Page:Trials of the Slave Traders Samo, Peters and Tufft (1813).pdf/6

THE TRIAL

OF

SAMUEL SAMO,

SLAVE TRADER,

Indicted for trading in Slaves, and tried at the Court of Oyer and Terminer, held in Sierra Leone, on the Coast of Africa, before the Honourable Chief Justice Thorpe, L.L.D. on the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th of April, 1812.

The Court met on the 7th of April, James Becket, Esq. the clerk, having sworn the Grand Jury; the Chief Justice then charged them, in a most impressive manner, on their various duties, and concluded in these words:

Gentlemen,

The calendar furnishes one crime more, on which it is necessary to instruct you, but its novelty and importance will oblige me to be minutely explicit.

Indictments will be laid before you against Samuel Samo and Charles Hickson for trading in slaves, since the first of September, 1811, in violation of the fifty-first of the King, chap. 23. The British parliament passed above ten bills for meliorating the condition, affording comfort, and preventing the cruelties that had been practised on the negroes in their transatlantic passage. They were