Horrors of Coolie Emigration. 399 



The society which takes charge of this trade in exporting 

 men is known as the Colonisadora, and has its head-quarters 

 in the Havanna. Each Chinese must before leaving Macao 

 subscribe a contract which is for the exclusive benefit of the 

 society, and by which the poor emigrants explicitly renounce 

 all the advantage they might derive from certain paragraphs 

 in the Spanish Emigration Act, passed in 1854, which bear 

 upon the interpretation of such contracts. As it is usually 

 only the very poorest, most shiftless, and most ignorant class 

 that emigrates, the contract is enforced without the smallest 

 scruple, and if afterwards the emigrant in the foreign country 

 becomes aware of the privations and oppression he has to 

 submit to in comparison with other workers, the obligations 

 he has entered into are made use of to invoke the protec- 

 tion of the Spanish authorities.* The fact however that 

 these latter secretly favour the objections of the coloniza- 

 tion society, sufficiently proves that the interests of a 

 social class and the extension of the labour market in the 

 island are considered by them as of far higher importance 

 than the good of mankind. 



document respecting the number of Chinese imported in the course of one 3'car into 

 Havanna proves that in the case of the Peruvian ship Cora, 117 out of 292 cooUes 

 perished owing to bad water. In one single year (1857) 63 ships, of 43,933 tons, 

 cleared from Chinese ports for the Havanna, with 23,92S Chinese labourers, of 

 whom 3842, or above 16 per cent., died during the voyage. 



* We give in the Ajipendix the original text of one of these contracts, which 

 the Chinese emigi'ants have to sign preparatory to their going on ship-board, to- 

 gether with a translation, and shall leave the reader to judge whether those are very 

 far wrong who denounce the system as but another form of slave-trade. 



