The committee having approved and printed the tables of questions, I began my tour.  I had selected the southern counties from Kent to Cornwall for it.  I had done this, because these included the great stations of the ships of war in ordinary; and as these were all under the superintendence of Sir Charles Middleton, as comptroller of the navy, I could get an introduction to those on board them.  Secondly, because sea-faring people, when they retire from a marine life, usually settle in some town or village upon the coast.

Of this tour I shall not give the reader any very particular account.  I shall mention only those things which are most worthy of his notice in it.  At Poole, in Dorsetshire, I laid the foundation of a committee, to act in harmony with that of London for the promotion of the cause.  Moses Neave, of the respectable society of the Quakers, was the chairman; Thomas Bell, the secretary; and Ellis B. Metford and the Reverend Mr. Davis and others the committee.  This was the third committee which had been instituted in the country for this purpose.  That at Bristol, under Mr. Joseph Harford as chairman, and Mr. Lunell as secretary, had been the first:  and that at Manchester, under Mr. Thomas Walker as chairman, and Mr. Samuel Jackson as secretary, had been the second.

As Poole was a great place for carrying on the trade to Newfoundland, I determined to examine the assertion of the Earl of Sandwich in the House of Lords, when he said, in the debate on Sir William Dolben’s bill, that the Slave Trade was not more fatal to seamen than the Newfoundland and some others.  This assertion I knew at the time to be erroneous, as far as my own researches had been concerned:  for out of twenty-four vessels, which had sailed out of the port of Bristol in that employ, only two sailors were upon the dead list.  In sixty vessels from Poole, I found but four lost.  At Dartmouth, where I went afterwards on purpose, I found almost a similar result.  On conversing, however, with Governor Holdsworth, I learnt that the year 1786 had been more fatal than any other in this trade.  I learnt that in consequence of extraordinary storms and hurricanes, no less than five sailors had died and twenty-one had been drowned in eighty-three vessels from that port.  Upon this statement I determined to look into the muster-rolls of the trade there for two or three years together.  I began by accident with the year 1769, and I went on to the end of 1772.  About eighty vessels on an average had sailed thence in each of these years.  Taking the loss in these years, and compounding it with that in the fatal year, three sailors had been lost; but taking it in these four years by themselves, only two had been lost in twenty-four vessels so employed.  On comparison with the Slave Trade, the result would be, that two vessels to Africa would destroy more seamen than eighty-three sailing to Newfoundland.  There was this difference also to be noted, that the loss in the one trade was generally by the weather or by accident, but in the other by cruel treatment or disease; and that they who went out in a declining state of health in the one, came home generally recovered; whereas they, who went out robust in the other, came home in a shattered condition.