mill. It is what Zachary Bayley feared when he tore across the country

in the dawn of the tropical morning.

By noon he had collected 130 men, “white men and trusty blacks.” We do not know the proportion of white men to “trusty blacks,” but we do know that the white men were all imbued with the same awful fear, the fear lest all the Koromantyns in the island, and there were thousands of them, should revolt. These men Bayley led in pursuit of the rebels.

The wasteful savages had dissipated the advantage they had gained. They might have held the whole colony up to ransom, but instead they were actually found at Haywood Hall roasting an ox by the flames of the buildings they had set on fire.

I should like to know more precise details, but Edwards only says the whites attacked them with great fury, killed eight or nine on the spot, took several prisoners and drove the rest into the woods. Here, of course, sustenance could not be found for so large a party all at once, and they were obliged to act wholly on the defensive. The ruling class when they were thoroughly aroused had this in their favour, they had some sort of discipline, the blacks had none. Sullenly enough they had retired to the woods, and there Tacky the chief who had instituted the revolt was killed by one of the parties which constantly harried the wretched fugitives, and before long some died, some made good in the recesses of the mountains and the rest were taken.

But before they were conquered the revolt had spread across the island to Westmoreland.

“In St Mary,” writes Bridges, “they were repulsed, broken and disheartened. In Westmoreland they were flushed with early victory; murderous success crowned their first efforts; they beat off the militia, increased their ranks to a thousand effective men, and after a tedious struggle they could be subdued only by the exertions of a regiment of regulars, the militia of the neighbouring parish and the Maroons of the interior. The most cruel excesses that ever stained the pages of history, marked the progress of these rebels; and the details which would elucidate barbarity scarcely human, almost chills the warm hope of civilisation ever reaching the bosoms in which ferocity is so innate.”

Edwards takes some trouble to show us what the civilisation of the times meant and what might be hoped from it. It was better to die than be taken, for there was little to choose between black and white in fiendish cruelty. The white gentleman ran the ignorant savage close.

“It was thought necessary,” says Edwards, “to make a few examples of some of the most guilty. Of three who were clearly proved to have been concerned in the murders at Ballard's Valley, one was condemned to be burnt and the other two to be hung up alive in irons and left to perish in that dreadful situation.”

There is in the Jamaican Institute a set of the irons used for such a sentence. When found, they had the bones of a skeleton in them, the skeleton of a woman!

They burnt the man after the fashion that Hans Sloane described. He uttered not a groan when they applied the fire to his feet, and saw his legs and feet reduced to ashes with the “utmost firmness and composure. Then getting one of his hands loose he seized a burning brand and flung it in the face of his executioner.” Truly a man it seems to me who might have been worth something better.

In the case of the other two, Fortune and Kingston, the whole proceeding was gone through with a ghastly deliberation that makes us shiver now although it happened a hundred and sixty years ago. They were given a hearty meal and then they were hung up on a gibbet which was erected on the parade of the town of Kingston. Edwards declares that from the time they were hung up till the moment they died they never uttered a complaint. A week later they were still alive and as the authorities thought that one of them had something to tell his late master, Zachary Bayley, who was on his plantation, Edwards was sent for, but though he had an interpreter he could not understand what the man wanted and he only remembers that one of them laughed immoderately at something, he did not know what. They must have had water, for one lived for eight days and the other one died on the morning of the ninth day.

“Throughout their torture,” remarks Bridges, “they evinced such hardened insolence and brutal insensibility that even pity was silenced.” What did he expect them to do? They could not expect any mercy, so why should they express regret except for having failed?

But did Bridges really believe, “that their condition was gradually rising in the scale of humanity and the tide of Christianity, which in the wilds of Africa never could have reached them, was here flowing with a gentle but accelerated motion.” God save us from the Christianity preached by some of its advocates.

Here I may put it on record that the slaves, no matter to what torture they were subjected, never betrayed each other. In all the tale of conspiracies and rebellion seldom are we told of a slave having betrayed the secret of the proposed rising, and when one did there was generally strong reason for it. Once a girl begged that the life of her nursling might be saved. The man of whom she begged the baby's life refused--all the whites must die. So she saved the baby she loved and its mother and father by betraying the rebellion. Then again, sometimes I think a girl might tell to save the life of her white lover, the book-keeper or the overseer of the estate.

One would think that living amidst a hostile people every white man would be most careful in his comings and goings, careful even of what he said, for though at first the negroes did not understand English, the house servants soon learned it, and we may be very sure that the doings and sayings of the people up at the Great House were reported daily in the slave village and listened to with as great avidity as to-day we read the news of the world in the daily papers.

Besides, all the slaves were not hostile. The Creoles, born to the conditions in which they found themselves, were more contented. They regarded slavery as their natural lot, and it was only by slow degrees that the talk of emancipation grew. But it did grow and the rebellion of 1882, a very devastating one, which ran like wildfire through Westmoreland, Hanover, and St James', was caused mainly because at the Great Houses and the “Buckras'” tables the white people talking carelessly before the black servants, to whom they never gave a thought, declared emphatically that all this talk of emancipation was so much rubbish.

And at Christmas time, the angry, disappointed, misguided slaves rose. I have always taken particular interest in this rebellion, because I once enjoyed the hospitality of Montpelier, one of the loveliest pens in Jamaica, where much money has been spent, and beneath the trees on the green grass rest white Indian cattle bred for draught purposes. Mr Edwards, the owner, told me that he used to hear stories in his youth of how the slaves burned the houses, and mills, and cane pieces, and the night was alight with blazing fires. Major Hall and his wife, high in the hills at Kempshot, received warning just in time, and through the darkness made their way to Worcester, lying far below.

It must have been terrible, stumbling down that stony mountain path through the darkness, with the dread fear that the enemy might reach Worcester before them. Neither husband nor wife returned, nor was the house rebuilt, and not till nearly fifty years afterwards did Mr Maxwell Hall, seeking through the country for a site on which to build an observatory, choose a hill on Kempshot Pen just above the place where the old house had stood. Where the country was not dense jungle it was occupied by negro cultivators, the most destructive cultivators perhaps in the world, of the old house there was not one stone left upon another, nothing remained but the Mango Walk. It stands there still, the only monument to the white people who once lived on that spot. The trees have long given over bearing, but the avenue is a thing of beauty, and to the very tops has grown a lovely creeper which strews the ground beneath with heavily scented white bellshaped flowers.

It has nothing to do with them, of course, but in my mind that beautiful Walk stands for the slave rebellions, the terrible times that are past and gone but hardly forgotten. In judging the relations of the white man and the black, in weighing the causes of discord between them, in considering the shortcomings of both, we must always remember that past when they lived together bound by a tie galling to both which has left behind it a legacy of bitterness that only time and success on the part of the black man can sweeten.