual of sallow hue—and, beside him, his mate—a dark-bearded ruffian; while a score of like stamp, but lower grade, acting under their orders, were distributed in different parts of the ship.