could not hope to escape by force of arms or by flight.  Then the sternness of the law, together with a foolish rule concerning the evidence necessary to convict, resulted in the murder of the slaves, not by ones or twos, but by scores, and even hundreds, at a time.  For it was the unwise ruling of the courts that actual presence of slaves on a captured ship was necessary to prove that she was engaged in the unlawful trade.  Her hold might reek with the odor of the imprisoned blacks, her decks show unmistakable signs of their recent presence, leg-irons and manacles might bear dumb testimony to the purpose of her voyage, informers in the crew might even betray the captain’s secret; but if the boarders from the man-of-war found no negroes on the ship, she went free.  What was the natural result?  When a slaver, chased by a cruiser, found that capture was certain, her cargo of slaves was thrown overboard.  The cruiser in the distance might detect the frightful odor that told unmistakably of a slave-ship.  Her officers might hear the screams of the unhappy blacks being flung into the sea.  They might even see the bodies floating in the slaver’s wake; but if, on boarding the suspected craft, they found her without a single captive, they could do nothing.  This was the law for many years, and because of it thousands of slaves met a cruel death as the direct result of the effort to save them from slavery.  Many stories are told of these wholesale drownings.  The captain of the British cruiser “Black Joke” reports of a case in which he was pursuing two slave ships: 

“When chased by the tenders both put back, made all sail up the river, and ran on shore.  During the chase they were seen from our vessels to throw the slaves overboard by twos, shackled together by the ankles, and left in this manner to sink or swim as best they could.  Men, women, and children were seen in great numbers struggling in the water by everyone on board the two tenders, and, dreadful to relate, upward of 150 of these wretched creatures perished in this way.”

In this case, the slavers did not escape conviction, though the only penalty inflicted was the seizure of their vessels.  The pursuers rescued some of the drowning negroes, who were able to testify that they had been on the suspected ship, and condemnation followed.  The captain of the slaver “Brillante” took no chance of such a disaster.  Caught by four cruisers in a dead calm, hidden from his enemy by the night, but with no chance of escaping before dawn, this man-stealer set about planning murder on a plan so large and with such system as perhaps has not been equaled since Caligula.  First he had his heaviest anchor so swung that cutting a rope would drop it.  Then the chain cable was stretched about the ship, outside the rail, and held up by light bits of rope, that would give way at any stout pull.  Then the slaves—­600 in all—­were brought up from below, open-eyed, whispering, wondering what new act in the pitiful drama of their lives this midnight