e duties of a
soldier, many things seem absolute tyranny which would appear to a
civilised man a mere necessary restraint. To keep the restless body of
an African negro in a position to which he has not been accustomed; to
cramp his splay feet, with his great toes standing out, into European
shoes made for feet of a different form; to place a collar round his
neck, which is called a stock, and which to him is cruel torture; above
all, to confine him every night to his barracks--are almost
insupportable. One unacquainted with the habits of the negro cannot
conceive with what abhorrence he looks on having his disposition to
nocturnal rambles checked by barrack regulations.

"Formerly the 'King's man,' as the black soldier loved to call himself,
looked (not without reason) contemptuously on the planter's slave,
although he himself was after all but a slave to the State; but these
recruits were enlisted shortly after a number of their recently imported
countrymen were wandering freely over the country, working either as
free labourers, or settling, to use an apt American phrase, as
squatters; and to assert that the recruit, while under military
probation, is better off than the free Trinidad labourer, who goes where
he lists and earns as much in one day as will keep him for three days,
is an absurdity. Accordingly, we find that Lieutenant-Colonel Bush, who
commanded the 1st West India Regiment, thought that the mutiny was
mainly owing to the ill-advice of their civil, or, we should rather say,
unmilitary countrymen. This, to a certain degree, was the fact; but, by
the declaration of Daaga and many of his countrymen, it is evident that
the seeds of the mutiny were sown on the passage from Africa.

"It has been asserted that the recruits were driven to mutiny by hard
treatment of their commanding officers. There seems not the slightest
truth in this assertion; they were treated with fully as much kindness
as their situation would admit of, and their chief was peculiarly a
favourite of Colonel Bush and the officers, notwithstanding Daaga's
violent and ferocious temper often caused complaints to be brought
against him.

"On the night of the 17th of June, 1837, the people of San Josef were
kept awake by the recruits, about 280 in number, singing the war-song of
the Paupaus. This wild song consisted of a short air and chorus. The
tone was, although wild, not inharmonious, and the words rather
euphonious. As near as our alphabe