From Amity Hall, we drove to Manchioneal, a small village ten miles north of the Plantain Garden River Valley.  We had a letter to the special magistrate for that district, R. Chamberlain, Esq., a colored gentleman, and the first magistrate we found in the parish of St. Thomas in the East, who was faithful to the interests of the apprentices.  He was a boarder at the public house, where we were directed for lodgings, and as we spent a few days in the village, we had opportunities of obtaining much information from him, as well as of attending some of his courts.  Mr. C. had been only five months in the district of Manchioneal, having been removed thither from a distant district.  Being a friend of the apprentices, he is hated and persecuted by the planters.  He gave us a gloomy picture of the oppressions and cruelties of the planters.  Their complaints brought before him are often of the most trivial kind; yet because he does not condemn the apprentices to receive a punishment which the most serious offences alone could justify him in inflicting, they revile and denounce him as unfit for his station.  He represents the planters as not having the most distant idea that it is the province of the special magistrate to secure justice to the apprentice; but they regard it as his sole duty to help them in getting from the laborers as much work as whips, and chains, and tread-wheels can extort.  His predecessor, in the Manchioneal district, answered perfectly to the planters’ beau ideal.  He ordered a cat to be kept on every estate in his district, to be ready for use as he went around on his weekly visits.  Every week he inspected the cats, and when they became too much worn to do good execution, he condemned them, and ordered new ones to be made.

Mr. C. said the most frequent complaints made by the planters are for insolence.  He gave a few specimens of what were regarded by the planters as serious offences.  An overseer will say to his apprentice, “Work along there faster, you lazy villain, or I’ll strike you;” the apprentice will reply, “You can’t strike me now,” and for this he is taken before the magistrate on the complaint of insolence.  An overseer, in passing the gang on the field, will hear them singing; he will order them, in a peremptory tone to stop instantly, and if they continue singing, they are complained of for insubordination.  An apprentice has been confined to the hospital with disease,—­when he gets able to walk, tired of the filthy sick house, he hobbles to his hut, where he may have the attentions of his wife until he gets well.  That is called absconding from labor!  Where the magistrate does not happen to be an independent man, the complaint is sustained, and the poor invalid is sentenced to the treadmill for absenting himself from work.  It is easy to conjecture the dreadful consequence.  The apprentice, debilitated by sickness, dragged off twenty-five miles on foot to Morant Bay, mounted on the wheel, is unable to keep the step with the stronger ones, slips off and hangs by the wrists, and his flesh is mangled and torn by the wheel.