He was a young man of very respectable appearance, and of mild manners.

His appearance, indeed, gave me reason to hope that I might depend upon his statements; but I was most of all influenced by the consideration that, never having been ill-used himself, he could have no inducement to go beyond the bounds of truth on this occasion.

He gave me a melancholy confirmation of all the three cases.

He told me, also, that one Joseph Cunningham had been a severe sufferer, and that there was reason to fear that Charles Horseler, another of the crew, had been so severely beaten over the breast with a knotted end of a rope, (which end was of the size of a large ball, and had been made on purpose,) that he died of it.

To this he added, that it was now a notorious fact, that the captain of the Alfred, when mate of a slave-ship, had been tried at Barbados for the murder of one of the crew with whom he had sailed, but that he escaped by bribing the principal witness to disappear[A].
[Footnote A: Mr.Sampson, who was surgeon's mate of the ship in which the captain had thus served as a mate, confirmed to me afterwards this assertion, having often heard him boast in the cabin, "how he had tricked the law on that occasion."] The reader will see, the further I went into the history of this voyage, the more dismal it became.