THE JAMAICA AFFAIR.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume I, Issue 77, 4 June 1866, Page 3

THE JAMAICA AFFAIR.

We have not yefe any detail of the actual number slain, save from the evidence of one grave-digger at 3'ioranfc Bay, who counted above 200 bodies consigned to earth by himself. But the mere slaughter was not the worst. The flogging (it stands in the evidence, not of black men, but of a white pi*o-vost-marshal, Peter Bruce) went on from six in the morning till dark. Bruce was directed to make the cat heavier with wire. From the evidence of a magistrate at Bath, Mr. Kirklaud, in the Jamaica Guardian, we extract the following : — "Many were flogged, about fifteen a day; only one man was flogged severely, and he got forty lashes. The people were punished in my uucle's yard in Bath. There was some wire used in the cats, but only for the men, not for the women. No military officer saw the cats. The only magistrates were my uncle and myself. He gave the directions for the making of the cats, but he left it to Bruce. I saw the cats. I saw four fully. All those used for the men contained wire. The only order Bruce got was to make them according to the army pattern. There were four knots in each thou^. Only two men I saw were punished much; whether from tenderness of skin or not I cant say, but they bled more than others. I only saw one man get 100 lashes. He was afterwards hanged. Only one man was flogged before he was sent to Morant Bay, but that was by a mistake. There were about 150 sent down to Mo rant Bay under Maroon guard. Those Hogged at Bath were let go." It will be no longer possible for us, after this official testimony, to comfort ourselves Avith the belief that it was impossible that men could be flogged first and hang afterwards, or that women could have been flogged by Englishmen. But if it be possible, the shame is made more burning by the claim that seems put in for tenderness and delicacy because women were not flogged with wire. To these inhuman monsters it would appear that only the physical pain were a thing to be counted, and that the atrocity of stripping women naked that they might be flogged by men seemed nothing, if only they were not badly cut. But how they were administered may perhaps be credited, since the fact now stands an official confession, from the following evidence of William Christie, a man residiug on his own property at Fonthill : — " When the soldiers came my father went to the woods. They tied my mother's hands on the post, stripped her stark naked, and flogged her. They gave 30 lashes. I was on a hill not far off. I counted them myself, and when I came in she told me." These are but a sample of the horrors which are now proved to have been committed. — \'aih/ News, March 3,