Page:Abstract of the evidence for the abolition of the slave-trade 1791.djvu/109

( 75 ) danger of being lost. They after this continued to use her ill, confining and degrading her. Captain Cook came in during the beating, and was an eye witness to it himself.

Captain Cook states farther, that he saw a woman, named Rachel Lauder, beat a female slave most unmercifully. Having bruised her head almost to a jelly, with the heel of her shoe, she threw her with great force on the seat of the child's necessary, and then tried to stamp her head through the hole, and would have murdered her, if not prevented by two officers. The girl's crime was the [sic] not bringing money enough from on board ship, where she was sent by her mistress, for the purpose of prostitution.

Lieutenant Davison states, in his evidence, that the clergyman's wife at Port Royal, was remarkably cruel. She used to drop hot sealing wax on her negroes, after flogging them. He was sent for as surgeon to one of them, whose breast was terribly burnt with sealing wax. He was also once called in to a woman slave, who had been tied up all night by her hands, and had been abused with cayenne pepper, by the same mistress, and in a way too horrid and indecent to mention. He lived next door, he states also, to a washer-woman at Port Royal, who was almost continually flogging her negroes. He has often gone in and remonstrated against her cruelty, when he has seen the negro women chained, to the washing-tubs, almost naked, with their thighs and backs in a gore of blood, from flogging. He could mention various other capricious, punishments, if necessary.

Mr. Forster, examined on the same subject, says he has known a creole woman, in Antigua, drop hot sealing wax on a girl's back, after a flogging. He and many others saw a young woman of fortune and character flogging a negro man very severely with her own hands. Many similar instances he could relate if necessary, They are almost innumerable among the domestick slaves.

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