Through his mind sang the line of Lovelace: 

  “Stone walls do not a prison make,
   Nor iron bars a cage.”

But he gave it a fresh meaning, the very converse of that which its author had intended.  A prison, he reflected, was a prison, though it had neither walls nor bars, however spacious it might be.  And as he realized it that morning so he was to realize it increasingly as time sped on.  Daily he came to think more of his clipped wings, of his exclusion from the world, and less of the fortuitous liberty he enjoyed.  Nor did the contrasting of his comparatively easy lot with that of his unfortunate fellow-convicts bring him the satisfaction a differently constituted mind might have derived from it.  Rather did the contemplation of their misery increase the bitterness that was gathering in his soul.

Of the forty-two who had been landed with him from the Jamaica Merchant, Colonel Bishop had purchased no less than twenty-five.  The remainder had gone to lesser planters, some of them to Speightstown, and others still farther north.  What may have been the lot of the latter he could not tell, but amongst Bishop’s slaves Peter Blood came and went freely, sleeping in their quarters, and their lot he knew to be a brutalizing misery.  They toiled in the sugar plantations from sunrise to sunset, and if their labours flagged, there were the whips of the overseer and his men to quicken them.  They went in rags, some almost naked; they dwelt in squalor, and they were ill-nourished on salted meat and maize dumplings — food which to many of them was for a season at least so nauseating that two of them sickened and died before Bishop remembered that their lives had a certain value in labour to him and yielded to Blood’s intercessions for a better care of such as fell ill.  To curb insubordination, one of them who had rebelled against Kent, the brutal overseer, was lashed to death by negroes under his comrades’ eyes, and another who had been so misguided as to run away into the woods was tracked, brought back, flogged, and then branded on the forehead with the letters “F.  T.,” that all might know him for a fugitive traitor as long as he lived.  Fortunately for him the poor fellow died as a consequence of the flogging.

After that a dull, spiritless resignation settled down upon the remainder.  The most mutinous were quelled, and accepted their unspeakable lot with the tragic fortitude of despair.

Peter Blood alone, escaping these excessive sufferings, remained outwardly unchanged, whilst inwardly the only change in him was a daily deeper hatred of his kind, a daily deeper longing to escape from this place where man defiled so foully the lovely work of his Creator.  It was a longing too vague to amount to a hope.  Hope here was inadmissible.  And yet he did not yield to despair.  He set a mask of laughter on his saturnine countenance and went his way, treating the sick to the profit of Colonel Bishop, and encroaching further and further upon the preserves of the two other men of medicine in Bridgetown.