40 TlMEHRI. 
As against the white colonists, these free coloured 
people had rights not very far in advance of those of the 
black slaves. Any disrespect shown by a coloured man 
or woman to one of pure white blood, even if such dis- 
respect consisted only in much provoked insolence, was, 
if not legally yet practically, punished by fine, imprison- 
ment or even with degrading stripes. On the other hand 
it is curious to note that the coloured man or woman, 
however slight the proportion of European blood in his 
or her veins, looked down, in imitation so close as almost 
to amount to reproduction, of the feelings of the white 
man, upon the pure bred negro as an altogether inferior 
animal. 
Another, and a very troublesome part of the free 
population of Guiana at this time was formed by the 
bush-negroes of whom mention has already been made. 
The origin of these people has already been described. 
They were slaves who had escaped into the forest, and 
they therefore retained their freedom only as long as they 
could keep out of the clutches of their former masters. 
The only life possible to these people in wild forests, in 
a land unknown to them, was one of such terrible hard- 
ship that only extreme cruelty and wretchedness had 
induced its adoption. The bush-negroes were therefore 
generally the most brutalized, embittered and revengeful 
of the negroes. Under chosen leaders, they resisted, 
and even attacked, both their former masters and the 
native Indians, and made for themselves fortified en- 
the common error involved in using the word ' Creole' of coloured 
people. The West Indian adjective ' creole' is rightly applied not 
necessarily to ' a coloured person' but to an individual, either of black, 
coloured, or purest white blood, or to an animal, bom in the West Indies, 
