Page:Abstract of the evidence for the abolition of the slave-trade 1791.djvu/108

( 74 ) be flogged for a mistake only. Lieutenant Davison has often known the mistress send her domestics to be punished, and without telling them for what. He has seen a slave also, both whose nostrils had been slit by her mistress's order, who was of some consequence, being the wife of the Chief Engineer of the island, and he also remembers a new negro girl, flogged by the order of her mistress, who died in two days afterwards of her wounds.

Lieutenant Davison, Captain Smith, and Dr. Jackson, all agree, that it was common for ladies of respectability and rank to superintend the punishments of their slaves. Conformably with this, we find Dr. Harrison stating to the Committee, that a negro, in Jamaica, was flogged to death by her mistress's order, who stood by to see the punishment. Lieutenant Davison also states, that in the same island, he has seen several negro girls at work with the needle, in the presence of their mistresses, with a thumb-screw on their left thumbs, and he has seen the blood gush out from the ends of them. He has also seen a negro girl made to kneel with her bare knees on pebbles, and to work there at the same time; a sort of punishment, he says, among the domestics, which he knows to be in common use.

On the subject of women becoming the executioners of their own fury, Doctor Jackson observes, that the first thing that shocked him in Jamaica was a creole lady, of some consequence, superintending the punishment of her slaves, male and female, ordering the number of lashes, and, with her own hands, flogging the negro driver, if he did not punish properly.

Capt. Cook relates, that two young ladies of fortune, in Barbadoes, sisters, one of whom was displeased at the pregnancy of a female slave belonging to the other, by the son of the surgeon attending the estate, proceeded to some very derogatory acts of cruelty. With their own garters they tied the young woman neck and heels, and then beat her almost to death with the heels of their shoes. One of her eyes continued a long while afterwards in