oo vindictive to be good servants. There is
given by Abbe Gosselin in a paper in the _Transactions, Royal Society
of Canada for 1900_, an account of a mutiny of part of the garrison at
Niagara incited by a Panis probably in the service of an officer at
the post. Some of the mutineers were sentenced to death but made their
escape while the Panis, Charles, was sent to Martinique with a request
to the authorities to make him a slave and to take every precaution
that he should not escape to Canada or even to the English colonies. A
female slave of color belonging to Mme. de Francheville who had been
bought in the English Colonies set fire to her mistress' home the
night of the 10-11 April 1734, thus causing a conflagration which
destroyed a part of the city of Montreal. The unfortunate slave was
apprehended and tried for the crime then and for long after a capital
felony. Being found guilty, she was hanged June, 1734.

The increase in the number of slaves made necessary some regulation
concerning their liberation. September 1, 1736, Gilles Hocquart, the
Intendant already mentioned, made an ordinance concerning the
formalities requisite in the enfranchisement of slaves. Reciting that
he had been informed that certain persons in Canada had freed their
slaves without any other formality than verbally giving them their
liberty, and the necessity of fixing in an invariable manner the
status of slaves who should be enfranchised, he ordered that for the
future all enfranchisements should be by notarial act and that all
other attempted enfranchisements should be null and void.

Slaves unable to secure their freedom by legal means, however,
undertook sometimes to effect the same by flight. A royal decree of
July 23, 1745, recited the escape of three male and one female Negro
slaves from the English West India Island of Antigua to the French
Island of Guadeloupe and there sold. There followed a decision of the
Superior Council of Guadeloupe that the proceeds of the sale belonged
to the King of France and Negro slaves belonging to the enemy when
they came into a French colony became at once the property of His
Majesty. To make clear the course to pursue for the future, the decree
declared that Negro slaves who escape from enemy colonies into French
colonies and all they bring with them belong to His Majesty alone in
the same way as enemy ships and goods wrecked on his coasts.

With all of this security the ownership of slaves became