JAMAICA.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume I, Issue 68, 23 May 1866, Page 3

JAMAICA.

The royal Commission of Inquiry commenced their labors on January 25. They have examined a great many witnesaes, ani among them his Excellency Governor Eyre, whose testimony was looked forward to by the whole country with great anxiety. So far, however, the oral and documentary evidence he has given before the commission has not advanced him one step beyond the position in which he was placed by his despatches to the Secretary of State. The occurrences of the first three days, that is the outrages committed by the negroes, have been fully established, with the exception that many of the stories about the mutilation of the bodies of the murdered gentlemen have not been supported. The witnesses appearing before the commission in the first instance were those for the most part who testified to the measures of reprisal adopted by the Government. They brought to light some rather startling facts, among others that the whips used for flogging rebels were made partly of piano zoire, that with these instruments of torture women were flogged, that in some places people were hanged and shot without any form of trial whatever, and that the provost-marshal and others were apparently guilty of acts of wanton cruelty. Mr. Jackson, a stipendiary magistrate stated — the people in St. Thomas-in-the-East were most assuredly dissatisfied with the administration of justice. The dissatisfaction, in his opinion, was well-grounded. Whenever there was for hearing a case in which the evidence unfavorably affected parties possessing the sympathy of the local magistrates, the latter prevented justice being done by declining to attend in numbers sufficient to form a court. The arrest of Provost-Marshal Ramsay on the charge of murdering a man named Marshall, by ordering him to be hanged for grinning while he was being flogged, has taken place.