Page:The West Indies, and Other Poems.djvu/82

for a negro mother whose son had been murdered by the Moors, that the poor boy had never told a lie.'—Parke's Travels. The description of African life and manners that follows, and the song of the Negro's daughters, are copied without exaggeration from the authentic acounts of Mungo Parke.

Note ². Page 39, line 10.—Or headlong plunged alive into the main.—On this subject the following instance of almost incredible cruelty was substantiated in a court of justice.

'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, alledging 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