’To the African savage, while being drilled into the 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. {172}

’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 the seeds of 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.

’A correspondent of the Naval and Military Gazette was under an apprehension that the mutineers would be joined by the praedial apprentices of the circumjacent estates:  not the slightest foundation existed for this apprehension.  Some months previous to this Daaga had planned a mutiny, but this was interrupted by sending a part of the Paupau and Yarraba recruits to St. Lucia.  The object of all those conspiracies was to get back to Guinea, which they thought they could accomplish by marching to eastward.

’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 alphabet can convey them, they ran thus:—­