MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE AND ART. 605 



events of his own administration, and without any reason for the faith 

 which is in him, assures their lordships that the treatment of the slaves is 

 excellent, their clothing and food abundant, and their dwellings a perfect 

 paradise. Another witness in favour of slavery, is the Rev. J. Curtin, a 

 Protestant clergyman of the island of Antigua, now the owner of nineteen 

 slaves : this worthy minister of the gospel sees nothing whatever but per- 

 fection in the present system ; the negroes being a contented race of people, 

 and the planters the finest gentlemen in existence profuse of turtle and 

 champaigne ! Upon the opposite side of the question appears the Hon. 

 Admiral Fleming, who having witnessed and examined the operation of the 

 system in Jamaica, Cuba, Mexico, and other parts of the world, condemns 

 the continuance of slavery, as contrary to the true interests of the planters 

 themselves, and destructive to all hopes of prosperity in our colonial domi- 

 nions. The Hon. Admiral treats with ridicule the absurd idea, that eman- 

 cipation would place life and property in peril : from his own observations in 

 Mexico, he is convinced that free labour would extend and improve the culti- 

 vation of the soil. The Reverend J. Knibb, an intelligent missionary of the 

 Methodist persuasion, gave evidence of the most harrowing description, of 

 the treatment of the slaves, and of the general brutalization of the manners 

 and morals of both blacks and whites under this most dreadful system. A 

 Mr. Edmund Sharp thinks, that " switches which draw blood but do not leave 

 marks," might be substituted for the whip. The Reverend John Barry is of 

 opinion, that the slave population decreases from causes connected with 

 slavery : one of these, he believes to be excessive punishment, which is 

 sometimes so severe as to occasion death. He detailed several cases of 

 oppression, arising out of the power possessed by masters and overseers to 

 oblige female slaves to submit to their desires. Once, when travelling, he 

 was arrested by the shrieks of a woman, who was undergoing punishment 

 with the cat. She was raised from the ground, on which she had been 

 extended, on his coming up, and sent to her work, but she was unable to 

 stand upright, so severely had she been punished. An old lady in Spanish 

 Town, on being requested to allow one of her slaves to meet in religious 

 society, replied, " I certainly cannot allow her to pray ; she is young, and I 

 must keep her to breed/' William Taylor, Esq. states, that he has known 

 eighteen lashes (inflicted on a young girl) cause a degree of suffering that 

 was dreadful, and called for notice ; but the law having allowed thirty-nine, 

 the parties who sought redress were completely baffled. The overseer set 

 them all at defiance, by simply pointing to the statute ; the spirit of which, 

 by-the-bye, is evaded by a subsequent switching, as it will appear from the 

 following statement of the Reverend Peter Duncan. 



" A Negro was laid down to be flogged almost under my window, when I 

 resided at Morant Bay at least at no great distance. His master went to 

 the workhouse ; he came back with the supervisor, and four workhouse 

 Negroes came along with the master and supervisor ; two of them had whips. 

 The Negro man was laid down ; two of the Negroes held him down, one at 

 the feet, and the other by the hands ; and the Negroes who had the whips 

 went one to each side of the man thus laid down and stripped. I counted 

 either thirty-nine or forty lashes ; that was with a cart whip I mean what 

 is called a cart whip." This was in 1821. "The Negro man received 

 thirty-nine or forty lashes with the whip. I observed that they still kept 

 him down, while the two men, the Negroes who had been flogging him, 

 went some little distance, and came back with tamarind switches they are 

 hard and flexible almost as wire and then they began upon him again, to 

 flog him with those tamarind switches. I did not count the strokes they 

 gave with the switches ; but to the best of my knowledge they were as many 

 as had been given before. I observed, when the former lashes were inflicted, 

 the slave never uttered any thing more than a deep groan ; but, when he 

 came to be flogged with the tamarind switches, he shrieked most dismally. 



