After our visit to Silver Hill, our attention was particularly turned to the condition of the negro grounds.  Most of them were very clean and flourishing.  Large plats of the onion, of cocoa, plantain, banana, yam, potatoe, and other tropic vegetables, were scattered all around within five or six miles of a plantation.  We were much pleased with the appearance of them during a ride on a Friday.  In the forenoon, they had all been vacant; not a person was to be seen in them; but after one o’clock, they began gradually to be occupied, till, at the end of an hour, where-ever we went, we saw men, women, and children laboring industriously in their little gardens.  In some places, the hills to their very summits were spotted with cultivation.  Till Monday morning the apprentices were free, and they certainly manifested a strong disposition to spend that time in taking care of themselves.  The testimony of the numerous apprentices with whom we conversed, was to the same effect as our observation.  They all testified that they were paying as much attention to their grounds as they ever did, but that their provisions had been cut short by the drought.  They had their land all prepared for a new crop, and were only waiting for rain to put in the seed.  Mr. Bourne corroborated their statement, and remarked, that he never found the least difficulty in procuring laborers.  Could he have the possession of the largest plantation in the island to-day, he had no doubt that, within a week, he could procure free laborers enough to cultivate every acre.

On one occasion, while among the mountains, we were impressed on a jury to sit in inquest on the body of a negro woman found dead on the high road.  She was, as appeared in evidence, on her return from the house of correction, at Half-Way-Tree, where she had been sentenced for fourteen days, and been put on the treadmill.  She had complained to some of her acquaintances of harsh treatment there, and said they had killed her, and that if she ever lived to reach home, she should tell all her massa’s negroes never to cross the threshold of Half-Way-Tree, as it would kill them.  The evidence, however, was not clear that she died in consequence of such treatment, and the jury, accordingly, decided that she came to her death by some cause unknown to them.

Nine of the jury were overseers, and if they, collected together indiscriminately on this occasion, were a specimen of those who have charge of the apprentices in this island, they must be most degraded and brutal men.  They appeared more under the influence of low passions, more degraded by sensuality, and but little more intelligent, than the negroes themselves.  Instead of possessing irresponsible power over their fellows, they ought themselves to be under the power of the most strict and energetic laws.  Our visits to the plantations, and inquiries on this point, confirmed this opinion.  They are the ‘feculum’ of European society—­ignorant, passionate, licentious.  We do them no injustice when we say this, nor when we further add, that the apprentices suffer in a hundred ways which the law cannot reach, gross insults and oppression from their excessive rapaciousness and lust.  What must it have been during slavery?