This confinement soon produces an effect, that may be easily imagined.

It generates a pestilential air, which, co-operating with, bad provisions, occasions such a sickness and mortality among them, that not less than _twenty thousand_[056] are generally taken off in every yearly transportation.
Thus confined in a pestilential prison, and almost entirely excluded from the chearful face of day, it remains for the sickly survivors to linger out a miserable existence, till the voyage is finished.

But are no farther evils to be expected in the interim particularly if we add to their already wretched situation the indignities that are daily offered them, and the regret which they must constantly feel, at being for ever forced from their connexions?
These evils are but too apparent.

Some of them have resolved, and, notwithstanding the threats of the _receivers_, have carried their resolves into execution, to starve themselves to death.

Others, when they have been brought upon deck for air, if the least opportunity has offered, have leaped into the sea, and terminated their miseries at once.