6zo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



self been a bond-servant and bad twice been sold. He tells ns 

 that the bond-servants were usually treated worse than the negro 

 slaves, for, as the latter were the actual property of their masters, 

 they took some care to preserve them. After describing the situ- 

 ation of the bond-servants in the islands belonging to France, and 

 saying that he has seen bond-servants beaten to death in the 

 French portion of Hispaniola, now Hayti, he thus continues: 

 " The planters that inhabit the Cariby Islands are rather worse 

 and more cruel to their servants than the precedent. In the Isle 

 of St. Christopher dwelleth one, whose name is Bettesa, very well 

 known among the Dutch merchants, who hath killed above an 

 hundred of his servants with blows and stripes. The English do 

 the same with their servants, and the mildest cruelty they exer- 

 cise towards them is that, when they have served six years of their 

 time (the years they are bound for among the English being seven 

 complete), they use them with such cruel hardship as forceth 

 them to beg of their masters to sell them unto others, although 

 it be to begin another servitude of seven years, or, at least, three or 

 four. I have known many who, after this manner, served fifteen 

 and twenty years before they could obtain their freedom. ... To 

 advance this trade, some persons there are who go purposely to 

 France (the same happeneth in England and other countries), 

 and, travelling through the cities, towns, and villages, endeavour 

 to pick up young men or boys, whom they transport, by making 

 them great promises. These having once allured and conveyed 

 them into the islands I speak of, they force to work like horses, 

 the toil they impose upon them being much harder than what 

 they usually enjoin unto the negroes their slaves/' 



A terrible indictment of seventeenth-century planters this, 

 and on the whole, except perhaps in the actual number killed by 

 the Dutchman Bettesa, not an exaggerated one, for we find Gen- 

 eral Brayne, who arrived in Jamaica as governor in December, 

 1G56, urging Cromwell to have negro slaves imported from Africa, 

 on the ground that, as the planters would have to pay for them, 

 they would have an interest in the preservation of their lives, 

 which was wanting in the case of bond-servants, numbers of whom 

 were killed by overwork and cruel treatment. 



The little village of Payerne, near the Lake of Neubourg, Switzerland, pos- 

 sesses a unique curiosity in the shape of the saddle of Queen Bertha, who founded 

 the Abbey of the Benedictines at Neubourg, now converted into an educational 

 establishment, in a. d. 901. The saddle is of marked antique shape, and has 

 an opening on the pommel, which was intended to hold the lady's distaff; for 

 the good queen would not lose a moment of her time, and set a profitable 

 example to her subjects by busying herself with spinning while she was on 

 horseback. 



