6 1 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



all men. It was made a crime to attend a Dissenting place of wor- 

 ship. A single justice of the peace might convict without a jury, 

 and might, for the third offense, pass sentence of transportation 

 beyond the seas for seven years. With refined cruelty it was 

 provided that the offender should not be transported to New Eng- 

 land, where he was likely to find sympathizing friends. If he re- 

 turned to his own country before the expiration of his term of 

 exile, he was liable to capital punishment.* 



Charles II made Jamaica one of the places of banishment for 

 the Quakers, who would take no oaths either abjuring papacy, ac- 

 knowledging the supremacy of the king, or swearing allegiance 

 to him, all which omissions were considered to be treasonable 

 offenses, and hundreds of them were sentenced as convicts and 

 sent out. These were soon followed by the conspirators of the 

 Whig and Rye House Plots in 1683, and in 1684 the Jamaica 

 House of Assembly passed by command an act entitled " An act 

 for ascertaining the servitude of the rebels lately sent from Eng- 

 land, and to prevent all clandestine releasements and buying out 

 their time, to the end, that after so great a mitigation " (as re- 

 prieve from hanging) " their punishment might yet in some 

 measure be answerable to their crime." The author of the An- 

 nals of Jamaica informs us that these poor wretches were sentenced 

 to ten years' servitude, and adds that few lived to its expiration, 

 as may be readily believed when we remember that they were 

 employed as " field hands " in a climate that at that time was 

 notoriously unhealthy for Europeans, were insufficiently fed, 

 badly housed, and hard worked. 



In the reign of James II this inhuman practice was still con- 

 tinued. More than three hundred persons who took part in, or 

 were suspected of being connected with, the rising in Argyleshire, 

 were transported to the West Indies, many of them having first 

 been subjected to mutilation ; and several women were banished, 

 after being branded on the cheek with a hot iron. The prisoners 

 taken at the battle of Sedgemoor in 1685, and persons otherwise 

 implicated in the rebellion of Monmouth, who were all technically 

 liable to suffer death, were granted in batches to the members of 

 the court, who sent them out to the colonies to be sold as slaves. 

 The number of prisoners transported by the notorious Judge Jef- 

 freys was eight hundred and forty-one. They were divided into 

 gangs and granted to court favorites, the conditions of the grant 

 being that the convicts should be carried beyond the sea as slaves, 

 that they should not be emancipated till after ten years, and that 

 the place of their banishment should be the West Indies. This 

 last condition was studiously framed for the purpose of aggravat- 



* Macaulay. 



