ain in his journeys to and fro had become acquainted with the
present black President of Hayti, Mr. Salomon. I had heard of this
gentleman as an absolute person, who knew how to make himself obeyed,
and who treated opposition to his authority in a very summary manner. He
seemed to be a favourite of the captain's. He had been educated in
France, had met with many changes of fortune, and after an exile in
Jamaica had become quasi-king of the black republic. I much wished to
see this paradise of negro liberty; we were to touch at Jacmel, which is
one of the principal ports, to leave the mails, and Captain W---- was
good enough to say that, if I liked, I might go ashore for an hour or
two with the officer in charge.

Hayti, as everyone knows who has studied the black problem, is the
western portion of Columbus's Espanola, or St. Domingo, the largest
after Cuba and the most fertile in natural resources of all the islands
of the Caribbean Sea. It was the earliest of the Spanish settlements in
the New World. The Spaniards found there a million or two of mild and
innocent Indians, whom in their first enthusiasm they intended to
convert to Christianity, and to offer as the first fruits of their
discovery to the Virgin Mary and St. Domenic. The saint gave his name to
the island, and his temperament to the conquerors. In carrying out their
pious design, they converted the Indians off the face of the earth,
working them to death in their mines and plantations. They filled their
places with blacks from Africa, who proved of tougher constitution. They
colonised, they built cities; they throve and prospered for nearly two
hundred years; when Hayti, the most valuable half of the island, was
taken from them by the buccaneers and made into a French province. The
rest which keeps the title of St. Domingo, continued Spanish, and is
Spanish still--a thinly inhabited, miserable, Spanish republic. Hayti
became afterwards the theatre of the exploits of the ever-glorious
Toussaint l'Ouverture. When the French Revolution broke out, and Liberty
and the Rights of Man became the new gospel, slavery could not be
allowed to continue in the French dominions. The blacks of the colony
were emancipated and were received into the national brotherhood. In
sympathy with the Jacobins of France, who burnt the chateaux of the
nobles and guillotined the owners of them, the liberated slaves rose as
soon as they were free, and massacred the whole French population