302 BENGAZI.

bodies) which they must necessarily breathe in the place of their confinement, will be more easily deplored than described. So oppressive is the heat, on many occasions, in the lower deck of the bullock-vessels, that the men employed to look after the unfortunate animals can scarcely stay more than ten minutes there, except immediately under the hatchways ; and such of the oxen as chance, from their situation, or other causes, to be more affected by the closeness of the atmosphere than the rest, are obliged to be dragged up continually to the deck above, to prevent them from dying of suffocation.

AVe are sorry to say that our own experience enables us to speak decidedly on these points ; for as there was no other vessel in the harbour of Bengazi, when we left the coast, than a bullock-vessel, and no other expected to arrive, we were obliged to take a passage in the only one of them then remaining. As we experienced, nearly the whole voyage, the most provoking calms, our passage was an unusually long one ; and independently of the extreme inconvenience (to use the mildest term) which we experienced ourselves, we had to witness a scene of suffering which we shall never forget, and which we would willingly have gone through much more than we experienced to have avoided. It is indeed scarcely possible to conceive that human nature could be really so degraded from its rank in creation, as it appears to be in the persons of those who form the crew of a bullock-vessel.

And yet many of them are not, on other occasions, cruel men but the constant habit of witnessing and inflicting sufferings, which