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very useful to my master; and saved him, as he used to acknowledge,
above a hundred pounds a year. Nor did he scruple to say I was of more
advantage to him than any of his clerks; though their usual wages in
the West Indies are from sixty to a hundred pounds current a year.
I have sometimes heard it asserted that a negro cannot earn his master
the first cost; but nothing can be further from the truth. I suppose
nine tenths of the mechanics throughout the West Indies are negro
slaves; and I well know the coopers among them earn two dollars a day;
the carpenters the same, and oftentimes more; as also the masons,
smiths, and fishermen, &c. and I have known many slaves whose masters
would not take a thousand pounds current for them. But surely this
assertion refutes itself; for, if it be true, why do the planters and
merchants pay such a price for slaves? And, above all, why do those
who make this assertion exclaim the most loudly against the abolition
of the slave trade? So much are men blinded, and to such inconsistent
arguments are they driven by mistaken interest! I grant, indeed, that
slaves are some times, by half-feeding, half-clothing, over-working
and stripes, reduced so low, that they are turned out as unfit for
service, and left to perish in the woods, or expire on a dunghill.
My master was several times offered by different gentlemen one hundred
guineas for me; but he always told them he would not sell me, to my
great joy: and I used to double my diligence and care for fear of
getting into the hands of those men who did not allow a valuable slave
the common support of life. Many of them even used to find fault with
my master for feeding his slaves so well as he did; although I often
went hungry, and an Englishman might think my fare very indifferent;
but he used to tell them he always would do it, because the slaves
thereby looked better and did more work.
While I was thus employed by my master I was often a witness to
cruelties of every kind, which were exercised on my unhappy fellow
slaves. I used frequently to have different cargoes of new negroes in
my care for sale; and it was almost a constant practice with our
clerks, and other whites, to commit violent depredations on the
chastity of the female slaves; and these I was, though with
reluctance, obliged to submit to at all times, being unable to help
them. When we have had some of these slaves on board my master's
vessels to carry them to other islands, or to America, I have known
our mates to commit these acts most shamefully, to the disgrace, not
of Christians only, but of men. I have even known them gratify their
brutal passion with females not ten years old; and these abominations
some of them practised to such scandalous excess, that one of our
captains discharged the mate and others on that account. And yet in
Montserrat I have seen a negro man staked to the ground, and cut most
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