be built for them. The present great dock system of Liverpool originated in the needs of the slavetraders.
In those days the ship-chandlers of Liverpool made special displays in their windows of such things as handcuffs, leg-shackles, iron collars, short and long chains, and furnaces and copper kettles designed for slavers' use. The newspapers were full of advertisements of slaves and slaver goods. "The young bloods of the town deemed it fine amusement to circulate handbills in which negro girls were offered for sale." An artist of wide repute — Stothard — painted "The voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies." The Merchants' Exchange, or Town Hall, as it was called, was ornamented in a way that was strikingly appropriate, for "between the capitals runs an entablature or fillet, on which are placed in base-relief the busts of blackamoors and elephants, with the teeth of the latter, with such-like emblematical figures representing the African trade and commerce." The merchants of Liverpool needed no Ruskin to suggest "pendant purses" for decorating a frieze, or "pillars broad at the base, for the sticking of bills," when they were building a market-place.
In America the New England colonies took the lead in the slave-trade. Barefooted boys waded through the snow to find berths in the forecastles of the colony ships, and, hard as sailor life was then, they found more comforts afloat than on the farms they left behind. And once afloat the Yankee boy worked his way aft as readily as he climbed the ratlines when ordered to reef topsails.
