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THE COMMON WIND
 THE
COMMON
WIND

Afro-American Currents in the

Age of the Haitian Revolution

Julius S. Scott

Foreword by Marcus Rediker

 First published by Verso 2018
© Julius S. Scott 2018
Foreword © Marcus Rediker 2018

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-247-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-249-9 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-250-5 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Minion Pro by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed in the US by Maple Press
 To my parents and to the
memory of my grandparents
 Contents

Foreword by Marcus Rediker

Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Map
1 “Pandora’s Box”: The Masterless Caribbean at the End of the
Eighteenth Century
2 “Negroes in Foreign Bottoms”: Sailors, Slaves, and
Communication
3 “The Suspence Is Dangerous in a Thousand Shapes”: News,
Rumor, and Politics on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution
4 “Ideas of Liberty Have Sunk So Deep”: Communication and
Revolution, 1789–93
5 “Know Your True Interests”: Saint-Domingue and the Americas,
1793–1800
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
 Foreword
Marcus Rediker

TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy man of men!

Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;—
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

This book takes its title from a sonnet William Wordsworth wrote in
1802: “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” the great leader of the Haitian
Revolution, who would soon die of pneumonia as a prisoner of
Napoleon in Fort de Joux in eastern France.
Julius S. Scott shows us the collective human power behind
Wordsworth’s words. He focuses on “the breathing of the common
wind,” asking who inhaled the history of Toussaint and the revolution
and who whispered it all out again as subversive stories, to circulate
with velocity and force around the Atlantic. Scott gives substance to
Wordsworth’s beautiful abstraction by showing “unconquerable
minds” at work—a motley crew of sailors, runaway slaves, free
people of color, maroons, deserted soldiers, market women, escaped
convicts, and smugglers. These people, in motion, became the
vectors through which news and experience circulated in, around,
and through the Haitian Revolution. Scott gives us a breathtaking
social and intellectual history of revolution from below.

It would not be exactly right to call The Common Wind an

“underground classic.” Its status as a classic is not in doubt, but the
landed metaphor would be wrong: the book is about what
happened, not underground, but rather below decks, at sea, and on
the docks, on ships and in canoes, and on the waterfronts of rough-
and-tumble port cities in the era of the Haitian Revolution. It would,
however, be right to say that the book and its reputation parallel the
world of sailors and other mobile workers who are its central
subject: both have had a fugitive existence—hard to find and known
about largely through word-of-mouth stories. For decades historians
have spoken at conferences in hushed, admiring, conspiratorial
tones about Scott’s work—“have you heard …?” From its inception as
a doctoral dissertation in 1986, through its endless citation by
scholars in a variety of fields down to the present, The Common
Wind has long occupied an unusual place in the world of scholarship.
I vividly recall the moment I first heard. Julius S. Scott’s friend
and mentor at Duke University, Peter Wood, had come in 1985 to
Georgetown University, where I taught at the time, to give a lecture.
Afterward, as we crossed “Red Square” and discussed questions that
arose about his talk, Wood mentioned that he had a Ph.D. student
who was studying the movement by sea of the ideas and news of
the Haitian Revolution during and after the 1790s, the decade in
which the Atlantic was in flames, from Port-au-Prince to Belfast to
Paris and London.
My first words to Wood were, “how on earth can someone study
that?” Bear in mind, I had recently completed a dissertation on
eighteenth - century Atlantic sailors, so if anyone could have been
expected to know how Scott did it, it might have been me. Even so,
I was stunned by Wood’s description of the project—and more than
curious to learn more. Wood put us in touch, Scott and I began to
correspond, and a year or so later, after its submission and defense,
I read “The Common Wind.” I was convinced then, and I am
convinced now, that it is one of the most creative historical studies I
have ever read.
Scott takes on an issue that long vexed slaveowners around the
Atlantic—what one of them in 1791 called the “unknown mode of
conveying intelligence amongst Negroes.” Intelligence is precisely
the right word, for the knowledge that circulated on “the common
wind” was strategic in its applications, linking news of English
abolitionism, Spanish reformism, and French revolutionism to local
struggles across the Caribbean. Mobile people used webs of
commerce and their own autonomous mobility to form subversive
networks, of which the ruling classes of the day were keenly aware
even if latter-day historians, until Scott, were not.
Scott thus creates a new way to see one of history’s biggest
themes, what Eric Hobsbawm famously called “the age of
revolution.” He shifts our view in two directions: we see the flaming
epoch from below and from the seaside. By emphasizing the men
and women who connected by sea Paris, Sevilla, and London to
Port-au-Prince, Santiago de Cuba, and Kingston, and who then in
small vessels connected ports, plantations, islands, and colonies to
each other, Scott creates a new, highly imaginative transnational
geography of struggle. Instances of resistance from below in
various, hitherto disconnected parts of the world now appear as
constituent parts of a broad human movement. The forces—and the
makers—of revolution are illuminated as never before.
The book is populated by long-forgotten figures who once upon a
time inspired stories of their own. A Cap Français runaway called
himself “Sans-Peur” (“Without Fear”)—truly a name with a message,
both for his fellow enemies of slavery and for anyone who might try
to hunt him down. Nameless African market women in Saint-
Domingue called each other “sailor,” expressing through their
greetings a form of solidarity that stretched back to the seventeenth-
century buccaneers. John Anderson, known as “Old Blue,” was a
Jamaican sailor who escaped his owner with a huge iron collar
around his neck. He eluded recapture along the waterfront for
fourteen years, during which time his reputation was “as long and
distinctive as his graying beard” (74). The richness of the book’s
narrative is extraordinary.
A key to Scott’s work is the port city, where mobile peoples from
around the world came together to work. Brought into cooperative
laboring relationships by transnational capital to move the
commodities of the world, these workers translated their cooperation
into projects of their own. Scott shows how the capitalist mode of
production actually worked in port cities, not only generating
massive wealth through trade, but also producing oppositional
movements from below. As the miserable Lord Balcarres, governor
of Jamaica, explained in 1800, “turbulent people of all nations” made
up the lower class of Kingston. Characterized by “a general levelling
spirit throughout” they were primed for insurrection—ready to torch
the town and leave it in ashes (70). Scott shows how the waterfront
became a “cauldron of insurrection” (114) and how transnational
“cycles of unrest” erupted in many port cities during the 1730s, the
1760s, and the 1790s. The last of these exploded into an Atlantic-
wide revolution.
Scott was doing transnational and Atlantic history long before
that approach and that field had become cutting-edge forces in
historical writing. To say that he was ahead of his time would be an
understatement. Many of the sentences he penned more than thirty
years ago read as if they were written yesterday. “Sweeping across
linguistic, geographic, and imperial boundaries, the tempest created
by mobile people in … slave societies would prove a major turning
point in the history of the Americas” (xv). Such conclusions are
based on deep archival research carried out in Spain, Britain,
Jamaica, and the United States, and on published primary sources
from and about Cuba, Saint Domingue, and other parts of the
Caribbean. They tell a startling new story in the proud annals of
“history from below.”
Scott has drawn creatively on a rich body of radical scholarship in
conceptualizing the book. From Christopher Hill’s The World Turned
Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution (1972), Scott
takes the notion of the “masterless,” originally used to describe the
footloose, often expropriated men and women of the seventeenth
century, to create something entirely new, “the masterless
Caribbean,” the men and women who occupied and moved around
and between the highly “mastered” spaces of the plantation system.
From C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: Herman
Melville and the World We Live In (1953), Scott takes the motley,
floating subjects who connected the world in the early modern era
and who later came to life in Melville’s sea novels. Scott also draws
on the work of Georges Lefebvre, the great historian of the French
Revolution who coined the phrase “history from below” in the 1930s
and who showed, in his classic work The Great Fear of 1789: Rural
Panic in Revolutionary France (1932), how rumor drove a great
social and political upheaval. Rumors of emancipation, spread by
masterless motley crews, became a material force across the
Caribbean and around the Atlantic during the 1790s.
The Common Wind is one of those rare works that conveys not
only new evidence and new arguments, though there are plenty of
both, but an entirely new vision of a historical period, in this case
the age of revolution, one of the most profound moments in world
history. The Haitian Revolution, Wordsworth would be happy to
know, “dies not.” Julius S. Scott follows in the wake of the
undefeated people he studies by telling us a new story—of exultation
and agony, of love and revolution. He has given us a gift for the
ages.
 Preface

In the summer of 1792, just three days before the third anniversary
of the storming of the Bastille in Paris, three volunteer army
battalions waited anxiously at the French port of La Rochelle to ship
out to the French Caribbean. Eager, loyal to the French republic, and
firmly committed to the ideals of the revolution which continued to
unfold around them, these soldiers nevertheless possessed only a
vague notion of the complex situation which awaited them in the
colonies.
Once the French Revolution began in 1789, inhabitants of
France’s possessions overseas perceived the sweeping governmental
and social changes in the mother country to represent an
opportunity to advance their own interests. Planters and merchants
pursued greater freedom from the control of colonial ministers, free
people of color sought to rid the colonies of caste inequality, but the
slaves, who made up the vast majority of the population in all the
French territories in America, mounted the most fundamental
challenge to metropolitan authority. Inspired by the ideas of “liberty,
equality, and fraternity,” sporadic uprisings of slaves occurred in the
French islands as early as the fall of 1789. While white colonists
managed to contain these early disturbances, in August 1791 a
massive rebellion of slaves erupted in Saint-Domingue (present-day
Haiti), France’s richest and most important Caribbean slave colony.
Even as these young troops massed at La Rochelle, French forces
continued to fight in vain to subdue the revolution of slaves in Saint-
Domingue, which had now lasted almost a full year. The volunteers
faced a difficult task: to re-establish order in Saint-Domingue in the
name of the French National Assembly.
Before departing, the young recruits underwent an inspection by
one General La Salle, himself ready to leave for Saint-Domingue as
part of the same detachment. Two of these newly raised units had,
after careful democratic deliberation, adopted slogans describing
their mission and their commitment, as did many of the battalions
raised in the days of the French Revolution. They emblazoned the
precious words across their caps and sewed them upon the colorful
banners which they held aloft. La Salle examined the slogans with
special interest. The flag of one of the battalions read on one side
“Virtue in action,” and “I am vigilant for the country” on the other,
watchwords which La Salle found acceptable. But the slogan chosen
by the Loire battalion caught the general’s discerning eye: “Live Free
or Die.”
Concerned that the soldiers may not understand the delicate
nature of their errand, the general assembled the troops and
explained to them the danger which such words posed “in a land
where all property is based on the enslavement of Negroes, who, if
they adopted this slogan themselves, would be driven to massacre
their masters and the army which is crossing the sea to bring peace
and law to the colony.” While commending their strong commitment
to the ideal of freedom, La Salle advised the troops to find a new
and less provocative way to express that commitment. Faced with
the unpleasant prospect of leaving their “richly embroidered” banner
behind, members of the battalion reluctantly followed the general’s
suggestion and covered over their stirring slogan with strips of cloth
inscribed with two hastily chosen new credos of very different
meaning: “The Nation, the Law, the King” and “The French
Constitution.” In addition, those sporting “Live Free or Die” on their
caps promised that they would “suppress” this slogan. To the further
dismay of the troops, the general forced other changes on them.
Instead of planting a traditional and symbolic “liberty tree” upon
their arrival in Saint-Domingue, the battalions would now plant “a
tree of Peace,” which would also bear the inscription “The Nation,
the Law, the King.” Writing ahead to the current governor-general in
Saint-Domingue, La Salle concluded that all that remained was to
“counteract the influence of the ill-disposed” and keep the soldiers’
misguided revolutionary ardor cool during the long transatlantic
voyage.1
As La Salle recognized, recent developments in the Americas,
especially the revolution in Saint-Domingue, had demonstrated
convincingly the explosive power of the ideas and rituals of the Age
of Revolution in societies based on slavery. For three years, French
officials like La Salle had attempted to keep revolutionary slogans
and practices from making their way across the Atlantic to circulate
in the French islands and inspire slaves and free people of color, but
their efforts had failed. Apparently determined to “live free or die,”
black rebels in the French colony had initiated an insurrection which,
despite the opposition of thousands of troops like those who
boarded the ships with General La Salle in July 1792, would succeed
in winning the liberation of the slaves and culminate in the New
World’s second independent nation in 1804.
Officials in the British, Spanish, North American, and other
territories where African slavery existed shared La Salle’s problem.
Just as the news and ideas of the French Revolution proved too
volatile to contain, accounts of the black rebellion in Saint-Domingue
spread rapidly and uncontrollably throughout the hemisphere.
Through trade, both legal and illicit, and the mobility of all types of
people from sailors to runaway slaves, extensive regional contact
among the American colonies occurred before 1790. By the last
decade of the eighteenth century, residents of the Caribbean islands
and the northern and southern continents alike had grown to
depend upon the movement of ships, commodities, people, and
information.
Prior to, during, and following the Haitian Revolution, regional
networks of communication carried news of special interest to Afro-
Americans all over the Caribbean and beyond. Before the outbreak in
Saint-Domingue, British and Spanish officials were already battling
rampant rumors forecasting the end of slavery. Such reports
gathered intensity in the 1790s. While planters viewed with alarm
the growing prospect of an autonomous black territory, fearing that
a successful violent black uprising might tempt their own slaves to
revolt, the happenings in Saint-Domingue provided exciting news for
slaves and free coloreds, increasing their interest in regional affairs
and stimulating them to organize conspiracies of their own. By the
end of the decade, rulers in slave societies from Virginia to
Venezuela moved to short-circuit the network of black rebellion by
building obstacles to effective colony-to-colony communication.
While General La Salle understood in 1792 the potential impact of
the revolutionary currents in the Atlantic world on the minds and
aspirations of Caribbean slaves, neither he nor his charges could
have anticipated the extent to which the winds of revolution would
blow in the other direction. Sweeping across linguistic, geographic,
and imperial boundaries, the tempest created by the black
revolutionaries of Saint-Domingue and communicated by mobile
people in other slave societies would prove a major turning point in
the history of the Americas.
 Acknowledgements

There are many, many people to thank. I couldn’t possibly thank

them all. I thank first of all the people who helped me in graduate
school at Duke University. Peter Wood showed us a whole new way
of thinking about ourselves and about intellectual history. He taught
me to understand enslaved people as thinking people, and this book
is a tribute to him. John Jay TePaske, who taught colonial Latin
American history, convinced me to go to Seville. Raymond Gavins
taught me how to be a citizen in the profession. I learned much from
Larry Goodwyn and Bill Chafe.
I am grateful to the fellows and staff of the Carter G. Woodson
Institute at the University of Virginia and to the late Armstead L.
Robinson, head of the Institute at the time, who deserves special
thanks. In addition, several people have helped me over the years
and have supported the enterprise of The Common Wind: Laurent
Dubois, Ada Ferrer, Neville Hall, Tera Hunter, Robin Kelley, Jane
Landers, Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker, Elisha Renne, Larry
Rowley, Rebecca Scott, James Sidbury, Matthew Smith, Rachel Toor,
and Stephen Ward.
Thanks as well go to the staff of the many archives and libraries I
visited: The Archivo General de Indias (Seville), the Public Record
Office (London, now called The National Archives), the Jamaica
Archives (Spanish Town), the National Library of Jamaica (Kingston),
the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (London), the John Carter
Brown Library (Providence, Rhode Island), the Historical Society of
Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), the American Antiquarian Society
(Worcester, Massachusetts), the Bibliothèque des Frères (Port-au-
Prince, Haiti), and the Bibliothèque de Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague.
Special thanks go to the Department of Afroamerican and African
Studies community at the University of Michigan. Finally, I would like
to thank Ben Mabie and Duncan Ranslem of Verso Books for their
careful and kind assistance.
 Abbreviations

AAS American Antiquarian Society, Worcester,

Massachusetts
ADM Admiralty Records, Public Record Office, London
AGI Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla
C.O. Colonial Office Records, Public Record Office, London
CVSP Palmer and McRae, eds., Calendar of Virginia State
Papers
FLB Letterpress Books, Stephen Fuller Papers, Duke
University Library
HSP Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
JA Jamaica Archives, Spanish Town
JHCVA Records of the Jamaica High Court of Vice-Admiralty,
Jamaica Archives
leg. legajo; a bundle of documents in Spanish archives
Minutes Minutes of the West India Planters and Merchants,
of West India Committee Archives, Institute of
WIPM Commonwealth Studies, London
NLJ National Library of Jamaica (Institute of Jamaica),
Kingston
PRO Public Record Office, London
RSD Revolutions de Saint-Domingue Collection, John Carter
Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island
W.O. War Office Records, Public Record Office, London
1.
“Pandora’s Box”

The Masterless Caribbean at the

End of the Eighteenth Century

Late in the seventeenth century, the European colonizing nations

briefly put aside their differences and began a concerted effort to rid
the Caribbean of the buccaneers, pirates, and other fugitives who
had taken refuge in the region. This move to dislodge the
“masterless” people of the West Indies signaled the transformation
of the islands from havens for freebooters and renegades into settler
colonies based on plantations and slave labor. The same offensive
that had given large planters the upper hand in Barbados in the
1670s had gained irreversible momentum throughout the Caribbean
by the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The steady rise in
sugar prices on the world market after about 1740 favored the
expansion of plantation monoculture into areas where cattle and
pigs had grazed, and where hide hunters, logwood cutters, runaway
slaves, and other Caribbean dissidents had found shelter.
Barely a half century after an earthquake in 1692 destroyed Port
Royal, Jamaica, a longstanding outpost for pirates from all over the
region, the Caribbean had already become a vastly different place
from what it had been during the heyday of the buccaneers. Not
only had their old haunts disappeared; older images of “enchanted”
islands liberated from the hierarchies of the Old World were difficult
to sustain as plantations hungrily gobbled up what was once frontier
land. As planters gained control over the land, so they tightened
their control of labor. The trade in African slaves steadily increased
as the century progressed, and the common scene of slave ships
unloading their human cargoes turned on its head in the most
graphic of ways earlier dreams of a “masterless” existence. By
century’s end, the fluid pre-plantation economy and society had long
since given way to an ominous landscape of imperial soldiers and
warships, plantations and sugar mills, masters and slaves.1
Even during such a period of advance and consolidation,
however, planters and merchants encountered pockets of resistance
to their drive for absolute authority. In fact, employers on both sides
of the Atlantic, though flushed with economic prosperity, still worried
about the many ways which individuals and groups found to protect
and extend masterless existences. In both the Old World and the
New, these concerns centered upon the persistent problem of the
“seething mobility” of substantial sectors of the laboring classes. In
eighteenth-century England, according to E. P. Thompson, masters
of labor complained about bothersome aspects of the developing
“free” labor market—about “the indiscipline of working people, their
lack of economic dependency and their social insubordination”—
which resulted from labor’s mobility.2 Planters echoed similar
concerns in the Caribbean region, where buccaneers and pirates, the
old scourges of the planters and traders, had been effectively
suppressed, but where a colorful assortment of saucy and
insubordinate characters continued to move about and resist
authority. Masters and employers in industrializing Old World
economies based on “free” labor felt only mildly threatened by such
mobility. In the plantation-based societies of the Caribbean, however,
where the unfreedom of the vast majority of the labor force was
written into law and sanctioned by force and where “free” workers
were the anomaly rather than the rule, the persistence of labor
mobility called forth an anguished response from the ruling class. For
the same reasons, the prospect of a masterless, mobile existence
outside the plantation orbit held an especially seductive appeal for
disenchanted people casting about for new options. In England,
masters begrudged a certain amount of uncontrolled movement
among their workers. In the Caribbean, masters resorted to a
profusion of local laws and international treaties to keep this mobility
within the narrowest of possible limits.
Though the planters’ efforts to curtail freedom over the course of
the eighteenth century placed severe restrictions on mobility, these
measures never succeeded completely in keeping people from
pursuing alternatives to life under the plantation system. At the close
of the eighteenth century, as at its beginning, people of many
descriptions defied the odds and attempted to escape their masters.
Slaves deserted plantations in large numbers; urban workers ducked
their owners; seamen jumped ship to avoid floggings and the press
gang; militiamen and regular troops grumbled, ignored orders, and
deserted their watch; “higglers” left workplaces to peddle their
wares in the black market; and smugglers and shady foreigners
moved about on mysterious missions from island to island.
Furthermore, the very commercial growth which planters and
merchants welcomed opened new avenues of mobility. Cities grew
and matured, attracting runaway slaves and sheltering a teeming
underground with surprising regional connections. Expanding
commercial links sanctioned the comings and goings of ships of all
sizes and nations. Island ports required pilot boats with experienced
navigators to guide the incoming merchantmen to safe anchorages,
and they needed a network of coastal vessels and skilled sailors to
support their busy markets. This web of commerce brought the
region’s islands into closer and closer contact as the century
progressed, providing channels of communication as well as
tempting routes of escape.
On the eve of Caribbean revolution, most English, French, and
Spanish planters and traders in the region rode the crest of a long
wave of prosperity. Nevertheless, they continued to grope, much as
they had at the end of the last century, for common solutions to the
problem of controlling runaways, deserters, and vagabonds in the
region. As long as masterless men and women found ways to move
about and evade the authorities, they reasoned, these people
embodied submerged traditions of popular resistance which could
burst into the open at any time. Examining the rich world which
these mobile fugitives inhabited—the complex (and largely invisible)
underground which the “mariners, renegades, and castaways” of the
Caribbean created to protect themselves in the face of planter
consolidation—is crucial to understanding how news, ideas, and
social excitement traveled in the electric political environment of the
late eighteenth century.3

All of the West Indies felt the effects of the sugar boom of the mid-
eighteenth century, particularly the Greater Antilles—Jamaica, Cuba,
and Hispaniola, the larger islands of the northwestern Caribbean. In
the century after 1670, though at different speeds and by different
historical processes, the expansion of sugar cultivation transformed
these three islands from sparsely populated frontier outposts to
plantation societies based on captive African labor.
British growth centered in Jamaica. After 1740 the planter class
had managed to contain the intense factionalism and black
rebelliousness of the previous decade enough to attract white
settlers, drawn in large part from the stagnating islands to the east.
They began to clear and cultivate new lands in the north and west of
the island, and to purchase hundreds of thousands of Africans to
work the new plantations. By 1766, Jamaica had bolted well past the
other British possessions in the West Indies in its importance both as
a commercial entrepôt and as a staple-producing economy. Some
200,000 people, half the population of Britain’s sugar colonies,
resided there, and its busy ports controlled half the British trade in
the region. Despite setbacks encountered during the period of the
American Revolution, the rapid extension of sugar monoculture in
Jamaica continued through the 1780s.4
As sugar came to dominate the economy of Jamaica, the
demographic balance between black and white Jamaicans shifted
decisively in favor of the African population. Slave imports into the
island rose steadily throughout the eighteenth century, surpassing
120,000 for the twenty-year period between 1741 and 1760, totaling
nearly 150,000 in the subsequent two decades, and increasing at an
even faster rate after 1781. As early as 1730, nine of every ten
Jamaicans were black slaves, and by the eve of the American
Revolution almost ninety-four percent of the population of the island
was of African ancestry.5
Cuba’s move toward massive investment in the sugar industry, as
well as its demographic absorption into Afro-America, occurred both
later and more abruptly than in Jamaica. Crucial to the expansion of
sugar in this Spanish colony was the British occupation of Havana in
1762. Over a period of eleven months, the British introduced some
10,000 slaves into the island, breathing life into the sugar industry
which Cuban planters sustained after the British departure. The
Cuban share in the African slave trade, while still miniscule relative
to its more thoroughly developed neighbors, increased markedly
after 1763. Almost 31,000 Africans were imported between 1763
and 1789, and by 1792 data from the island’s second official census
revealed that the white population of Cuba had slipped below the
numbers of non-whites for the first time in the history of the island.6
But nowhere was society transformed more quickly or completely
than in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. The progress of sugar
in Jamaica and Cuba paled next to the economic explosion in this
mountainous strip of land comprising the western third of the island
of Hispaniola. Even as French fortunes waxed and finally waned in
the intense imperial competition leading up to the Seven Years’ War,
the sudden emergence of Saint-Domingue was astonishing. Still a
buccaneering outpost upon its cession to France in 1697, by 1739
Saint-Domingue was the world’s richest and most profitable slave
colony. Already the number of sugar mills had reached 450, up from
just thirty-five at the turn of the century, and there were more
enslaved Africans—over 117,000—working in Saint-Domingue than in
Jamaica or in any other Caribbean island. Three years later Saint-
Domingue produced more sugar than all the British sugar islands
combined. During the American Revolution, French planters took
advantage of famine and economic dislocation in the British
territories to carve out an even bigger slice of the world sugar
market. The increased volume of the slave trade to Saint-Domingue
reflects the new boom of the 1770s. In 1771, traders brought
slightly more than 10,000 new Africans to Saint-Domingue; five
years later, the number had more than doubled. The expansion of
the French colony continued through the 1780s. In the ten years
preceding the French Revolution, Saint-Domingue’s booming
economy was primarily responsible for tripling the volume of the
French slave trade over the previous decade, and official figures
showed annual African imports to rival consistently the size of the
colony’s entire white population year after year, reaching a dizzying
total of 30,000 at least as early as 1785. By 1789, Saint-Domingue
was the world’s largest producer of sugar and coffee; its plantations
produced twice as much as all other French colonies combined; and
French ships entering and leaving its ports accounted for more than
a third of the metropole’s foreign trade.7

While the decisive economic expansion after 1700 sounded the

death knell, both in image and reality, of the masterless Caribbean of
an earlier time, it also produced new strata of disaffected individuals
who continued to strive to place themselves outside the plantation
orbit and survive. In addition, forms of resistance already endemic to
the region continued to thrive and spread. The practice of Africans
fleeing their enslavers, for example, was already a tradition of long
standing at the turn of the eighteenth century. As sugar production
expanded and regional demography tilted dramatically in favor of
Africans, the problem of controlling runaway slaves became one of
the paramount concerns of Caribbean planters, colonial officials, and
other whites. Workers fleeing plantations and attempting to set up
communities of their own provided both concrete alternatives to the
plantation regime and a powerful metaphor informing other forms of
mobility and resistance in the region.
 Africans in Jamaica achieved notable success in their efforts to
become independent. The rugged “cockpit country” in the northwest
of the island and the Blue Mountains in the east harbored refugees
from slavery from the earliest years of Spanish control; these groups
of outlying runaway slaves constituted the region’s first “maroons.”
As slave imports soared after 1700, Africans followed the well-worn
paths of their forebears, leaving plantations for expanding maroon
communities in the parishes of Trelawny, St. James, St. Elizabeth,
and St. George. As these communities grew, so did their contacts
with the plantations, for maroons and slaves carried on a clandestine
trade in ammunition and provisions, and maroons staged periodic
raids. During the 1730s, a period of slave unrest throughout the
Caribbean, the related problems of slave desertion and the hostile
activities of communities of runaways became particularly acute,
driving the planter class into open warfare with the maroons. A
decade of conflict finally forced the government to recognize by
treaty the semi-independent status of several maroon towns in 1739.
By these treaties, the British government agreed to allow these
maroon towns to exist under limited self-government, but at the
same time enlisted their aid in policing the island. In return for
official recognition, the maroons promised to discourage, apprehend,
and return future runaways. Designed to drive a wedge between the
maroon towns and nearby plantations, laws passed in the aftermath
of the rebellion threatened maroons guilty of “inveigling slaves” from
plantations or “harbouring runaways” with banishment from the
island.8
Not surprisingly, conflict and ambiguity complicated the history of
this arrangement between the planter class and the maroons in the
half century after 1740. On occasion, residents of the maroon towns
faithfully outfitted parties to track down runaways in their areas, and
the accounts brought back to the estates by recaptured runaways
produced a marked animosity in the slave huts.9 Such examples of
loyalty led Governor Adam Williamson to assert hopefully in 1793
that “the Maroons are well affected, and would exert themselves
either in the defence of the Island or quelling internal
Insurrections.”10 The planters themselves, however, apprehended
danger in the carefree mobility of ostensible black allies, and their
concerns surfaced time and again. They observed that the laws
restricting the movements of the maroons were indifferently
enforced, and they watched as the maroons wandered about with
ease in the towns and through the countryside, where they had
extensive contact with plantation slaves. The men of Trelawny Town,
the largest of the maroon settlements, fathered “numerous Children
by Female Slaves, residing on the Low Plantations” of the
surrounding parishes, and, concluded a 1795 report, “the Nature of
their Connections was alarming.” When the Trelawny maroons took
up arms against the government that same year, officials moved
quickly to isolate the rebels by cutting off such communication, fully
expecting their “Search for concealed Arms in all the Negroe Huts
over the Island” to uncover and foil their networks.11
Finally, critics of the government’s treaties pointed out, the
agreement with the maroons hardly deterred groups of new
runaways from seeking even greater independence and taking to the
woods and mountains to establish towns of their own. Well known
from estate to estate, the daring exploits of leaders of runaway
groups sparked excited conversation among Jamaican slaves and
constantly reminded them of both the hazards and the promise of
such activity. Market days, dances, horse races, and other public
occasions attracting large gatherings of slaves allowed news of these
developments to circulate. When Mingo, a fisherman and former
driver on a large Trelawny estate, “made a Ball … after the
Conclusion of Crop” in the fall of 1791, slaves from neighboring
estates who attended were astonished to see Brutus present. An
incorrigible runaway serving a life term in the parish workhouse at
Martha Brae for his role in organizing unauthorized maroon towns in
the 1780s, Brutus had recently escaped and had already set about
his old ways. At the ball, Brutus scoffed at his owner’s attempts to
recapture him and affirmed rumors spread by recently returned
runaways that he, together “with about eighteen other Negroes men
slaves and three women of different Countries and owners” from
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and agility, and thought to crown her efforts by a notable feat, which
was no less than standing on her head on the top of the ladder, and
brandishing the two stilts, from which she had disengaged herself,
round about her, like the arms of a windmill. It required no great
skill to see that the old lady was very much offended with this last
performance, for when the little dish was carried to her, and the
ladder-dancer directed a beseeching look accompanied by an attitude
which seemed to imply that there were other feats yet in reserve, if
encouragement was held out, the patroness of the stair-head could
restrain herself no longer, but poured out a torrent partaking both of
objurgation and admonition.
“Ne’er-do-weel hussie,” and “vagrant gipsy,” were some of the
sharp missiles shot at the unsuspecting figurante, who, as little aware
of the meaning of all this “sharp-toothed violence,” as the bird is of
the mischief aimed at him by the fowler, sadly misapprehended its
import, and thinking it conveyed encouragement and approbation,
ducked her head in acknowledgment, while the thunder of the old
lady’s reprobation rolled about her in the most ceaseless rapidity of
vituperation.
“Ye’re a pretty ane indeed, to play sic antics afore ony body’s
house! Hae ye naebody to learn ye better manners that to rin up and
down a ladder like a squirrel, twisting and turning yoursel till my
banes are sair to look at you? Muckle fitter gin ye would read your
Bible, if as much grace be left to ye; or maybe a religious tract, to
begin wi’, for I doubt ye wad need preparation afore ye could drink at
the spring-head wi’ ony special profit.”
The last part was conveyed with a kind of smile of self-
approbation; for of all tasks, to reclaim a sinner is the most pleasing
and soothing to religious vanity;—so comfortable it is to be allowed
to scold on any terms, but doubly delightful, because it always
implies superiority. But the ladder-dancer and her attendant were
aware of no part of what was passing in the mind of the female
lecturer, and fully as ignorant of the eloquent address I have just
repeated; she only saw, in the gracious looks in which her feats were
condemned, an approval of her labours, for it passed her philosophy
to comprehend the ungodly qualities of standing on the head, or
whirling like a top. Again the ladder-dancer cringed and bowed to
her of the stair-head; and her male supporter, who acted as a kind of
pedestal to her elevation, bowed and grinned a little more grimly,
while the boy held out his plate to receive the results of all this
assiduity. But they could not command a single word of broad
English among them. Theirs only was the eloquence of nods and
grimaces; a monkey could have done as much, and in the present
humour of the old lady, would have been as much approved. The
ladder-dancer grew impatient, and seemed determined on an effort
to close her labours.
“Ah, Madame!” she exclaimed; “Madame” was repeated by the
man, and “Madame” was re-echoed by the boy.
“Nane o’ your nonsense wi’ me,” was the response from the stair-
head; “your madam’ing, and I dinna ken what mair havers. Ye
needna fash your head to stand there a’ day girning at me, and
making sic outlandish sport. I’m mair fule than you, that bides to
look at you; a fine tale they’d hae to tell that could say they saw me
here, idling my precious time on the like o’ you.”
She now whispered to one of the girls, who retired, and soon after
returned, giving her a small parcel, which she examined, and seemed
to say all was right. She beckoned the ladder-dancer, who slid down
with cat-like agility, and was instantly with her, standing a step
lower, in deference to the doughty dame.
“Here,” said she, with a gruff air, which was rather affected than
real, “tak these precious gifts,” handing her a bunch of religious
tracts. “See if ye canna find out your spiritual wants, and learn to
seek for the ‘Pearl of Price.’ My certie, but ye’re a weel-faured
hussie,” examining her more narrowly, “but your gaits are no that
commendable; but for a’ that, a mair broken ship has reached the
land.”
I could observe that she slipped a half-crown into the hand of the
Piedmontoise; and as she turned away to avoid thanks, an elderly
gentleman (perhaps her husband), who stood by, said in a low voice,
—
“That’s like yoursel, Darsie; your bark was aye waur than your bite,
ony day!”—Blackwood’s Magazine, 1826.
 THE ELDER’S DEATH-BED.

By Professor Wilson.

It was on a fierce and howling day that I was crossing the dreary
moor of Auchindown, on my way to the manse of that parish—a
solitary pedestrian. The snow, which had been incessantly falling for
a week past, was drifted into beautiful but dangerous wreaths, far
and wide, over the melancholy expanse; and the scene kept visibly
shifting before me, as the strong wind that blew from every point of
the compass struck the dazzling masses, and heaved them up and
down in endless transformation. There was something inspiriting in
the labour with which, in the buoyant strength of youth, I forced my
way through the storm; and I could not but enjoy those gleamings of
sunlight that ever and anon burst through some unexpected opening
in the sky, and gave a character of cheerfulness, and even warmth, to
the sides or summits of the stricken hills. Sometimes the wind
stopped of a sudden, and then the air was as silent as the snow—not
a murmur to be heard from spring or stream, now all frozen up over
those high moorlands. As the momentary cessations of the sharp
drift allowed my eyes to look onwards and around, I saw here and
there, up the little opening valleys, cottages just visible beneath the
black stems of their snow-covered clumps of trees, or beside some
small spot of green pasture kept open for the sheep. These
intimations of life and happiness came delightfully to me in the
midst of the desolation; and the barking of a dog, attending some
shepherd in his quest on the hill, put fresh vigour into my limbs,
telling me that, lonely as I seemed to be, I was surrounded by
cheerful, though unseen company, and that I was not the only
wanderer over the snows.
 As I walked along, my mind was insensibly filled with a crowd of
pleasant images of rural winter life, that helped me gladly onwards
over many miles of moor. I thought of the severe but cheerful labours
of the barn—the mending of farm-gear by the fireside—the wheel
turned by the foot of old age less for gain than as a thrifty pastime—
the skilful mother making “auld claes look amaist as weel’s the
new”—the ballad unconsciously listened to by the family all busy at
their own tasks round the singing maiden—the old traditionary tale,
told by some wayfarer hospitably housed till the storm should blow
by—the unexpected visit of neighbours on need or friendship—or the
footstep of lover undeterred by snow-drifts that have buried up his
flocks;—but above all, I thought of those hours of religious worship
that have not yet escaped from the domestic life of the peasantry of
Scotland—of the sound of psalms that the depth of the snow cannot
deaden to the ear of Him to whom they are chanted—and of that
sublime Sabbath-keeping which, on days too tempestuous for the
kirk, changes the cottage of the shepherd into the temple of God.
With such glad and peaceful images in my heart, I travelled along
that dreary moor, with the cutting wind in my face, and my feet
sinking in the snow, or sliding on the hard blue ice beneath it—as
cheerfully as I ever walked in the dewy warmth of a summer
morning, through fields of fragrance and of flowers. And now I could
discern, within half an hour’s walk, before me, the spire of the
church, close to which stood the manse of my aged friend and
benefactor. My heart burned within me as a sudden gleam of stormy
sunlight tipped it with fire; and I felt, at that moment, an
inexpressible sense of the sublimity of the character of that
grayheaded shepherd who had, for fifty years, abode in the
wilderness, keeping together his own happy little flock.
As I was ascending a knoll, I saw before me on horseback an old
man, with his long white hairs beaten against his face, who,
nevertheless, advanced with a calm countenance against the
hurricane. It was no other than my father, of whom I had been
thinking—for my father had I called him for many years, and for
many years my father had he truly been. My surprise at meeting him
on such a moor—on such a day—was but momentary, for I knew that
he was a shepherd who cared not for the winter’s wrath. As he
stopped to take my hand kindly into his, and to give his blessing to
his long-expected visitor, the wind fell calm—the whole face of the
sky was softened, and brightness, like a smile, went over the blushing
and crimson snow. The very elements seemed then to respect the
hoary head of fourscore; and after our first greeting was over, when I
looked around, in my affection, I felt how beautiful was winter.
“I am going,” said he, “to visit a man at the point of death; a man
whom you cannot have forgotten; whose head will be missed in the
kirk next Sabbath by all my congregation; a devout man, who feared
God all his days, and whom, on this awful trial, God will assuredly
remember. I am going, my son, to the Hazel Glen.”
I knew well in childhood that lonely farmhouse, so far off among
the beautiful wild green hills, and it was not likely that I had
forgotten the name of its possessor. For six years’ Sabbaths I had
seen the Elder in his accustomed place beneath the pulpit, and, with
a sort of solemn fear, had looked on his steadfast countenance during
sermon, psalm, and prayer. On returning to the scenes of my infancy,
I now met the pastor going to pray by his deathbed; and, with the
privilege which nature gives us to behold, even in their last
extremity, the loving and the beloved, I turned to accompany him to
the house of sorrow, resignation, and death.
And now, for the first time, I observed walking close to the feet of
his horse, a little boy of about ten years of age, who kept frequently
looking up in the pastor’s face, with his blue eyes bathed in tears. A
changeful expression of grief, hope, and despair, made almost pale
cheeks that otherwise were blooming in health and beauty; and I
recognised, in the small features and smooth forehead of childhood,
a resemblance to the aged man whom we understood was now lying
on his death-bed. “They had to send his grandson for me through the
snow, mere child as he is,” said the minister to me, looking tenderly
on the boy; “but love makes the young heart bold—and there is One
who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.”
I again looked on the fearless child with his rosy cheeks, blue eyes,
and yellow hair, so unlike grief or sorrow, yet now sobbing aloud as if
his heart would break. “I do not fear but that my grandfather will yet
recover, as soon as the minister has said one single prayer by his
bedside. I had no hope, or little, as I was running by myself to the
manse over hill after hill, but I am full of hopes, now that we are
together; and oh! if God suffers my grandfather to recover, I will lie
awake all the long winter nights blessing Him for His mercy. I will
rise up in the middle of the darkness, and pray to Him in the cold on
my naked knees!” and here his voice was choked, while he kept his
eyes fixed, as if for consolation and encouragement, on the solemn
and pitying countenance of the kind-hearted pious old man.
We soon left the main road, and struck off through scenery that,
covered as it was with the bewildering snow, I sometimes dimly and
sometimes vividly remembered; our little guide keeping ever a short
distance before us, and with a sagacity like that of instinct, showing
us our course, of which no trace was visible, save occasionally his
own little footprints as he had been hurrying to the manse.
After crossing, for several miles, morass and frozen rivulet, and
drifted hollow, with here and there the top of a stone-wall peeping
through the snow, or the more visible circle of a sheep-bucht, we
descended into the Hazel-glen, and saw before us the solitary house
of the dying Elder.
A gleam of days gone by came suddenly over my soul. The last time
that I had been in this glen was on a day of June, fifteen years before,
—a holiday, the birthday of the king. A troop of laughing schoolboys,
headed by our benign pastor, we danced over the sunny braes, and
startled the linnets from their nests among the yellow broom.
Austere as seemed to us the Elder’s Sabbath face when sitting in the
kirk, we schoolboys knew that it had its week-day smiles, and we flew
on the wings of joy to our annual festival of curds and cream in the
farm-house of that little sylvan world. We rejoiced in the flowers and
the leaves of that long, that interminable summer day; its memory
was with our boyish hearts from June to June; and the sound of that
sweet name, “Hazel Glen,” often came upon us at our tasks, and
brought too brightly into the school-room the pastoral imagery of
that mirthful solitude.
As we now slowly approached the cottage through a deep snow-
drift, which the distress within had prevented the household from
removing, we saw peeping out from the door, brothers and sisters of
our little guide, who quickly disappeared, and then their mother
showed herself in their stead, expressing by her raised eyes, and
arms folded across her breast, how thankful she was to see at last the
pastor, beloved in joy and trusted in trouble.
 Soon as the venerable old man dismounted from his horse, our
active little guide led it away into the humble stable, and we entered
the cottage. Not a sound was heard but the ticking of the clock. The
matron, who had silently welcomed us at the door, led us, with
suppressed sighs and a face stained with weeping, into her father’s
sick room, which even in that time of sore distress was as orderly as
if health had blessed the house. I could not help remarking some old
china ornaments on the chimneypiece, and in the window was an
ever-blowing rose-tree, that almost touched the lowly roof, and
brightened that end of the apartment with its blossoms. There was
something tasteful in the simple furniture; and it seemed as if grief
could not deprive the hand of that matron of its careful elegance.
Sickness, almost hopeless sickness, lay there, surrounded with the
same cheerful and beautiful objects which health had loved; and she,
who had arranged and adorned the apartment in her happiness, still
kept it from disorder and decay in her sorrow.
With a gentle hand she drew the curtain of the bed, and there,
supported by pillows as white as the snow that lay without, reposed
the dying Elder. It was plain that the hand of God was upon him, and
that his days on the earth were numbered.
He greeted his minister with a faint smile, and a slight inclination
of the head—for his daughter had so raised him on the pillows, that
he was almost sitting up in his bed. It was easy to see that he knew
himself to be dying, and that his soul was prepared for the great
change; yet, along with the solemn resignation of a Christian who
had made his peace with God and his Saviour, there was blended on
his white and sunken countenance an expression of habitual
reverence for the minister of his faith; and I saw that he could not
have died in peace without that comforter to pray by his death-bed.
A few words sufficed to tell who was the stranger;—and the dying
man, blessing me by name, held out to me his cold shrivelled hand,
in token of recognition. I took my seat at a small distance from the
bedside, and left a closer station for those who were more dear. The
pastor sat down near his head; and, by the bed, leaning on it with
gentle hands, stood that matron, his daughter-in-law—a figure that
would have graced and sainted a higher dwelling, and whose native
beauty was now more touching in its grief. But religion upheld her
whom nature was bowing down. Not now for the first time were the
lessons taught by her father to be put into practice, for I saw that she
was clothed in deep mourning and she behaved like the daughter of a
man whose life had been not only irreproachable but lofty, with fear
and hope fighting desperately but silently in the core of her pure and
pious heart.
While we thus remained in silence, the beautiful boy, who, at the
risk of his life, had brought the minister of religion to the bedside of
his beloved grandfather, softly and cautiously opened the door, and
with the hoar-frost yet unmelted on his bright glistering ringlets,
walked up to the pillow, evidently no stranger there. He no longer
sobbed—he no longer wept—for hope had risen strongly within his
innocent heart, from the consciousness of love so fearlessly exerted,
and from the presence of the holy man in whose prayers he trusted,
as in the intercession of some superior and heavenly nature. There
he stood, still as an image in his grandfather’s eyes, that, in their
dimness, fell upon him with delight. Yet, happy as was the trusting
child, his heart was devoured by fear, and he looked as if one word
might stir up the flood of tears that had subsided in his heart. As he
crossed the dreary and dismal moors, he had thought of a corpse, a
shroud, and a grave; he had been in terror, lest death should strike in
his absence the old man, with whose gray hairs he had so often
played; but now he saw him alive, and felt that death was not able to
tear him away from the clasps, and links, and fetters of his
grandchild’s embracing love.
“If the storm do not abate,” said the sick man, after a pause, “it will
be hard for my friends to carry me over the drifts to the kirkyard.”
This sudden approach to the grave struck, as with a bar of ice, the
heart of the loving boy; and, with a long deep sigh, he fell down with
his face like ashes on the bed, while the old man’s palsied right hand
had just strength to lay itself upon his head. “Blessed be thou, my
little Jamie, even for His own name’s sake who died for us on the
tree!” The mother, without terror, but with an averted face, lifted up
her loving-hearted boy, now in a dead fainting-fit, and carried him
into an adjoining room, where he soon revived. But that child and
the old man were not to be separated. In vain he was asked to go to
his brothers and sisters;—pale, breathless, and shivering, he took his
place as before, with eyes fixed on his grandfather’s face, but neither
weeping nor uttering a word. Terror had frozen up the blood of his
heart; but his were now the only dry eyes in the room; and the pastor
himself wept—albeit the grief of fourscore is seldom vented in tears.
“God has been gracious to me, a sinner,” said the dying man.
“During thirty years that I have been an elder in your kirk, never
have I missed sitting there one Sabbath. When the mother of my
children was taken from me—it was on a Tuesday she died, and on
Saturday she was buried—we stood together when my Alice was let
down into the narrow house made for all living; on the Sabbath I
joined in the public worship of God: she commanded me to do so the
night before she went away. I could not join in the psalm that
Sabbath, for her voice was not in the throng. Her grave was covered
up, and grass and flowers grew there; so was my heart; but thou,
whom, through the blood of Christ, I hope to see this night in
Paradise, knowest that, from that hour to this day, never have I
forgotten thee!”
The old man ceased speaking, and his grandchild, now able to
endure the scene (for strong passion is its own support), glided softly
to a little table, and bringing a cup in which a cordial had been
mixed, held it in his small soft hands to his grandfather’s lips. He
drank, and then said, “Come closer to me, Jamie, and kiss me for
thine own and thy father’s sake;” and as the child fondly pressed his
rosy lips on those of his grandfather, so white and withered, the tears
fell over all the old man’s face, and then trickled down on the golden
head of the child, at last sobbing in his bosom.
“Jamie, thy own father has forgotten thee in thy infancy, and me in
my old age; but, Jamie, forget not thou thy father nor thy mother, for
that thou knowest and feelest is the commandment of God.”
The broken-hearted boy could give no reply. He had gradually
stolen closer and closer unto the old loving man, and now was lying,
worn out with sorrow, drenched and dissolved in tears, in his
grandfather’s bosom. His mother had sunk down on her knees and
hid her face with her hands. “Oh! if my husband knew but of this—he
would never, never desert his dying father!” and I now knew that the
Elder was praying on his death-bed for a disobedient and wicked
son.
At this affecting time the minister took the family Bible on his
knees, and said, “Let us sing to the praise and glory of God, part of
the fifteenth psalm;” and he read, with a tremulous and broken voice,
those beautiful verses:—
“Within thy tabernacle, Lord,
Who shall abide with thee?
And in Thy high and holy hill
Who shall a dweller be?
The man that walketh uprightly,
And worketh righteousness,
And as he thinketh in his heart,
So doth he truth express.”

The small congregation sang the noble hymn of the psalmist to

“plaintiff Martyrs, worthy of the name.” The dying man himself, ever
and anon, joined in the holy music; and when it feebly died away on
his quivering lips, he continued still to follow the tune with the
motion of his withered hand, and eyes devoutly and humbly lifted up
to heaven. Nor was the sweet voice of his loving grandchild unheard;
as if the strong fit of deadly passion had dissolved in the music, he
sang with a sweet and silvery voice, that, to a passer-by, had seemed
that of perfect happiness—a hymn sung in joy upon its knees by
gladsome childhood before it flew out among the green hills, to quiet
labour or gleesome play. As that sweetest voice came from the bosom
of the old man, where the singer lay in affection, and blended with
his own so tremulous, never had I felt so affectingly brought before
me the beginning and the end of life, the cradle and the grave.
Ere the psalm was yet over, the door was opened, and a tall fine-
looking man entered, but with a lowering and dark countenance,
seemingly in sorrow, in misery, and remorse. Agitated, confounded,
and awe-struck by the melancholy and dirge-like music, he sat down
on a chair, and looked with a ghastly face towards his father’s death-
bed. When the psalm ceased, the Elder said with a solemn voice, “My
son, thou art come in time to receive thy father’s blessing. May the
remembrance of what will happen in this room before the morning
again shine over the Hazel Glen win thee from the error of thy ways!
Thou art here, to witness the mercy of thy God and thy Saviour,
whom thou hast forgotten.”
The minister looked, if not with a stern, yet with an upbraiding
countenance, on the young man, who had not recovered his speech,
and said, “William! for three years past your shadow has not
darkened the door of the house of God. They who fear not the
thunder may tremble at the still small voice; now is the hour for
repentance, that your father’s spirit may carry up to heaven tidings of
a contrite soul saved from the company of sinners!”
The young man, with much effort, advanced to the bedside, and at
last found voice to say, “Father, I am not without the affections of
nature, and I hurried home as soon as I heard that the minister had
been seen riding towards our house. I hope that you will yet recover,
and if I have ever made you unhappy, I ask your forgiveness; for
though I may not think as you do on matters of religion, I have a
human heart. Father! I may have been unkind, but I am not cruel. I
ask your forgiveness.”
“Come nearer to me, William; kneel down by the bedside, and let
my hand find the head of my beloved son—for blindness is coming
fast upon me. Thou wert my first-born, and thou art my only living
son. All thy brothers and sisters are lying in the kirkyard, beside her
whose sweet face thine own, William, did once so much resemble.
Long wert thou the joy, the pride of my soul—ay, too much the pride,
for there was not in all the parish such a man, such a son, as my own
William. If thy heart has since been changed, God may inspire it
again with right thoughts. Could I die for thy sake—could I purchase
thy salvation with the outpouring of thy father’s blood—but this the
Son of God has done for thee, who hast denied Him! I have sorely
wept for thee—ay, William, when there was none near me—even as
David wept for Absalom, for thee, my son, my son!”
A long deep groan was the only reply; but the whole body of the
kneeling man was convulsed; and it was easy to see his sufferings, his
contrition, his remorse, and his despair. The pastor said, with a
sterner voice and austerer countenance than were natural to him,
“Know you whose hand is now lying on your rebellious head? But
what signifies the word father to him who has denied God, the Father
of us all?”—“Oh! press him not so hardly,” said the weeping wife,
coming forward from a dark corner of the room, where she had tried
to conceal herself in grief, fear, and shame. “Spare, oh! spare my
husband—he has ever been kind to me;” and with that she knelt
down beside him, with her long, soft, white arms mournfully and
affectionately laid across his neck. “Go thou, likewise, my sweet little
Jamie,” said the Elder, “go even out of my bosom, and kneel down
beside thy father and thy mother, so that I may bless you all at once,
and with one yearning prayer.” The child did as that solemn voice
commanded, and knelt down somewhat timidly by his father’s side;
nor did that unhappy man decline encircling with his arm the child
too much neglected, but still dear to him as his own blood, in spite of
the deadening and debasing influence of infidelity.
“Put the Word of God into the hands of my son, and let him read
aloud to his dying father the 25th, 26th, and 27th verses of the
eleventh chapter of the Gospel according to St John.” The pastor
went up to the kneelers, and, with a voice of pity, condolence, and
pardon, said, “There was a time when none, William, could read the
Scriptures better than couldst thou—can it be that the son of my
friend hath forgotten the lessons of his youth?” He had not forgotten
them; there was no need for the repentant sinner to lift up his eyes
from the bedside. The sacred stream of the Gospel had worn a
channel in his heart, and the waters were again flowing. With a
choked voice he said, “Jesus said unto her, I am the Resurrection and
the Life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he
live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.
Believest thou this? She saith unto him, Yea, Lord; I believe that thou
art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.”
“That is not an unbeliever’s voice,” said the dying man
triumphantly; “nor, William, hast thou an unbeliever’s heart. Say
that thou believest in what thou hast now read, and thy father will
die happy!”—“I do believe; and as thou forgivest me, so may I be
forgiven by my Father who is in heaven.”
The Elder seemed like a man suddenly inspired with a new life. His
faded eyes kindled—his pale cheeks glowed—his palsied hands
seemed to wax strong—and his voice was clear as that of manhood in
its prime. “Into Thy hands, O God, I commit my spirit!”—and so
saying, he gently sank back on his pillow; and I thought I heard a
sigh. There was then a long deep silence, and the father, and mother,
and child rose from their knees. The eyes of us all were turned
towards the white placid face of the figure now stretched in
everlasting rest; and without lamentations, save the silent
lamentations of the resigned soul, we stood around the “Death-bed
of the Elder.”
 A HIGHLAND FEUD.

By Sir Walter Scott.

The principal possessors of the Hebrides were originally of the

name of MacDonald, the whole being under the government of a
succession of chiefs, who bore the name of Donald of the Isles, and
were possessed of authority almost independent of the kings of
Scotland. But this great family becoming divided into two or three
branches, other chiefs settled in some of the islands, and disputed
the property of the original proprietors. Thus, the MacLeods, a
powerful and numerous clan, who had extensive estates on the
mainland, made themselves masters, at a very early period, of a great
part of the large island of Skye, seized upon much of the Long Island,
as the isles of Lewis and Harris are called, and fought fiercely with
the MacDonalds and other tribes of the islands. The following is an
example of the mode in which these feuds were conducted:—
About the end of the sixteenth century, a boat, manned by one or
two of the MacLeods, landed in Eigg, a small island peopled by the
MacDonalds. They were at first hospitably received; but having been
guilty of some incivility to the young women of the island, it was so
much resented by the inhabitants, that they tied the MacLeods hand
and foot, and putting them on board of their own boat, towed it to
the sea, and set it adrift, leaving the wretched men, bound as they
were, to perish by famine, or by the winds and waves, as chance
should determine. But fate so ordered it, that a boat belonging to the
Laird of MacLeod fell in with that which had the captives on board,
and brought them in safety to the Laird’s castle of Dunvegan, in
Skye, where they complained of the injury which they had sustained
from the MacDonalds of Eigg. MacLeod, in great rage, put to sea
with his galleys, manned by a large body of his people, which the
men of Eigg could not entertain any rational hope of resisting.
Learning that their incensed enemy was approaching with superior
forces, and deep vows of revenge, the inhabitants, who knew they
had no mercy to expect at MacLeod’s hands, resolved, as the best
chance of safety in their power, to conceal themselves in a large
cavern on the sea-shore.
This place was particularly well-calculated for that purpose. The
entrance resembles that of a fox-earth, being an opening so small
that a man cannot enter save by creeping on hands and knees. A rill
of water falls from the top of the rock, and serves, or rather served at
the period we speak of, wholly to conceal the aperture. A stranger,
even when apprised of the existence of such a cave, would find the
greatest difficulty in discovering the entrance. Within, the cavern
rises to a great height, and the floor is covered with white dry sand. It
is extensive enough to contain a great number of people. The whole
inhabitants of Eigg, who, with their wives and families, amounted to
nearly two hundred souls, took refuge within its precincts.
MacLeod arrived with his armament, and landed on the island, but
could discover no one on whom to wreak his vengeance—all was
desert. The MacLeods destroyed the huts of the islanders, and
plundered what property they could discover; but the vengeance of
the chieftain could not be satisfied with such petty injuries. He knew
that the inhabitants must either have fled in their boats to one of the
islands possessed by the MacDonalds, or that they must be concealed
somewhere in Eigg. After making a strict but unsuccessful search for
two days, MacLeod had appointed the third to leave his anchorage,
when, in the gray of the morning, one of the seamen beheld, from the
deck of his galley, the figure of a man on the island. This was a spy
whom the MacDonalds, impatient of their confinement in the cavern,
had imprudently sent out to see whether MacLeod had retired or no.
The poor fellow, when he saw himself discovered, endeavoured, by
doubling after the manner of a hare or fox, to obliterate the track of
his footsteps, and prevent its being discovered where he had re-
entered the cavern. But all his art was in vain; the invaders again
landed, and tracked him to the entrance of the cavern.
MacLeod then summoned those who were within it, and called
upon them to deliver the individuals who had maltreated his men, to
be disposed of at his pleasure. The MacDonalds, still confident in the
strength of their fastness, which no assailant could enter but on
hands and knees, refused to surrender their clansmen.
MacLeod then commenced a dreadful work of indiscriminate
vengeance. He caused his people, by means of a ditch cut above the
top of the rock, to turn away the stream of water which fell over the
entrance of the precipice. This being done, the MacLeods collected
all the combustibles which could be found on the island, particularly
quantities of dry heather, piled them up against the aperture, and
maintained an immense fire for many hours, until the smoke,
penetrating into the inmost recesses of the cavern, stifled to death
every creature within. There is no doubt of the truth of this story,
dreadful as it is. The cavern is often visited by strangers; and I have
myself seen the place, where the bones of the murdered MacDonalds
still remain, lying as thick on the floor of the cave as in the charnel-
house of a church.
 THE RESURRECTION MEN.

By D. M. Moir, M.D.
How then was the Devil drest?
He was in his Sunday’s best;
His coat was red, and his breeches were blue,
With a hole behind, where his tail came through.

Over the hill, and over the dale,

And he went over the plain:
And backward and forward he switched his tail,
As a gentleman switches his cane.
Coleridge.

About this time[8] there arose a great sough and surmise that some
loons were playing false with the kirkyard, howking up the bodies
from their damp graves, and hurling them away to the college.
Words canna describe the fear, and the dool, and the misery it
caused. All flocked to the kirk yett; and the friends of the newly
buried stood by the mools, which were yet dark, and the brown,
newly-cast divots, that had not yet ta’en root, looking with mournful
faces, to descry any tokens of sinking in.
8. See ante, “Benjie’s Christening,” page 214.
I’ll never forget it. I was standing by when three young lads took
shools, and, lifting up the truff, proceeded to howk down to the
coffin, wherein they had laid the gray hairs of their mother. They
looked wild and bewildered like, and the glance of their een was like
that of folk out of a mad-house; and none dared in the world to have
spoken to them. They didna even speak to ane anither; but wrought
on wi’ a great hurry till the spades struck on the coffin-lid—which
was broken. The dead-claithes were there huddled a’thegither in a
nook, but the dead was gane. I took haud o’ Willie Walker’s arm, and
looked down. There was a cauld sweat all ower me;—losh me! but I
was terribly frighted and eerie. Three mair graves were opened, and
a’ just alike, save and except that of a wee unkirstened wean, which
was aff bodily, coffin and a’.
There was a burst of righteous indignation throughout the parish;
nor without reason. Tell me that doctors and graduates maun hae the
dead; but tell it not to Mansie Wauch, that our hearts maun be
trampled in the mire of scorn, and our best feelings laughed at, in
order that a bruise may be properly plaistered up, or a sair head
cured. Verily, the remedy is waur than the disease.
But what remead? It was to watch in the session-house, with
loaded guns, night about, three at a time. I never likit to gang into
the kirkyard after darkening, let-a-be to sit there through a lang
winter night, windy and rainy, it may be, wi’ nane but the dead
around us. Save us! it was an unco thought, and garred a’ my flesh
creep; but the cause was gude,—my spirit was roused, and I was
determined no to be dauntoned.
I counted and counted, but the dread day at length came, and I
was summonsed. All the leivelang afternoon, when ca’ing the needle
upon the brod, I tried to whistle Jenny Nettles, Niel Gow, and ither
funny tunes, and whiles crooned to mysel between hands; but my
consternation was visible, and a’ wadna do.
It was in November, and the cauld glimmering sun sank behind
the Pentlands. The trees had been shorn of their frail leaves; and the
misty night was closing fast in upon the dull and short day; but the
candles glittered at the shop windows, and leery-light-the-lamps was
brushing about wi’ his ladder in his oxter, and bleezing flamboy
sparking out behind him. I felt a kind of qualm of faintness and
down-sinking about my heart and stomach, to the dispelling of which
I took a thimbleful of spirits, and, tying my red comforter about my
neck, I marched briskly to the session-house. A neighbour (Andrew
Goldie, the pensioner) lent me his piece, and loaded it to me. He took
tent that it was only half-cock, and I wrapped a napkin round the
dog-head, for it was raining. No being acquaint wi’ guns, I keepit the
muzzle aye awa frae me; as it is every man’s duty no to throw his
precious life into jeopardy.
 A furm was set before the session-house fire, which bleezed
brightly, nor had I ony thought that such an unearthly place could
have been made to look half so comfortable, either by coal or candle;
so my speerits rose up as if a weight had been ta’en aff them, and I
wondered in my bravery, that a man like me could be afeard of
onything. Nobody was there but a touzy, ragged, halflins callant of
thirteen (for I speired his age), wi’ a desperate dirty face, and lang
carroty hair, tearing a speldrin wi’ his teeth, which lookit lang and
sharp eneugh, and throwing the skin and lugs intil the fire.
We sat for amaist an hour thegither, cracking the best way we
could in sic a place; nor was onybody mair likely to cast up. The night
was now pit-mirk; the wind soughed amid the headstanes and
railings of the gentry (for we maun a’ dee); and the black corbies in
the steeple-holes cackled and crawed in a fearsome manner. A’ at
ance we heard a lonesome sound; and my heart began to play pit-pat
—my skin grew a’ rough, like a poukit chicken—and I felt as if I didna
ken what was the matter with me. It was only a false alarm, however,
being the warning of the clock; and in a minute or twa thereafter the
bell struck ten. Oh, but it was a lonesome and dreary sound! Every
chap gaed through my breast like the dunt of a forehammer.
Then up and spak the red headed laddie: “It’s no fair; anither
should hae come by this time. I wad rin awa hame, only I’m
frightened to gang out my lane. Do ye think the doup o’ that candle
wad carry in my cap?”
“Na, na, lad; we maun bide here, as we are here now. Leave me
alane! Lord save us! and the yett lockit, and the bethrel sleepin’ wi’
the key in his breek-pouches! We canna win out now, though we
would,” answered I, trying to look brave, though half frightened out
of my seven senses. “Sit down, sit down; I’ve baith whisky and porter
wi’ me. Hae, man, there’s a cauker to keep your heart warm; and set
down that bottle,” quoth I, wiping the sawdust aff it with my hand,
“to get a toast; I’se warrant it for Deacon Jaffrey’s best brown stout.”
The wind blew higher, and like a hurricane; the rain began to fall
in perfect spouts; the auld kirk rumbled, and rowed, and made a sad
soughing; and the bourtree tree behind the house, where auld
Cockburn, that cuttit his throat, was buried, creakit and crazed in a
frightful manner; but as to the roaring of the troubled waters, and
the bumming in the lum-head, they were past a’ power of
description. To make bad worse, just in the heart of the brattle, the
grating sound of the yett turning on its rusty hinges was but too
plainly heard. What was to be done? I thought of our baith running
away; and then of our locking oursels in, and firing through the door;
but wha was to pull the trigger?
Gudeness watch ower us! I tremble yet when I think on’t. We were
perfectly between the deil and the deep sea—either to stand and fire
our gun, or rin and be shot at. It was really a hang choice. As I stood
swithering and shaking, the laddie ran to the door, and thrawing
round the key, clapped his back till’t. Oh! how I lookit at him, as he
stude, for a gliff, like a magpie hearkening wi’ his lug cockit up, or
rather like a terrier watching a rotten.
“They’re coming! they’re coming!” he cried out; “cock the piece, ye
sumph,” while the red hair rose up from his pow like feathers;
“they’re coming, I hear them tramping on the gravel!” Out he
stretched his arms against the wall, and brizzed his back against the
door like mad; as if he had been Samson pushing over the pillars in
the house of Dagon. “For the Lord’s sake, prime the gun,” he cried
out, “or our throats will be cut frae lug to lug, before we can say Jack
Robinson! See that there’s priming in the pan!”
I did the best I could; but my hale strength could hardly lift up the
piece, which waggled to and fro like a cock’s tail on a rainy day; my
knees knockit against ane anither, and though I was resigned to dee
—I trust I was resigned to dee—’od, but it was a frightfu’ thing to be
out of ane’s bed, and to be murdered in an auld session-house, at the
dead hour of night, by unyearthly resurrection-men—or rather let me
call them devils incarnate—wrapt up in dreadnoughts, wi’ blackit
faces, pistols, big sticks, and other deadly weapons.
A snuff-snuffing was heard; and through below the door I saw a
pair of glancing black een. ’Od, but my heart nearly loupit aff the bit
—a snouff and a gur—gurring, and ower a’ the plain tramp of a man’s
heavy tackets and cuddy-heels amang the gravel. Then cam a great
slap like thunder on the wall; and the laddie quitting his grip, fell
down, crying, “Fire, fire!—murder! holy murder!”
“Wha’s there?” growled a deep rough voice; “open—I’m a friend.”
I tried to speak, but could not; something like a halfpenny roll was
sticking in my throat, so I tried to cough it up, but it wadna come.
“Gie the pass-word, then,” said the laddie, staring as if his een wad
loupen out; “gie the pass-word!”
First cam a loud whussle, and then “Copmahagen,” answered the
voice. Oh! what a relief! The laddie started up like ane crazy wi’ joy.
“Ou! ou!” cried he, thrawing round the key, and rubbing his hands,
“by jingo! it’s the bethrel—it’s the bethrel—it’s auld Isaac himsel!”
First rushed in the dog, and then Isaac, wi’ his glazed hat, slouched
ower his brow, and his horn bowet glimmering by his knee. “Has the
French landit, do ye think? Losh keep us a’!” said he, wi’ a smile on
his half-idiot face (for he was a kind of a sort of a natural, wi’ an
infirmity in his leg). “’Od sauf us, man, put by your gun. Ye dinna
mean to shoot me, do ye? What are ye aboot here wi’ the door lockit?
I just keppit four resurrectioners louping ower the wa’.”
“Gude guide us!” I said, taking a long breath to drive the blude frae
my heart, and something relieved by Isaac’s company. “Come now,
Isaac, ye’re just giein’ us a fright. Isn’t that true, Isaac?”
“Yes, I’m joking,—and what for no? But they might have been, for
onything ye wad hae hindered them to the contrair, I’m thinking. Na,
na, ye maunna lock the door; that’s no fair play.”
When the door was put ajee, and the furm set fornent the fire, I
gied Isaac a dram to keep his heart up on sic a cauld, stormy night.
’Od, but he was a droll fallow, Isaac. He sung and leuch as if he had
been boozing in Lucky Tamson’s, wi’ some of his drucken cronies.
Fient a hair cared he about auld kirks, or kirkyards, or vouts, or
through-stanes, or dead folk in their winding-sheets, wi’ the wet
grass growing ower them; and at last I began to brighten up a wee
mysel; so when he had gone ower a good few funny stories, I said to
him, quoth I, “Mony folk, I daresay, mak mair noise about their
sitting up in a kirkyard than it’s a’ worth. There’s naething here to
harm us.”
“I beg to differ wi’ ye there,” answered Isaac, taking out his horn
mull from his coat pouch, and tapping on the lid in a queer style—“I
could gie anither version of that story. Did ye no ken of three young
doctors—Eirish students—alang wi’ some resurrectioners, as waff
and wild as themselves, firing shottie for shottie wi’ the guard at
Kirkmabreck, and lodging three slugs in ane o’ their backs, forbye
firing a ramrod through anither ane’s hat?”