602 MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE AND ART. 



THKBE MONTHS IN JAMAICA, IN 1832 : COMPRISING A RESIDENCE OF 

 SEVEN WEEKS ON A SUGAR PLANTATION. BY HENRY WHITELEY. 

 LONDON. HATCHARD AND SON. 



We have read this pamphlet with deep but painful interest. It is 

 remarkably well written ; and the author has prudently left the facts detailed 

 to work their own effect without the aid of comment. It appears that he 

 arrived in Jamaica in September, 1832 ; having been sent out by a re- 

 spectable West India house, in which one of his relatives was a partner, with 

 a recommendation for employment to the resident attorney of the firm, either 

 as clerk in a store, or as book-keeper upon a plantation. He had previously 

 been a member of the central committee at Leeds on the Factory System, 

 and he landed in Jamaica with the full impression that " the condition of 

 the Negro slave was much preferable to that of the factory child." 



On the day of his arrival, he dined with several colonists, among whom 

 was Mr. Hamilton Brown, representative of the parish of St. Ann, in the 

 Colonial Assembly. " Some reference," says Mr. Whiteley, " having been * 

 made to the new order in council, I was rather startled when that gentleman 

 swore by his Maker that that order should never be adopted in Jamaica, nor 

 would the planters, he said, permit the interference of the Home government 

 with their slaves in any shape." This, be it observed, occurred in Sep- 

 tember last. 



The next day he proceeded to the estate of the firm which had sent him out. 

 He was received with great hospitality by the overseer, who, after he had 

 enlarged a little on the comfortable condition of the slaves, ordered a conch 

 shell to be blown, the sound of which brought up four drivers with six 

 working negroes. Five of the latter were successively stripped, laid down, 

 and flogged with the cart- whip. When they had received thirty-nine lashes 

 each, bleeding and lacerated, they were ordered off to their usual occupation. 

 Theoffenceof one, was having suffered a mule to go astray, andthatof the others, 

 " some deficiency in the task prescribed to them." Two of the sufferers were 

 girls of eighteen or nineteen. At the conclusion of this scene, the overseer, 

 who had been a looker-on, " with as much seeming indifference as though he 

 had been paying them their wages," asked his visitor to walk in and take 

 some rum and water ! 



During the seven weeks he resided on the estate, besides constant punish- 

 ments in the field, which, on the whole are more dreadful than regular 

 " breaking down" for the whip, Mr. Whiteley witnessed no less than twenty 

 floggings: of some of these the following are memoranda. A slave employed 

 in the boiling house, received thirty-nine lashes, "to s/n7eabook- keeper under 

 whose charge this slave was at the time, and with whom the overseer had a 

 difference, and as he could not flog the book-keeper he flogged the slave." 

 Two young females, pimento pickers, were " uncovered in the most brutal 

 and indecent manner," and flogged to the full extent allowed by law 

 (thirty-nine lashes each) because " the baskets of the two poor girls were 

 pronounced deficient." Of the first, Mr. W. says, " every stroke upon her 

 flesh gave a loud crack, and the wretched creature at the same time called 

 out in agony, ' Lord ! Lord ! Lord !' ' That/ said the overseer, turning to 

 me, with a chuckling laugh, ' that is the best cracking, by G d !' " 



Two other girls had the full complement of lashes, by order of the overseer, 

 on being " accused of having been idle that morning." They were from ten 

 to thirteen years old. A married woman, the mother of several children, 

 having been charged with stealing a fowl, (a few feathers, said to have been 

 found in her hut were exhibited as evidence of her guilt,) was subjected to 

 the punishment of the whip, (which, says Mr. W., " is about ten feet long, 

 with a short stout handle, and is an instrument of terrible power ; it is 

 whirled by the operator round his head, and then brought down with a rapid 

 motion of the arm upon the recumbent victim, causing the blood to spring at 

 every stroke.") " The punishment inflicted on this poor creature was 



