ship alone—"which was $1,000 more than the [other] owners had authorized me to sell her for."
As the eighteenth century passed away the improvements in merchant shipping, so far as improvements were made, were due chiefly to the enterprise of slave-merchants, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century there was nothing afloat of their size that could overhaul the slavers that were aa into privateers during the war of 1812.
In the nineteenth century the slave-trade had relatively much less influence on shipping, but it is certain that the Venus from Baltimore was the forerunner of the splendid Yankee clippers whose voyages previous to the Civil War astonished the maritime world. It is certain, too, that the building of small, swift schooners enriched many a Yankee ship-yard owner in the years before our Civil War. If the sole end of government were the promotion of business interests, then it might be said that those officials who winked at the doings of slavers served their country well.
What goods were used in the slave-trade has been recorded in many official documents. Here is the bill of lading of the Sierra Leone, a Yankee slaver in the middle of the eighteenth century.
