It is generally the natives of Africa by whom these murders are committed; the negroes born in the country are of a more yielding temper.  They have better learned the art of avoiding punishment, and submit to it more patiently when inflicted, having understood from their birth that it is one of the conditions of their existence.  The whip is always in sight.  “Nothing can be done without it,” said an Englishman to me, who had lived eleven years on the island, “you can not make the negroes work by the mild methods which are used by slaveholders in the United States; the blacks there are far more intelligent and more easily governed by moral means.”  Africans, the living witnesses of the present existence of the slave-trade, are seen everywhere; at every step you meet blacks whose cheeks are scarred with parallel slashes, with which they were marked in the African slave-market, and who can not even speak the mutilated Spanish current in the mouths of the Cuba negroes.

One day I stood upon the quay at Matanzas and saw the slaves unloading the large lighters which brought goods from the Spanish ships lying in the harbor—­casks of wine, jars of oil, bags of nuts, barrels of flour.  The men were naked to the hips; their only garment being a pair of trowsers.  I admired their ample chests, their massive shoulders, the full and muscular proportions of their arms, and the ease with which they shifted the heavy articles from place to place, or carried them on their heads.  “Some of these are Africans?” I said to a gentleman who resided on the island.  “They are all Africans,” he answered, “Africans to a man; the negro born in Cuba is of a lighter make.”

When I was at Guines, I went out to look at a sugar estate in the neighborhood, where the mill was turned by water, which a long aqueduct, from one of the streams that traverse the plain, conveyed over arches of stone so broad and massive that I could not help thinking of the aqueducts of Rome.  A gang of black women were standing in the secadero or drying-place, among the lumps of clayed sugar, beating them small with mallets; before them, walked to and fro the major-domo, with a cutlass by his side and a whip in his hand, I asked him how a planter could increase his stock of slaves.  “There is no difficulty,” he replied, “slaves are still brought to the island from Africa.  The other day five hundred were landed on the sea-shore to the south of this; for you must know, Senor, that we are but three or four leagues from the coast.”

“Was it done openly?” I inquired.

“Publicamente, Senor, publicamente;[8] they were landed on the sugar estate of El Pastor, and one hundred and seven more died on the passage from Africa.”

“Did the government know of it?”

He shrugged his shoulders.  “Of course the government knows it,” said he; “every body else knows it.”