would sustain the crew and cargo. I found that half a gill a day would hold out to the Spanish main; and it was decided that, in order to save our cargo, we should allow the slaves a half gill, and the crew a gill, each day. Then began a torture worse than death to the blacks. Pent in their close dungeons, to the number of nearly five hundred, they suffered continual torment. Our crew and drivers were unwilling to allow even the half gill per diem, and quarrelled fiercely over their own stinted rations. Our cargo had been stowed on the platforms closer than I ever saw slaves stowed before or since. Instead of lowering buckets of water to them, as was customary, it became necessary to pour the water into halfpint measures. Those furthest from the gratings never got a drop.... Death followed so fast that in a short time at least a hundred men and women were shackled to dead partners. Our captain and crew, as well as myself, drank hard.... The dead were not thrown overboard. At last Captain Ruiz ordered the hatches down, and swore he would make the run on our regular water rations, and take the chances of his stock.
That night we caroused, and satisfied our thirst, whilst the negroes suffocated below. Next morning came a storm, which drove us on our course a hundred knots. Two days afterward, Ruiz and four of the men were taken suddenly ill with a disease that baffled my medical knowledge. Their tongues swelled, and grew black; their flesh turned yellow, and in six hours they were dead. The first mate went next, and then three others of the crew, and a black driver, whose body became leprous with yellow spots. I began to notice a strange, fetid smell pervading the vessel, and a low, heavy fog on deck, almost like steam. Then the horrid truth became apparent. Our rotting negroes under hatches had generated the plague, and it was a malaria or death-mist that I saw rising. At this time all our men but three and myself had been attacked; and we abandoned the Gloria, in her long boat, taking the remnant of water, a sack of biscuit, and a rum beaker, with what gold-dust and other valuables we
