THE WESTERN COAST. 
rate fortunes, or doubtful characters, they deter- 
mined to discourage the promiscuous emigration of 
their countrymen, and to endeavour to find a class 
of settlers more able to endure the vicissitudes of 
the climate, and the insalubrity of the uncultivat- 
ed soil. Many of the black loyalists, at the ter- 
mination of the American war, had been convey- 
ed to the Bahamas and Nova Scotia, where they 
had experienced a treatment which they did not 
scruple to denominate a second servitude. In the 
Bahamas the black code of laws received in the 
West Indian Islands prevails, according to which 
every black is presumed to be a slave, unless he 
can prove his freedom ; and the evidence of a negro 
is not admitted against a white man. Every free 
negro, therefore, who cannot produce formal proof 
of his freedom, becomes ipso Jacto the slave of any 
unprincipled white, who chooses to swear that he 
is his property. Of these laws, the white loyalists, 
who had found an asylum in the Bahamas, un- 
taught by adversity to sympathize with the un- 
fortunate, availed themselves against the black 
refugees, with such flagrant injustice, that their 
conduct occasioned the interference of the gover- 
nor. In Nova Scotia, where they had been pro- 
mised lands, the same disposition appeared, though 
it did not proceed to such violent excesses. The 
lands allotted them were almost sterile, as the 
most valuable were engrossed by the whites \ and 
