Читать книгу A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Addressed to the freeholders and other inhabitants of Yorkshire онлайн

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Evidence by which the above statements are established.

To adduce all the specific testimony by which the above allegations were established, would be to fill a volume. I mean, as a specimen of the whole, to extract, and subjoin in an appendix, a few passages from the vast body of evidence with which we are furnished on this subject. But it would be injustice to the great cause I am pleading, not to declare, that the above statements were established beyond all possible dispute; and also, that, with occasional variations, resulting from the difference in the forms of government, and in other circumstances, they were found to be applicable not to particular parts only of Africa, but to the whole of that vast district which is visited by the European Slave ships; to be, not the exception, but the rule; not the occasional, but the general and systematic effects of the Slave Trade ships. We have the evidence of several most respectable Officers of the navy, to prove, that wherever they touched, acts of depredation were common. The same practices were found to prevail in the widely distant countries of Senegambia and the Gold coast, by men of Science, one of whom produced a journal, kept at the time, in which he daily entered all that appeared to him worthy of remark; and it was from this record that the Committee read the affecting account which has been mentioned, in which one of the African Kings, with every appearance of sincerity, repeatedly expressed his deep remorse for having been instigated, in a season of intoxication, into which he had been drawn by the Slave merchants, to oppress and pillage his subjects. Much of the Abolitionists’ information was also obtained from those who, in different capacities, chiefly as surgeons, more commonly as mates, and in some few instances as common sailors, had been actually employed in Slave ships; some of these persons had likewise been for many months on shore among the natives; and several of them had witnessed the practice of attacking villages by armed parties in the night, and carrying away, and selling all they could seize.