"
For a few moments all was silent as the grave, and I felt as if the air
had become too thick for breathing, while I looked up like another Cain.
Presently, about one hundred and fifty of the slaves, men, women, and
children, who had been drawn down by the vortex, rose amidst numberless
pieces of smoking wreck, to the surface of the sea; the strongest
yelling like fiends in their despair, while the weaker, the women, and
the helpless gasping little ones, were choking, and gurgling, and
sinking all around. Yea, the small thin expiring cry of the innocent
sucking infant tom from its sinking mother's breast, as she held it for
a brief moment above the waters, which had already for ever closed over
herself, was there. But we could not perceive one single individual of
her white crew; like desperate men, they had all gone down with the
brig. We picked up about one half of the miserable Africans, and--my
pen trembles as I write it--fell necessity compelled us to fire on the
remainder, as it was utterly impossible for us to take them on board.
Oh that I could erase such a scene for ever from my memory! One
incident I cannot help relating. We had saved a woman, a handsome clear
skinned girl, of about sixteen years of age. She was very faint when
we got her in, and was lying with her head over a port--sill, when a
strong athletic young negro swam to the part of the schooner where she
was. She held down her hand to him; he was in the act of grasping it,
when he was shot through the heart from above.
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