s, and more as he becomes acclimated and
instructed, their dull natures requiring a vast deal of watchful
training before they can be brought to any positive usefulness, in doing
which the overseers have found kindness go a vast deal farther than
roughness. Trifling rewards, repaying the first efforts at breaking in
of the newly imported negro, establishes a good understanding at once,
and thus they soon grow very tractable, though they do not for a long
time understand a single word of Spanish that is addressed to them.

These negroes are from various African tribes, and their characteristics
are visibly marked, so that their nationality is at once discernible,
even to a casual observer. Thus the Congos are small in stature, but
agile and good laborers; the Fantee are a larger race, revengeful, and
apt to prove uneasy; those from the Gold Coast are still more powerful,
and command higher prices, and when well treated make excellent domestic
servants. The Ebros are less black than the others, being almost
mulatto. There is a tribe known as the Ashantees, very rare in Cuba, as
they are powerful at home, and consequently are rarely conquered in
battle, or taken prisoners by the shore tribes in Africa, who sell them
to the slave factories on the coast. They are prized, like those from
the Gold Coast, for their strength. Another tribe, known as the
Carrobalees, are highly esteemed by the planters, but yet they are
avoided when first imported, from the fact that they have a belief and
hope, very powerful among them, that after death they will return to
their native land, and therefore, actuated by a love of home, these poor
exiles are prone to suicide. This superstition is also believed in by
some other tribes; and when a death thus occurs, the planter, as an
example to the rest, and to prevent a like occurrence among them, burns
the body, and scatters the ashes to the wind!

The tattooed faces, bodies and limbs, of the larger portion of the
slaves, especially those found inland upon the plantations, indicate
their African birth; those born upon the island seldom mark themselves
thus, and being more intelligent than their parents, from mingling with
civilization, are chosen generally for city labor, becoming postilions,
house-servants, draymen, laborers upon the wharves, and the like,
presenting physical developments that a white man cannot but envy on
beholding, and showing that for some philosophical reason the race thus