we found the custos sitting in state,
ready to communicate any official information which might be called for.
He expressed similar sentiments in the main, with those of Mr. Barclay.
He feared for the consequences of complete emancipation; the negroes
would to a great extent abandon the sugar cultivation and retire to the
woods, there to live in idleness, planting merely yams enough to keep
them alive, and in the process of time, retrograding into African
barbarism. The attorney did not see how it was possible to prevent this.
When asked whether he expected that such would be the case with the
negroes on Golden Grove, he replied that he did not think it would,
except with a very few persons. His people had been _so well treated_,
and had _so many comforts_, that they would not be at all likely to
abandon the estate! [Mark that!] Whose are the people that will desert
after 1840? Not Thomas McCornock's, Esq.! _They are too well situated.
Whose_ then will desert? _Mr. Jocken's_, or in other words, those who
are ill-treated, who are cruelly driven, whose fences are broken down,
and whose provision grounds are exposed to the cattle. They, and they
alone, will retire to the woods who can't get food any where else!

The custos thought the apprentices were behaving very ill. On being
asked if he had any trouble with his, he said, O, no! his apprentices
did quite well, and so did the apprentices generally, in the Plantain
Garden River Valley. But in _far off parishes_, he _heard_ that they
were very refractory and troublesome.

The custos testified that the negroes were very easily managed. He said
he had often thought that he would rather have the charge of six hundred
negroes, than of two hundred English sailors. He spoke also of the
temperate habits of the negroes. He had been in the island twenty-two
years, and he had never seen a negro woman drunk, on the estate. It was
very seldom that the men got drunk. There were not more than ten men on
Golden Grove, out of a population of five hundred, who were in the habit
of occasionally getting intoxicated. He also remarked that the negroes
were a remarkable people for their attention to the old and infirm among
them; they seldom suffered them to want, if it was in their power to
supply them. Among other remarks of the custos, was this sweeping
declaration--"_No man in his senses can pretend to defend slavery._"

After spending a day at Golden Grove, we proceeded to the adjacent
e