616 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



was allowed that the wretches, many of whom were still tor- 

 mented by unhealed wounds, could not all lie down at once with- 

 out lying on one another. They were never suffered to go on 

 deck. The hatchway was constantly watched by sentinels armed 

 with hangers and blunderbusses. In the dungeon below all was 

 darkness, stench, lamentation, disease, and death. Of ninety-nine 

 convicts who were carried out in one vessel, twenty-two died be- 

 fore they reached Jamaica, although the voyage was performed 

 with unusual speed. The survivors when they arrived at their 

 home of bondage were mere skeletons. During some weeks 

 coarse biscuit and fetid water had been doled out to them in such 

 scanty measure that any one of them could easily have consumed 

 the ration which was assigned to five. They were therefore in 

 such a state that the merchant to whom they were consigned 

 found it expedient to fatten them before selling them." 



John Coad, an honest carpenter, who joined the rebellion under 

 Monmouth, was badly wounded in the skirmish at Philip's Nor- 

 ton, and tried by Jeffreys and sent to Jamaica, where he appears 

 to have fared better than most of his fellow-exiles, has left us a 

 narrative from which the reader may gather many curious par- 

 ticulars. He and those who were shipped with him were con- 

 signed to a Mr. Christopher Hicks, of Port Royal, Jamaica, who 

 at first, having some Nonconformist leanings, refused to sell 

 them ; but on its being represented that if he declined that office it 

 would only be filled by some one else, and that he might be in- 

 strumental in getting them good places, he consented to put them 

 up to auction. The hour at which the market opened for the sale 

 of the convicts was announced by the firing of a gun, and John 

 Coad, more fortunate than some of his fellow-sufferers, passed 

 into the hands of a humane planter with whom he was secure 

 from ill-treatment, and in whose service he passed five years of 

 his servitude. Immediately after the Revolution, and the eleva- 

 tion to the throne of William and Mary, a new governor, the Earl 

 of Inchiquin, was sent to Jamaica, with instructions to release 

 from their bondage and send to England such of the exiles as 

 were still alive. This news spread rapidly among the convicts, 

 and some of them went to the Governor to inquire about their 

 freedom. The earl, who appears not to have read his instructions, 

 and to have been of a choleric and hasty temper, had the deputa- 

 tion flogged and sent away ; but was astonished to find, a few days 

 later, that the men he had thus ill-treated were those who were 

 specially recommended for kind treatment. He accordingly sum- 

 moned the Council and proclaimed the freedom of all the exiles, 

 who, after some little delay, were finally shipped home. 



The participators in Monmouth's rebellion were the last who 

 were ever sold into bondage beyond the seas and consigned to 



