Page:Trials of the Slave Traders Samo, Peters and Tufft (1813).pdf/27

hearsay, or actual sight, may furnish such information, but whether one or all, it does not prove the prisoner to be a Dutchman. It is asserted that the prisoner was apprehended out of the jurisdiction of this Court; that assertion cannot be maintained, as the Isles de Loss are considered the dependencies of Sierra Leone; they are inhabited and cultivated by British subjects, who consider, and have always acknowledged themselves amenable to British laws. I can prove beside this, my Lord, that the prisoner has often boasted of being a British subject; and this boast is now recorded in the Sierra Leone Gazette, and has never been contradicted by the prisoner. As to the Dutch passport, upon which so much reliance is placed, money could procure that for any one in a Dutch colony; besides, this passport, admitting its validity, does not describe either the person or profession of the reputed possessor, nor does it contain his christian name; it is not impossible that this passport might have been drawn up for one of the many Samo's who reside in London, where the name is very common among the Jews born in the neighbourhood of Duke's Place. In answer to the remarks of the prisoner's ingenious counsel, that no day is stated in the indictment, I beg leave to remind him that this was objected to in the early part of the trial; but if the indictment had then been quashed, a new one would have been preferred, in which the day would appear, as I could prove that Samo shipped off slaves on the 12th of January, 1812. I shall conclude, my Lord, with a citation from Vatel, who, in his work on the Laws of Nations, has a passage much in point with the matter m discussion. The learned author, in page 162, section 75, speaking of cases where an individual of one nation has injured the sovereign of another nation, says, that if the offended state has in her power the individual who has done the injury, she may not scruple to bring him to justice, and punish him. If he has escaped