£68 
THE WESTERN COAST. 
which a colony derived from numbers, connected 
by a common interest, and at the same time aware 
of the danger that would necessarily result from 
the intrusion of idle, unprincipled, or extravagant 
Europeans, impatient of subordination, of despe- 
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 vicissi- 
tudes of the climate, and the insalubrity of the 
uncultivated soil. Many of the black loyalists, at 
the termination of the American war, had been 
conveyed 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, un- 
less 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 facto 
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, untaught by adversity to sympathize 
with the unfortunate, availed themselves against 
the black refugees, with such flagrant injustice, 
that their conduct occasioned the interference of 
