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No stigma whatever was attached to the slave traffic as carried on in the seventeenth century and for the greater part of the eighteenth. The voyages, while always dangerous, were not always profitable. The vessels engaged in them were ordinarily small; sometimes they were sloops of less than a hundred tons. A fleet of them could be stowed away in the hold of a Lusitania. They had to be small and of light draft in order to run up the shallow rivers to whose banks their human cargo was driven. Lying at anchor in the stifling heat, with no wind to drive away the swarming insect life, the deadly coast fever would descend upon a ship, and, having swept away half its crew, leave those who survived too weak to hoist the sails. The captains were, for the most part, God fearing men, working hard to support their families at home. One piously informs his owners that “we have now been twenty days upon the coast and by the blessing of God shall soon have a good cargo.” The number of negroes taken on board a ship was never large until the trade was declared to be piratical. Then conditions changed horribly. It did not pay to take more on board than could be delivered in the West Indies in prime condition. They were not packed more closely than were the crews of the privateers of whom we shall read later on.