Chapter Two.
Ship on Fire.
The story of the Pandora has been told in all its terrible details. A slave-ship, fitted out in England, and sailing from an English port—alas! not the only one by scores—manned by a crew of ruffians, scarce two of them owning to the same nationality. Such was the bark Pandora.
Her latest and last voyage was to the slave coast, in the Gulf of Guinea. There, having shipped five hundred wretched beings with black skins—“bales” as they are facetiously termed by the trader in human flesh—she had started to carry her cargo to that infamous market—ever open in those days to such a commodity—the barracoons of Brazil.
In mid-ocean she had caught fire—a fire that could not be extinguished. In the hurry and confusion of launching the boats the pinnace proved to be useless; and the longboat, stove in by the falling of a cask, sank to the bottom of the sea. Only the gig was found available; and this, seized upon by the captain, the mate, and four others, was rowed off clandestinely in the darkness.
The rest of the crew, over thirty in number, succeeded in constructing a raft; and but a few seconds after they had pushed off from the sides of the ship, a barrel of gunpowder ignited by the flames, completed the catastrophe.
But what became of the cargo? Ah! that is indeed a tale of horror.
Up to the last moment those unfortunate beings had been kept under hatches, under a grating that had been fastened down with battens. They would have been left in that situation to be stifled in their confinement by the suffocating smoke, or burnt alive amid the blazing timbers, but for one merciful heart among those who were leaving the ship. An axe uplifted by the arm of a brave youth—a mere boy—struck off the confining cleats, and gave the sable sufferers access to