[The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808), Vol. I by Thomas Clarkson]@TWC D-Link book
The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808), Vol. I

CHAPTER XXIII
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He adverted next to the case of Mr.
Dalzell; and showed how one dismal fact after another, each making against their own testimony, was extorted from him.

He then went to the trifling mortality said to be experienced in these voyages, upon which subject he spoke in the following words: "Though the witnesses are some of them interested in the trade, and all of them parties against the bill, their confession is, that of the Negros of the windward coast, who are men of the strongest constitution which Africa affords, no less on an average than five in each hundred perish in the voyage,--a voyage, it must be remembered, but of six weeks.

In a twelvemonth, then, what must be the proportion of the dead?
No less than forty-three in a hundred, which is seventeen times the usual rate of mortality; for all the estimates of life suppose no more than a fortieth of the people, or two and a half in the hundred, to die within the space of a year.

Such then is the comparison.

In the ordinary course of nature the number of persons, (including those in age and infancy, the weakest periods of existence,) who perish in the space of a twelvemonth, is at the rate of but two and a half in a hundred; but in an African voyage, notwithstanding the old are excluded and few infants admitted, so that those who are shipped are in the firmest period of life, the list of deaths presents an annual mortality of forty-three in a hundred.


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