We have in our possession a number of official documents from gentlemen,
officers of the government, and variously connected with its
administration, in the different islands which we visited: some of
these--such as could not be conveniently incorporated into the body of
the work--we insert in the form of an appendix. To insert them _all_,
would unduly increase the size of the present volume. Those not embodied
in this appendix, will be published in the periodicals of the American
Anti-Slavery Society.

* * * * *

OFFICIAL COMMUNICATION FROM E.B. LYON, ESQ., SPECIAL MAGISTRATE.

_Jamaica, Hillingdon, near Falmouth, Trelawney, May 15, 1837_.

TO J.H. KIMBALL., ESQ., and J.A. THOME, ESQ.

DEAR SIRS,--Of the operation of the apprenticeship system in this
district, from the slight opportunity I have had of observing the
conduct of managers and apprentices, I could only speak conjecturally,
and my opinions, wanting the authority of experience, would be of little
service to you; I shall therefore confine the remarks I have to make, to
the operation of the system in the district from which I have
lately removed.

I commenced my duties in August, 1834, and from the paucity of special
magistrates at that eventful era, I had the superintendence of a most
extensive district, comprising nearly one half of the populous parish of
St. Thomas in the East, and the whole of the parish of St. David,
embracing an apprentice population of nearly eighteen thousand,--in
charge of which I continued until December, when I was relieved of St.
David, and in March, 1835, my surveillance was confined to that portion
of St. Thomas in the East, consisting of the coffee plantations in the
Blue Mountains, and the sugar estates of Blue Mountain Valley, over
which I continued to preside until last March, a district containing a
population of four thousand two hundred and twenty-seven apprentices, of
which two thousand eighty-seven were males, and two thousand one hundred
and forty, females. The apprentices of the Blue Mountain Valley were, at
the period of my assumption of the duties of a special magistrate, the
most disorderly in the island. They were greatly excited, and almost
desperate from disappointment, in finding their trammels under the new
law, nearly as burdensome as under the old, and their condition, in many
respects, much more intolerable. They were also extremely irritated at
what they deemed an attempt