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friend took him on a tour of a Guinea ship docked in Liverpool. “It was just finished,and had not then been employed,” he recalled, “the narrow cells and the chains, which were as yet unstained with blood … were all ready for the victims.” Even that brief glimpse into a new ship horrified this son of a slave-owning family. “There will be a day when these things shall be told in heaven!” he predicted. 33
    Dr. Chancellor complained bitterly about the
Wolf
. Water flowed freely into the ship during storms, forcing the crew to stand ankle deep belowdecks or risk being swept into the ocean. “These sorts of vessels are terrible things to have slaves in, especially so great a number sick & none but myself to look after them,” Chancellor complained. By May 1750 the three dozen people chained belowdecks, many of them small children, were ill. The holds for the Africans were so cramped and their detention so prolonged that several could not walk without assistance. Chancellor recorded their suffering and his anxieties as the enterprise crumbled. “I am in the very height of my miserys,” he admitted during the summer, “not only from the deaths of the slaves, but the reflection, that by the Capt[ain] is cast on me on that acc[oun]t.” 34
    Lingering doubts about their ability to control enslaved people had led white northerners to demand children, whom they believed to be less rebellious and more susceptible to Christian instruction. “For this market they must be young[,] the younger the better if not quite Children, those advanced in years will never do,” the merchant and King’s College trustee John Watts advised Gedney Clarke in 1762. “I should imagine a Cargo of them not exceeding thirty [in total] might turn out at fifty pounds a head gross Sales.” A year earlier John and Susanna Wheatley had gone aboard
Phillis
at the Long Wharf in Boston and purchased a sickly girl who was covering herself with a piece of old carpet. Owning several older black people, the Wheatleys were shopping for a child to serve them as they aged. They named her Phillis (Wheatley) in honor of the ship. 35
    Before they became the presidents of the College of New Jersey and Yale, respectively, the Connecticut evangelist Jonathan Edwards and the Rhode Island minister Ezra Stiles both purchased African children through the captains of slave ships in Newport. In 1738 the Boston merchant Peter Faneuil empowered Captain Peter Buckley to sell several hogsheads and barrels of fish in Antigua,and use the proceeds to buy a “strait limbed Negro lad … from 12 to fiveteen years” with a docile temperament. “I have lost one of my Negroe boys, who died of a Consumption [tuberculosis],” William Vassall, a Harvard graduate and Boston resident, informed his plantation manager, James Wedderburn, in Jamaica, “& want another in his room very much.” Vassall instructed his overseer to find, purchase, and ship a “sprightly lively healthy young Negroe lad about 14 years old,” who could act as a personal servant and butler, spoke English, and had no bad habits. Governor James Bowdoin, who established the Bowdoin Prize at Harvard and whose namesake endowed Bowdoin College in Maine, authorized a family member to buy a “light-timber’d Negro boy” for his home. 36
    On Tuesday evening, May 29, a five-year-old girl succumbed to the conditions on the
Wolf
. Wednesday morning the surgeon went below and “found a boy dead[,] at noon another, and in the afternoon another.” The doctor believed that his medicines were too potent; he had not expected Captain Wall to take on small children. “This morning early found another of the boys dead,” he recorded the following day, “the sight was shocking and to see likely boys floating over board is a misery to all on board.” On Tuesday, June 5, Dr. Chancellor brought up the corpse of a