The Vessel Was Afterwards Condemned As Unfit For Sea,
And The Slaves, As I Have Heard, Were Ordered To Be Sold For The
Benefit Of The Owners.
At this island I remained ten days, when the Chesterfield packet,
homeward bound from the Leeward Islands, touching at St. John's for
the Antigua mail, I took my passage in that vessel.
We sailed on
the 24th of November, and after a short but tempestuous voyage
arrived at Falmouth on the 22nd of December, from whence I
immediately set out for London; having been absent from England two
years and seven months.
NOTE
The following passage from James Montgomery's poem, "The West
Indies," published in 1810, was inspired by "Mungo Park's Travels in
the Interior of Africa." It enshrines in English verse the
beautiful incident of the negro woman's song of "Charity" (on page
190 of the first of these two volumes), and closes with the poet's
blessing upon Mungo Park himself, who had sailed five years before
upon the second journey, from which he had not returned, and whose
fate did not become known until five years later.
Man, through all ages of revolving time,
Unchanging man, in every varying clime,
Deems his own land of every land the pride,
Beloved by Heaven o'er all the world beside;
His home the spot of earth supremely blest,
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest.
And is the Negro outlawed from his birth?
Is he alone a stranger on the earth?
Is there no shed whose peeping roof appears
So lovely that it fills his eyes with tears?
No land, whose name, in exile heard, will dart
Ice through his veins and lightning through his heart?
Ah! yes; beneath the beams of brighter skies
His home amidst his father's country lies;
There with the partner of his soul he shares
Love-mingled pleasures, love-divided cares;
There, as with nature's warmest filial fire,
He soothes his blind and feeds his helpless sire;
His children, sporting round his hut, behold
How they shall cherish him when he is old,
Trained by example from their tenderest youth
To deeds of charity and words of truth.
Is HE not blest? Behold, at closing day,
The Negro village swarms abroad to play;
He treads the dance, through all its rapturous rounds,
To the wild music of barbarian sounds;
Or, stretched at ease where broad palmettos shower
Delicious coolness in his shadowy bower,
He feasts on tales of witchcraft, that give birth
To breathless wonder or ecstatic mirth:
Yet most delighted when, in rudest rhymes,
The minstrel wakes the song of elder times,
When men were heroes, slaves to Beauty's charms,
And all the joys of life were love and arms.
Is not the Negro blest? His generous soil
With harvest plenty crowns his simple toil;
More than his wants his flocks and fields afford:
He loves to greet a stranger at his board:
"The winds were roaring and the White Man fled;
The rains of night descended on his head;
The poor White Man sat down beneath our tree:
Weary and faint and far from home was he:
For him no mother fills with milk the bowl,
No wife prepares the bread to cheer his soul.
Pity the poor White Man, who sought our tree;
No wife, no mother, and no home has he."
Thus sung the Negro's daughters; - once again,
O that the poor White Man might hear that strain!
Whether the victim of the treacherous Moor,
Or from the Negro's hospitable door
Spurned as a spy from Europe's hateful clime,
And left to perish for thy country's crime,
Or destined still, when all thy wanderings cease,
On Albion's lovely lap to rest in peace,
Pilgrim! in heaven or earth, where'er thou be,
Angels of mercy guide and comfort thee!
A note to the same poem gives the following record of facts,
substantiated in a court of justice, in which there can be only one
answer to the question, "Which were the savages?"
"In this year (1783) certain underwriters desired to be heard
against Gregson and others of Liverpool, in the case of the ship
Zong, Captain Collingwood, alleging that the captain and officers of
the said vessel threw overboard one hundred and thirty-two slaves
alive into the sea, in order to defraud them by claiming the value
of the said slaves, as if they had been lost in a natural way. In
the course of the trial which afterwards came on, it appeared that
the slaves on board the Zong were very sickly; that sixty of them
had already died, and several were ill and likely to die, when the
captain proposed to James Kelsal, the mate, and others to throw
several of them overboard, stating that 'if they died a natural
death, the loss would fall upon the owners of the ship, but that if
they were thrown into the sea, it would fall upon the underwriters.'
He selected accordingly one hundred and thirty-two of the most
sickly of the slaves. Fifty-four of these were immediately thrown
overboard, and forty-two were made to be partakers of their fate on
the succeeding day. In the course of three days afterwards the
remaining twenty-six were brought upon deck to complete the number
of victims. The first sixteen submitted to be thrown into the sea,
but the rest, with a noble resolution, would not suffer the offices
to touch them, but leaped after their companions and shared their
fate.
"The plea which was set up in behalf of this atrocious and
unparalleled act of wickedness was that the captain discovered, when
he made the proposal, that he had only two hundred gallons of water
on board, and that he had missed his port. It was proved, however,
in answer to this, that no one had been put upon short allowance;
and that, as if Providence had determined to afford an unequivocal
proof of the guilt, a shower of rain fell, and continued for three
days, immediately after the second lot of slaves had been destroyed,
by means of which they might have filled many of their vessels with
water, and thus have prevented all necessity for the destruction of
the third.
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