Continued from above
sprightly... Last Tuesday the smallpox began to rage, and we hauled 60 corpses out of the hold...The sights which I witness may I never look on such again. This is a dreadful trade...I am growing sicker every day of this business of buying and selling human beings for beasts of burden... On the eighth day [out at sea] I took my round of the half deck, holding a camphor bag in my teeth; for the stench was hideous. The sick and dying were chained together. I saw pregnant women give birth to babies whilst chained to corpses, which our drunken overseers had not removed. The blacks were literally jammed between decks as if in a coffin; and a coffin that dreadful hold became to nearly one half of our cargo before we reached Bahia [in Brazil].
- Revelations of a Slave Smuggler (1860)