When General O’Donnell obtained the captain-generalship of Cuba, whether his object was to obtain honours from Spain for quelling an insurrection, or whether he was deceived, I cannot decide; but an imaginary insurrection was got up, and a military court was sent in every direction throughout the island.  These courts were to obtain all information as to the insurrection, and, of course, to flog the negroes till they confessed.  Unfledged ensigns would come with their guard upon a plantation, and despite the owner’s assurance that there was no feeling of insubordination among the negroes, they would set to work flogging right and left, till in agony the poor negro would say something which would be used to criminate some other, who in turn would be flogged till in agony he made some assertion; and so it went on, till the blood-thirsty young officer was satiated.  On one plantation a negro lad had been always brought up with one of the sons of the proprietor, and was, in fact, quite a pet in the family.  One of these military courts visited the plantation, and insisted upon flogging this pet slave till he confessed what he never knew.  In vain his master strove to convince the officer of his perfect innocence; he would not listen, and the poor lad was tied up, and received seven hundred lashes, during which punishment some remarks he made in the writhings of his agony were noted down, and he was shot at Matanzas for the same.  The master’s son, who was forced to witness this barbarity inflicted upon the constant companion of his early youth, never recovered the shock, and died the following year insane.

The streets of Matanzas were in some places running with negro blood.  An eye-witness told me that near the village of Guines he saw a negro flogged with an aloe-leaf till both hip-bones were perfectly bare; and there is little doubt that 1500 slaves died under the lash.  You will perhaps be surprised, most excellent John Bull, when I tell you that the cruelties did not stop at the negroes, but extended even to whites who claimed British protection.  One of them was chained to a log of wood in the open air for a hundred days and a hundred nights, despite the strongest remonstrances on the part of the British authorities, and was eventually unchained, to die two days after in jail.  Several others were imprisoned and cruelly treated; and when this reign of terror, worthy even of Spain in her bloodiest days, was over, and their case was inquired into, they were perfectly exonerated, and a compensation was awarded them.  This was in 1844.  Some of them have since died from the treatment they then received; and, if I am correctly informed, Spain—­by way of keeping up her character—­has not paid to those who survive one farthing of the sum awarded.  Volumes might be filled with the atrocities of 1844; but the foregoing is enough of the sickening subject.  When I call to mind the many amiable and high-minded Spaniards I have met, the national conduct of Spain becomes indeed a mystery.  But to return to present times.