Contract term of service has expired.
Your Memorialists, however, submit, that the case is totally altered with respect to Chinese emigrants, conveyed in foreign bottoms or under a foreign flag, under Contract to labor in Peru, or other Foreign partes.
To the first place your Memorialists have reason to believe that at this very time a system of the grossest deception and fraud is practised upon the Chinese Coolies who leave Hong Kong for Peru and for Svirinam or elsewhere – the majority are kidnapped, or otherwise violently or surreptitiously entrapped.
Secondly there is no protection for them on the voyage or when they arrive at their destination. They are sold in the public market place as laborers, and according to the contracts, are perpetually ceded or located on the Estates where they toil under the slowest and most brutal treatment, and die by thousands of diseases engendered by the pestilential nature of their occupation as Guano diggers.
In Cuba the mortality from the miasmata of the Copper mines is equally great.
It appears to Memorialists that Your Lordship in permitting foreign vessels laden with Coolies, to clear out under such circumstances from British port, is to implicate the British Authorities and consequently Her Majesty's Government, in a species of traffic which in its incidence and results is but a new kind of slave trade and renders the said Government culpably privy to the enslavement of the unfortunate victims who are thus deluded or forced away from their homes.
Your Lordship's attention is respectfully directed to the fact that the Chief British Authorities are solely responsible for the prosecution of this new slave-trade. A notorious man-stealer lately Consul General for Peru in China, and a British Official Mr. (D) R. Caldwell is notoriously employed by the Peruvian Government and the Guano Contractors and the Sugar planters of Cuba to obtain in China Coolies.
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