s to the insurrection, and, of course, to flog the negroes
till they confessed. Unfledged ensigns would come with their guard upon
a plantation, and despite the owner's assurance that there was no
feeling of insubordination among the negroes, they would set to work
flogging right and left, till in agony the poor negro would say
something which would be used to criminate some other, who in turn
would be flogged till in agony he made some assertion; and so it went
on, till the blood-thirsty young officer was satiated. On one plantation
a negro lad had been always brought up with one of the sons of the
proprietor, and was, in fact, quite a pet in the family. One of these
military courts visited the plantation, and insisted upon flogging this
pet slave till he confessed what he never knew. In vain his master
strove to convince the officer of his perfect innocence; he would not
listen, and the poor lad was tied up, and received seven hundred lashes,
during which punishment some remarks he made in the writhings of his
agony were noted down, and he was shot at Matanzas for the same. The
master's son, who was forced to witness this barbarity inflicted upon
the constant companion of his early youth, never recovered the shock,
and died the following year insane.

The streets of Matanzas were in some places running with negro blood. An
eye-witness told me that near the village of Guines he saw a negro
flogged with an aloe-leaf till both hip-bones were perfectly bare; and
there is little doubt that 1500 slaves died under the lash. You will
perhaps be surprised, most excellent John Bull, when I tell you that the
cruelties did not stop at the negroes, but extended even to whites who
claimed British protection. One of them was chained to a log of wood in
the open air for a hundred days and a hundred nights, despite the
strongest remonstrances on the part of the British authorities, and was
eventually unchained, to die two days after in jail. Several others were
imprisoned and cruelly treated; and when this reign of terror, worthy
even of Spain in her bloodiest days, was over, and their case was
inquired into, they were perfectly exonerated, and a compensation was
awarded them. This was in 1844. Some of them have since died from the
treatment they then received; and, if I am correctly informed, Spain--by
way of keeping up her character--has not paid to those who survive one
farthing of the sum awarded. Volumes might be filled with the a