ciiap. vi. 
VARIETIES OF PUNISHMENT. 
163 
rank and lineage placed him near the throne, to the poor and 
friendless slave,—all had been punished for supposed or ac¬ 
knowledged participation in the reading of the Christian’s hook 
or the offering of the Christian’s prayer. The punishments in¬ 
flicted had been almost as varied as the condition or the 
circumstances of the criminal. The tangena, or ordeal of 
poison-water, had frequently been administered with fatal 
effects. Fines had been imposed, from a single dollar to an 
amount equal to the estimated value at which a delinquent or 
his family could be ransomed. Thus, on one occasion, a 
prince was fined 100 dollars, estimated as half his redemption 
price. Confiscation and seizure had been made of house and 
land, and of every kind of property belonging to the accused. 
Multitudes were reduced to slavery, sold in the public markets, 
and subjected to all the ordinary miseries resulting from sepa¬ 
ration from their nearest relatives, frequently with two extra 
conditions intended to enhance the severity of their punish¬ 
ment, viz., that they should only be sold to those who would 
engage to make them labour continuously, and that their 
relatives or friends should not be allowed to redeem them, 
but that they should be, as it was expressed, “ like weeds of 
the waste, bowing down their heads till they died.” Amongst 
the communications which I received, were deeply affecting 
accounts of the circumstances of some who, nineteen years 
before, or at a later period, had been sold into slavery, and of 
the prices which had been paid for them by their purchasers. 
Some of these were the widows of those who had been put to 
death, some were single men or women, others were heads of 
families, and their wives and children were sold with them. 
The prices ranged from 23 to 90 dollars for a single indi¬ 
vidual, and from 110 dollars for a man and his wife to 178 
for a man and three children. 
Numbers, not sold into perpetual slavery, had been reduced 
in rank and sentenced to the hardest kinds of labour, such as 
