he
British Crown, and as Loyal, I delight to say, as I am myself), I don't
think I had the Yellow Fever more than three times, and at last grew as
tough as leather, and could say Bo to a land-crab (how many a White
Man's carcass have those crabs picked clean at the Palisadoes!), as
though I feared him no more than a Green Goose.

It may be fitting here that I should say something about that Abominable
Curse of Negro Slavery, which was then so Familiar and Unquestioned a
Thing in all our Colonies, that its innate and Detestable Wickedness was
scarcely taken into account in men's minds. Speaking only by the Card,
and of that which I saw with my own eyes, I don't think that Maum Buckey
was any crueller than other slave-owners of her class: for 'tis well
known that the Mulotter women are far more severe task-mistresses than
the Whites. But, Lord! Whites and coloured people, who in the West
Indies are permitted, when free, to own their fellow-creatures who are
only a shade darker in colour than they, left little to choose betwixt
on the score of cruelty. When I tell you that I have seen Slave Women
and Girls chained to the washing-tub, their naked bodies all one gore of
blood from the lashes of the whip; that on the public wharf at Kingston
I have seen a Negro man drawn up by his hands to a crane used for
lifting merchandise, while his toes, that barely touched the ground,
were ballasted with a thirty-pound weight, and, in that Trim, beaten
with the Raw Hide or with Tamarind-Bushes till you could lay your two
fingers in the furrows made by the whip (with which expert Scourgineers
boast they can lay deep ruts in a Deal Board), or else I have seen the
poor Miserable Wretch the next day lying on his face on the Beach, and a
Comrade taking the prickles of the Tamarind-Stubs, which are tempered in
the Fire, and far worse than English Thornbushes, out of his back;--you
may imagine that 'twas no milk-and-water Regimen that the slaves in the
West Indies had to undergo at the hands of their Hard masters and
mistresses. Also, I have known slaves taken to the Sick-House, or
Hospital, so dreadfully mangled with unmerciful correction as for their
wounds to be one mass of putrefaction, and they shortly do give up the
Ghost; while, at other times, I have seen unfortunate creatures that had
been so lacerated, both back and front, as to be obliged to crawl about
on All Fours. Likewise have I seen Negro men, Negro women, yea, and
Negro childr