"What do you mean?"
"Don't you know where we are bound?" added Grego, a Portuguese.
"No."
"You may know now; you must know soon. We are bound to the coast of Africa, for a cargo of niggers," laughed Grego.
I believed it.
CHAPTER XIII.
IN WHICH PHIL GOES AFT, WITH OTHERS OF THE CREW, AND THEN GOES FORWARD.
I believed that the Michigan was bound to the coast of Africa for a cargo of slaves. The boatman who had tried to assist me to escape had said as much to me, though I did not understand it at the time. Captain Farraday declared that he should make his fortune on this voyage; and Waterford was desperate enough to do anything. The bark was certainly ten or twelve hundred miles south of her proper latitude if she was bound up the Mediterranean.
If there was anything in the world which I regarded as more horrible and wicked than anything else, it was the slave trade. At the time of which I write, in spite of the vigilance of the British and American cruisers on the African coast, several vessels had been successful in running cargoes of negroes to Cuba. The profits of the trade were so enormous that large wages could be paid to crews, and the vessel sacrificed at the end. It was evident to me that the Spanish and Portuguese seamen on board had been shipped for a slave voyage, or they would not have known the destination of the bark. We had often heard them talking together in their own language; but, as none of the crew understood it, their secret was safe till they or the officers chose to divulge it.