24
MODES OF PUNISHMENT.
or two, to take an empty hogshead, and after driving plenty of nails into it, making the points to protrude in the inside, to put a slave or two into it, and heading it up, roll them down a steep hill ; and thus leave them to expire. Some masters, when their slaves were very ill, or very old, and could be of no further service, used to bury them alive ; and it is said, that upon being put into their graves, they have been heard to say, “ Pray, massa, no bury me, me no dead yet; do, massa, let dem take me out ;" and the master, with a curse upon his lips, has replied that he had plenty of money to buy more ; he did not want an old, half-dead negro. Gibbeting alive was another mode of punishment formerly in use ; and when adopted, the sufferers have been known to live more than a week. That any one could deliberately condemn a fellow-creature to such intolerable anguish seems almost impossible ; yet that such has been the case in Antigua, is remembered by some alive have heard of one instance in which a white man was the sufferer. I should not have noticed it in this place, was it not that it proves how much cruelty was practised even in those days. All will allow, or at least ought to do, that when a criminal suffers the extreme penalty of the law, it is done for the sake of example, not revenge ; and consequently, the mildest and quickest kind of death should be practised. The circum- " stance alluded to-, was as follows. A white man, known as Captain White, the owner of a small vessel, had for some length of time committed piracy upon the high seas ; but at last was taken, and brought into Antigua. He was condemned to die, and that death to be by gibbeting. A gibbet was accordingly prepared ; the wretched man was carried to a bay, near where St. James's Fort is now erected, and there, in the face of heaven, he was hung up in chains, alive ! with a loaf of bread and a calabash of water almost within his reach ; but which, like the waters of Tartarus to him of old, only mocked him with their approach, as the wind blew them backwards and" forwards. The man lived nine days in this