De l’influence de l’esclavage sur les mœurs des maîtres et des esclaves dans les colonies modernes,

CHAP. 7: > On the influence of slavery on the morals of masters and slaves in the modern colonies, and particularly in the Dutch colonies.

The moral effects that servitude of the glebe produced on the morals of masters and slaves, after the fall of the Roman empire, are analogous to those I have expounded in the preceding chapter; however, they manifested with less energy, because the domination was less violent: among the Romans, slavery produced in the master race a contempt for all industrial labors; among the moderns, it has produced a similar effect, and it has not yet completely ceased: among the former, to live honorably, it was necessary to live at the expense of a part of the human species; to subjugate men by cunning or by force, to seize the wealth already produced by them, and to force them to reproduce new wealth in order to seize it again, were the only employments the aristocracy reserved for itself; among the latter, it has been permitted to grow rich only by the pillage of vanquished nations, or by the contributions levied on the laboring classes; wealth acquired through industry and commerce was long considered vile, and worthy at most of freedmen: the former repelled from public functions all persons who had not come from their ranks; the latter have followed the same conduct whenever they have had the power: those considered any alliance with a family that was not of the master class as apt to defile the purity of their blood; these have made a similar judgment. It would be useless to push the comparison further, since nothing similar to what took place in Europe before the fall of the Roman empire exists among us.

Accustomed to judging the peoples of antiquity by theatrical heroes or by the fantastic descriptions of poets, we cannot pass from the possessors of men of ancient times to the possessors of men of the modern colonies without doing great violence to our ideas. However, in all countries, at all epochs, and among all races, similar causes have produced the same effects. We have seen, in the fourth chapter of this book, that in all the modern colonies where slavery has been established, the masters have considered labor as debasing, that they have abandoned it to their slaves, and have ceased to apply their physical organs and even their intellectual faculties to the production of the things necessary for their existence. In this respect, they have been in the same position, and have adopted the same ideas as the possessors of men of antiquity; but, in other respects, their position has been different. The Romans, to replace the slaves whom the miseries attached to servitude caused to perish incessantly, to multiply their number, to despoil the nations whose wealth they coveted, and to protect themselves from foreign aggressions, were obliged to have weapons constantly in hand; they were, consequently, under the necessity of continually exercising their physical strength. The possessors of men of the modern colonies have not, in general, been under the same necessity; they have not needed, like the Romans, to conduct the slave trade by force of arms; avid and ferocious speculators have done it for them. They have not needed to practice with arms for their defense; the governments, under whose protection they have acquired slaves, have taken upon themselves to watch over their safety, and to guarantee them from the dangers to which their cruelty, their pride, and their avarice would expose them. They have not needed to procure by arms the luxury objects they cannot obtain from the labor of their slaves; governments have established, for their profit, in the mother country, the monopoly on the commodities that these slaves can produce, and this monopoly has given them the means to acquire the wealth that can only be produced by free hands. They were thus delivered from all work of body and mind; they had only to abandon themselves to idleness, and to occupy themselves with their physical enjoyments; and it is indeed to this that their cares are limited.

The possessors of slaves of the Cape of Good Hope know no keener pleasures than to give themselves over to idleness, and to satisfy their appetite; drinking, eating, sleeping, or making a few visits, are the principal occupations of a colonist [98]. For him, all days are alike; and here is how he employs them: he is scarcely up when he drinks his coffee, and smokes his pipe while walking, in his nightcap, before his door or around his house; at nine o'clock, he breakfasts copiously, takes up his pipe again, walks or makes visits until noon; at noon, he returns to the table, has an even more copious dinner, goes to bed, and sleeps until five o'clock; upon waking, he takes up his pipe again, begins to drink, walks or makes visits for three or four hours; at nine o'clock, he returns to the table; he is served eight, ten, and even twenty dishes of meat and fish, prepared in various ways; he drinks and eats as if what he has drunk and eaten during the day had only whetted his appetite: it is thus, says Barrow, that every day this glutton abandons himself to laziness and grows fat in his sleep [99].

Idleness and gluttony are not the lot only of the rich possessors of slaves who live in the city; the farmers themselves are of an unequaled laziness, throughout the entire colony; sleeping and eating is the employment of their whole life; they leave uncultivated lands that would provide for the needs of a great number of industrious families; they even renounce procuring bread and salutary vegetables for themselves, rather than devote themselves to a slight labor; they are content with the flesh that their herds furnish them, because, to obtain it, they need neither labor nor intelligence [100].

There is no more activity among the women than among the men; they get up, drink, eat, and sleep at the same hours as their husbands; their occupations are limited to scolding their slaves and assigning them their work; they even rid themselves of the care of their children, when they have the means: each of them is committed by them to the guard and care of a slave [101].

Among the Romans, the masters belonging to the same species of men as the slaves, the children born into slavery brought, upon coming into the world, no mark by which one could judge the liaisons that existed between the female slaves and their masters; it has not been the same in the modern colonies; whenever a female slave has given birth to a child, one has been able to judge, by the color of that child, to what species of men its father belonged. It has been all the more difficult to be mistaken about the liaisons of the masters with their enslaved women, as there has never been any marriage between whites and blacks; every child of mixed blood has been the product of an immoral union; he has almost always been the fruit of the master's violence upon his slave. Thus, to know what effects slavery produces on morals, relative to the union of the sexes, it is hardly necessary to research, in travelers, what relations exist between a master and the women he possesses as slaves; it is enough to examine the diverse colors among which the population is divided.

"Upon arriving at the Cape of Good Hope," says Levaillant, "one is surprised by the multitude of slaves as white as Europeans that one sees there [102]." However, no white man has ever been reduced to slavery in this country; the slaves, on the contrary, have always been of Ethiopian origin. How then has it happened that their descendants have become white? By a long series of acts of violence by the masters upon the women reduced to servitude. From their liaisons with Ethiopian women were born mulatto daughters; from their liaisons with these were born daughters still lighter in color; finally, the traces of Ethiopian blood have disappeared, and the slaves have ended up being of the same species as their possessors.But, in this change of races, there is a phenomenon that it is important to observe, because we will find it again in almost all the other colonies. A colonist does not free the children born of him and his female slaves; he demands of them the labors and the submission that he demands of all the others. He sells them, exchanges them, or passes them on to his heirs as he sees fit. If one of his legitimate children receives them by inheritance, he makes no distinction between them and his other slaves; a brother thus becomes the owner of his sisters and his brothers. He exercises the same tyranny over them; he demands of them the same labors; he lashes them with the same whip; he sates upon them the same desires. This multitude of white slaves who astonish the eyes of a European are therefore almost always the fruits of adultery and incest. A traveler observes that there is so little affection between relatives in this colony that one rarely sees two brothers converse together [103]. How could a brother have tenderness for another, when perhaps he has ten or twelve brothers and sisters whom he considers the vilest of properties, and whom he employs to satisfy the most brutal passions? Among uneducated people, morals are ordinarily manifested through language, and, according to Barrow, that of the inhabitants of the Cape is of an indecency that would not be tolerated in any society [104].

Slaves having more or less value, according to whether they partake more or less of the white or the black species, the colonists encourage the liaisons of their female slaves with the European soldiers assigned to guard the colony; any negress whom her master does not reserve for his own use obtains from him permission to devote Sunday to the soldier of the garrison who has deigned to honor her with his gaze [105].

Whenever in a country one sees a part of the population living in idleness, softness, and abundance, one can be assured that there exists another, much more numerous part, which lives in extreme misery and is condemned to unceasing labor. At the Cape of Good Hope, the possessors of men never work, and consume an immense quantity of food. The slaves employed in cultivation are poorly fed, poorly clothed, overwhelmed with labors, and chastised with the greatest rigor [106]. The slaves attached to the personal service of their masters and living in the city are the only ones who are well clothed and well fed [107]. There is, between them and those who are employed in the labors of the fields, the same difference that there is, in certain States of Europe, between the lackeys who swarm in the houses of the great, and the workers who live in misery while working fourteen hours a day. It is from the analogy one observes between the men who command that the analogy one observes between the men who obey is born. We will find the same phenomenon in all the colonies.

The slaves employed in the most arduous labors, being excited by the hope of no profit, can be constrained to it only by the fear of punishments; the cruelty of the colonists toward them is such that there is no traveler who has not been revolted by it. The slightest contradiction, the slightest delay in the execution of their desires irritates them and renders them ferocious; they end up finding, in the exercise of cruelty, a kind of enjoyment.

"I have known some colonists," says Sparrman, "who, not only in the heat of anger, but in cold blood and upon reflection, did not blush to make themselves executioners, to tear, for the slightest negligence, the body and limbs of their slaves, to deliberately prolong their torment and their tortures, and, more cruel than tigers, to throw pepper and salt on their wounds; but, what seemed to me even stranger and more horrible, was to hear one of these Christian colonists describe, with an appearance of satisfaction, the entire process of these diabolical executions, and even to glorify himself for practicing them himself, to exhaust himself in sophisms to justify these excesses, and, in general, the slave trade in which he was personally interested [108]."

The instrument the colonists use to chastise their slaves is a whip of enormous size, which they also use to drive horses. They sometimes apply it with such fury that if the victim does not expire under the blows, it is difficult for her to escape them. Barrow, a witness to the continual violence committed upon the slaves, reports some instances that can allow one to judge the particular morals of their masters.

"We saw," he says, "a young Hottentot woman, holding a child in her arms, and lying on the ground in the most deplorable state. She had been torn from head to toe with one of those terrible whips made of rhinoceros or sea-cow hide, and known by the name of sambocs. Her body was exactly nothing but a wound; her child, in clinging to her, had not escaped the blows. We had great difficulty in putting her in a position fit to receive medical aid. But she was so bruised and the fever broke out with such violence that her life was despaired of for several days. The only crime this woman was accused of was having attempted to follow her husband, who was among the Hottentots who had resolved to implore English protection [109]."

"The neighboring farm," adds the same traveler, "offered us an example of even more horrible brutality. We saw in a corner of the house a beautiful Hottentot child of about seven years, who had an iron chain of ten or twelve pounds on his feet; his legs were swollen, and the irons were penetrating the flesh. This poor child was so overwhelmed by their weight that he dragged himself and could not walk; he had been in this state for more than a year [110]."

Sometimes, the masters' anger overcomes their cruelty, and does not leave them time to prolong the torments of their slaves; according to the testimony of the same traveler, a Hottentot refusing to shoot a deserter on his master's order, the latter laid him out at his feet with a gunshot, and then had the deserter, his wife, and his child massacred [111].

The Dutch government, to put a check on the cruelty of the colonists, had forbidden them to put them to death; it had even authorized the slaves to lodge complaints before the magistrates, in cases where they were unjustly mistreated; but these regulations were never executed [112].

"If a white man kills his slave," says Barrow, "he buries him and nothing more is said of it; if he kills another's, he gets out of it by paying his value to the master, unless the latter, implacable in his resentment, brings him before the court of justice, which, I believe, has never happened [113]."

At the same time that a master, or even any free man, can mistreat a slave with impunity, the latter is forbidden, on pain of death, to raise a hand to defend himself: the mere act of having struck a European is punished by the ultimate punishment, because it is presumed that the blow was struck with the intention to murder [114].

The death reserved for slaves is not the simple deprivation of life. The masters have felt, like those of antiquity, that such a punishment would seem light to beings for whom life is but a long torment. They have therefore sought a kind of death that could replace the crucifixion the Romans used. Sparrman was several times a witness to the penalties inflicted on slaves; he saw them torn by the whip, or delivered to the ultimate punishment, and he reports it in the following terms:

"I have several times been a witness," he says, "to these atrocious scenes. I have often heard, especially in the morning and evening, the cries and groans of these unfortunate men. In these cruel moments, they ask for mercy; but, I have been told, they implore with even more insistence for a glass of water, which is carefully refused them, so inflamed is their blood by the suffering. Experience has shown that a glass of water, or any other drink, then brought them death within a few hours and sometimes as soon as they had drunk. The same thing also happens to those who are impaled alive, after having been broken on the wheel, or even without having undergone this torture. The pike is thrust along their back and the vertebrae of the neck, between the skin and the epidermis, so that the patient is in the position of a seated man. However, some of these victims still live for several days in this position, when the weather is dry; but, if it becomes rainy, their wounds become gangrenous, and their torments end in a few hours with their life [115]."

The corpses of the men who have thus perished in torture are suspended in chains on the main roads; and they remain there until they are devoured by vultures, or they fall into decay [116].

Perfidy is not considered a vice by the colonists: whoever deceives his neighbor, says Barrow, passes for a clever man. Truth is not among the moral virtues, and lying is taken for wit. Property is no more respected than truth; theft is not regarded as a criminal action; it does not dishonor. In a word, the colonists, according to the same traveler, are active only in doing evil: they always applaud successful crimes [117].

Indifferent to everything that touches their reputation concerning morals, the colonists are of an extraordinary sensitivity regarding the distinction of ranks. The man who gives his daughter to the most infamous individual, without fear of losing status, would believe himself dishonored if his wife or daughter had lost their rank in church. Precedence is one of the principal causes of their numerous quarrels; to have the first step in the church, or to place one's seat closest to the pulpit, is for them a matter of the highest importance [118]. Their pride, which makes them view with such contempt any person they judge to be of an inferior rank, is manifested toward any man from whom they have nothing to hope for and nothing to fear, and particularly toward foreigners. Most of them, however, have for ancestors only beggars, malefactors, and prostitutes, who were formerly deported to this country by the Dutch government. But at the same time that the colonists manifest the most insolent pride toward any man they suppose to be of a rank inferior to their own, they show themselves to be of a boundless servility and baseness toward the principal members of the government to which they are subject: they thus unite in their persons the vices of the masters and those of the slaves [119].

The possessors of men of Guiana have, in several respects, the same morals as those of the Cape of Good Hope; however, as there are several differences between the nature of the soil and the productions of the two countries, one observes in the morals and in the relations that exist between the diverse classes of the population, corresponding differences.

The soil of the Cape of Good Hope is generally poor; it is used to raise herds, to produce the same species of grains that are harvested in Europe, and different species of wines. With the exception of the wines, all the products of the country are consumed on the spot, or sold to navigators who lack provisions. None of these products requires arduous and continuous labors; those that are most necessary for life are those that require the least fatigue, and that are sold at the lowest price. Butcher's meat, which is the basis of the population's subsistence, is sold for almost nothing. It follows from this that the masters can neither acquire great wealth, nor indulge in great luxury; and that they are not excited by any powerful interest to demand excessive labor from their slaves, or to deprive them of the food necessary for them to recover their strength. A slave assigned to guard a herd does not have to take much more trouble than a free man; he can be almost as lazy as his master. The cultivator who can feed a slave well for the value of two or three sous a day cannot aspire to make great savings on his food. Thus, although the slaves of this colony are harshly treated, they are less poorly fed than those of the other colonies.

The soil of Guiana is, on the contrary, of a very great fertility; the heat of the climate makes it unsuitable for pasture, or for producing cereals; but it makes it very suitable for producing sugar or other commodities that grow only between the tropics. These productions are obtained only by long and arduous labors; they have, compared to cereals and butcher's meat, a great value, and are generally destined for export. It follows from this that the masters can have more luxury and give themselves more numerous and more varied enjoyments than the colonists of the Cape of Good Hope; but it also follows that they have a greater interest in demanding more arduous and more continuous labor from their slaves, and in leaving them only what is strictly necessary for them to live. The slaves, being subjected to harsher fatigues, and having only scarce and poor-quality food, lose their strength more quickly and live for a shorter time; but the losses that the master makes in this way are more than compensated for by the surplus of labor he obtains from them, and by the savings he makes on their subsistence and their clothing [120].

The differences in the nature and productions of the soil and in the temperature of the atmosphere being known, one will easily understand the differences that exist in the morals of the two populations.

The Dutch colonists of Guiana have for labor, whether of body or of mind, the same aversion and the same contempt as the other possessors of men: their entire life is devoted to idleness and the satisfaction of their physical enjoyments; they have no distractions other than those they find in the punishments of their slaves and in the care for their own safety. Placed under a burning climate, the planter who lives in the middle of his plantation rises with the sun; he goes to a kind of portico called a piazza: there he finds his coffee, his pipe, and six of the most beautiful slaves of both sexes ready to serve him. The head of the plantation or overseer presents himself to make his report of what happened the day before or during the night; he is followed by the cultivator slaves, guilty of some negligence, by the executioner slaves, armed with a terrible whip, and by the slave surgeon who must dress the wounds. The report heard, the master makes a sign, and immediately the accused are tied to the columns of the portico or to a tree, and torn with lashes of the whip, until a new sign stops the fury of the executioners. If any serious wound has resulted from the punishments, the slave surgeon dresses it, and the punished slaves are sent back to work. In his turn, the surgeon makes his report on the health of the other slaves, and the youngest are passed in review.

"His lordship," says Stedman, "then walks about in his morning attire, which consists of drawers of the finest Holland cloth, white silk stockings, and slippers of yellow or red morocco leather; the collar of his shirt remains open, and he wears over it only a flowing gown of beautiful India cloth; his head is covered with a cotton cap of extreme fineness, and an enormous beaver hat that protects his thin and somber face from the heat of the sun…> "Having wandered slowly around his house, or having mounted his horse to visit his fields and calculate the increase of his wealth, he returns around eight o'clock, in order to dress if he wishes to make some visits, otherwise he remains as he is. In the first case, he only exchanges his drawers for breeches of a light linen or silk; then, he sits down, and holds out both legs to a young negro who puts on his shoes; another at the same time dresses his hair or shaves him; a third is occupied with keeping the mosquitoes away from him. This part of his toilet completed, he takes another shirt, puts on another coat, always of white linen; then, under a vast parasol carried by a young negro, he is led to his barge, which awaits him with six or eight oarsmen, and which his overseer has taken care to provide with fruit, wine, water, and tobacco. If he does not go far from the plantation, he breakfasts at ten o'clock. In the heat of the day, he stretches out in his hammock and sleeps. During his sleep, two young negresses fan him to cool him. At three o'clock, he awakens, washes, perfumes himself, and sits down to a table where he finds everything that can flatter his sensuality. At six o'clock, the same scene as in the morning with the overseer, the slaves who have erred, and the executioners; then, punch, games, the pipe. At ten o'clock, adds Stedman, his lordship chooses from his seraglio the one of his slaves with whom he wishes to spend the night. The next day the same scenes are repeated [121]."

It is not necessary to say that a master who is armed with limitless power, who usually lives only in the midst of his slaves, and who has nothing to fear from opinion, could find no resistance among the women subject to his empire; but, what must be observed, is that all the men to whom he delegates a part of his power enjoy nearly the same privilege as he; the overseer, upon whose report the slaves are punished, without being permitted to say anything in their defense, is more formidable than the master himself, since he is not stopped by the fear of destroying his property; even the slaves who fulfill the functions of executioners enjoy a kind of power; for, in their hands, the whip can be a more or less terrible instrument, according to whether they are well or ill-disposed.

It sometimes happens, however, that a female slave resists the desires of the master or the overseer, especially if she has made a choice among her companions in misfortune: in such a case, the resistance is punished by the most severe punishment. The first example of cruelty that Stedman witnessed, upon arriving in Surinam, was produced by such a cause. A beautiful girl, about eighteen years old, and entirely naked, was tied to a tree by her arms. In this position, two negroes, armed with two enormous whips, inflicted two hundred blows upon her. At the moment Stedman saw her, she had just undergone her punishment: her head bent to her breast, blood streaming from her head to her feet, she presented the most frightful spectacle.

"I ran to the overseer," says Stedman, "and begged him to have her promptly untied, since she had completely undergone her punishment. He replied quite simply that, to prevent foreigners from meddling in his administration, he had made it an invariable rule to double the punishment whenever anyone interceded for the guilty party, and the barbarian had the execution begin again instantly. I tried, but in vain, to stop him; he declared to me that the slightest delay, far from stopping his determination, would only make his vengeance more implacable and more terrible. I had no other choice but to flee this detestable monster, and to let him gorge himself on blood like a ferocious beast... Having sought the motive for this barbarity, I learned with certainty that the only crime of this unfortunate woman was to have constantly refused the embraces of her detestable executioner [122]."

The masters' wives do not have morals more pure or more gentle than their husbands; they abandon themselves to the same disorders as them, when they find the occasion, or they are devoured by jealousy, and resort to the most violent excesses toward the female slaves who are the object of their suspicions. Stedman, who recounts so many examples of the immorality of the men, wished to show himself less severe with regard to the women; he informs us, however, that they abandon themselves, in general, to all their passions, and principally to the most constant cruelty [123]. He says that in a few months the officers who had gone to this colony to subdue or destroy slaves who had taken refuge in the forests were, in large part, brought to the edge of the grave by the kindnesses of the ladies [124]. He recounts that one of the great ladies of the colony, in the meals she gave to the officers, had her guests served by the most beautiful of her slaves, completely naked, and that she justified this custom by saying that it took away their means of hiding their pregnancy. Finally, he asserts that the impudence of the women of good society was such that it made the European officers who were not accustomed to it blush [125]. However, he makes it a scruple to reveal all the facts of which he was a witness: "I must," he says, "draw the curtain over all the imperfections of the sex in this climate."

The licentiousness of morals does not calm the furies of jealousy. This passion shows itself to be all the more terrible as the unfortunate women who cause it are in a more abject state, and as they are more devoid of protection. A woman who has one of her slaves punished seeks above all to disfigure her and make her hideous: it is on the breast that she has the whip blows applied, sometimes even dagger blows. Stedman recounts that a Creole lady, seeing a young and beautiful slave on her plantation, immediately had a burning iron applied to her forehead, cheeks, and mouth, and ordered that her Achilles tendon be cut at the same time. She thus made, in an instant, of a beautiful person a kind of monster of deformity. The most exalted sentiments among all possessors of men are pride, and the love of physical enjoyments; a female slave who is the object of her master's preference thus offends her mistress in the most sensitive manner; she humiliates her in her own eyes, and robs her of a part of her pleasures; this is more than enough to ignite her vengeance and her cruelty [126].

The effects of jealousy do not stop at the women who are its object; they weigh particularly heavily upon the children who, by their color, announce that they owe their birth to their master or to men of his species. These children, whatever their sex, are odious to the masters' wives, because they are an irrefutable proof of the preference their slaves obtain over them; but, if they are of the female sex, they are odious moreover, because their mistresses see in them future rivals for themselves or at least for their daughters [127].

The masters could shelter the children they have by their slaves from the violence of their wives: it would be enough for them to give them their freedom; but two obstacles oppose this: morals, and the laws which are but their expression. The tenderness that a father shows for those of his children who are born in slavery is, in general, considered a weakness and almost a madness. To give them freedom is to strip oneself of a useful property and to deprive oneself of the faculty of disposing of them arbitrarily; he therefore leaves them mixed in with his other slaves; he sells them, exchanges them, or transmits them to his heir [128].

From the preceding, one can get an idea of the luxury and enjoyments of the possessors of men in Surinam; it remains to explain by what labors and by what pains these advantages are bought.

Sugar is the principal commodity obtained from this country; and as, in all the colonies, this commodity requires the same labors and demands the same care, one can apply to all of them what I will say of a single one.

The labors of agriculture, in the colonies, are all executed by manual labor; no use is made of machines, nor of the strength of animals. From sunrise, the cracking of whips announces to the slaves that it is time to go to work. On each plantation, a driver, armed with a carter's whip, leads them to the fields in gangs; and, while they work, he walks behind them, urging on with blows of the whip those he does not judge diligent enough [129]. The children, from the age of six or seven, are also led to the fields in gangs, to pull up weeds or to engage in other labors. The slave who leads them is armed with a long rod, and she strikes the slowest or the most clumsy with it: for them, as for their fathers, there exist no other motives for activity than punishments.

At the same time that they are subjected to endless fatigues, and are ceaselessly exposed to being torn by blows of the whip, the slaves obtain only food that is not abundant, not substantial, and never varies: it is cassava flour, a few herrings, a few vegetables that they cultivate themselves. They are rigorously forbidden to eat the sugar cane they cultivate; one who was merely suspected of having tasted it would have his teeth torn out [130].

Faults or negligences are punished, as has already been seen, by a number of whip blows applied to the naked parts of the body, according to the will or caprices of the master or the overseer; often, too, the nose is split, or the ears are cut off of slaves who have quarrels among themselves. The regulations forbid masters to put their slaves to death; but they are easily evaded; the testimony of free whites being the only one admitted, it is not possible to find witnesses to convict the guilty. Moreover, one would find neither accusers to prosecute him, nor judges to condemn him, since the magistrates belong to the master class and make common cause with them. Thus, it is not rare to find colonists who make a game of the life of their slaves; if they have some they wish to be rid of, they take them with them on a hunt, and as soon as they have reached a remote place, they kill them with a gunshot. Sometimes, they have them perish in long and painful tortures in the presence of all their other slaves, and then the death is attributed to an accident, or to the weakness of the patient's constitution [131].

The light faults of slaves being punished by the most serious punishments, and life being stripped of everything that can make it dear, serious faults or offenses can be punished only by great tortures. A slave whom an excess of misfortune leads to destroy himself must take care not to survive the attempt he makes; for, if he escapes it, he expiates in long torments the infringement he sought to make, in his own person, on the property of his possessor. He is torn with whip blows, taking care, however, not to injure any part essential to life; or else he is subjected to the torture of the spanso-bocko, which is crueler still [132].

The colonists sometimes apply to the magistrates to have their slaves punished: they take this precaution in cases where they fear the slaves might expire during the execution of the punishment; if this happens when the penalty is inflicted by order of the judge, they do not have to fear being condemned to a fine. A master who has recovered a fugitive slave can request the court of justice to have one of his legs cut off, to prevent the same offense. Stedman, during his stay in Paramaribo, saw nine executions of this kind, authorized by the magistrates, and performed by the hospital surgeon. Four of the patients died immediately after the operation, and a fifth killed himself by tearing off his bandages during the night [133]. Crimes more serious than flight, such as revolt, resistance, and the like, are punished with the longest and most cruel torments that the imagination of the masters can invent. To be burned over a slow fire, broken alive on the wheel, or drawn and quartered by four horses, are tortures that are inflicted indiscriminately on old men, women, and even children, and these tortures are not rare. If one wishes to prolong the patient's torments, he is suspended by the ribs on an iron hook, and he remains there alive sometimes for three days, his feet and head hanging toward the earth [134].

The constancy and firmness of the slaves rise to the level of the cruelty of the masters. Whatever the rigor of the tortures inflicted upon them, they almost never happen to utter a complaint. They show, in their torments, the constancy that we have observed among savages fallen into the hands of their enemies. Sometimes, they seek to irritate their executioners with sarcasms or jests; they defy them by accusing their cruelty of impotence. To know how to suffer and die is the only glory of which the masters cannot deprive their slaves [135].

The pride of the masters in this colony is equal to their cruelty. They would consider as an intolerable insolence on the part of a slave the act of drinking or eating in their presence, or in the presence of a man of the same species as them. A word, even a look, that did not bear that character of abasement that is demanded of the enslaved population, would be followed by the most terrible punishments. The slave who passed by a simple sailor and neglected to give him some sign of respect would risk having his skull smashed with a club for such insolence. This sensitivity does not exist only with regard to slaves or men of color; it exists with regard to any man whom a master judges to be of a rank inferior to his own [136].

One might suppose that the morals we observe in the Dutch colonies are due to causes other than the existence of slavery and the type of cultivation in which the slaves are employed; one might believe that the first inhabitants of these colonies were only the refuse of the society of the mother country, and that the current morals are only necessary consequences of the morals that existed at the time of colonization; but we shall see that similar morals exist in the English, French, and Spanish colonies, where slavery is admitted, and where some analogy is observed in the nature of the labors to which the enslaved population is subjected.

The morals of the Dutch established in the Sunda Islands are a little less known to us than those of the colonists of the Cape, and of those of Guiana. One sees, however, from what travelers say of them, that they differ little from those we have already observed; idleness, pride, and cruelty are the characteristics that, in these islands, first struck observers. We have previously seen that the aversion of the Dutch for every kind of occupation there is so strong that, without the Chinese, they would be exposed to lacking everything. Pride has marked the ranks, in these islands, with as much force as in any country. The titles of chief-merchant, merchant, sub-merchant, bookkeeper, assistant, correspond to the titles of prince, duke, count, marquis, baron, knight. Those who bear them are distinguished by a particular costume, and have more haughtiness and insolence than the nobility in any country of Europe. The military chiefs bear the same titles: a major can claim the rank of chief-merchant; a captain is raised only to the rank of sub-merchant [137]. The superior chiefs never leave their homes without being preceded by guards. When a governor passes in his carriage, everyone stops, persons who are in carriages dismount, and one bows with respect before the dignity of the great personage; only senators are excepted from this mark of respect. The great demand for their wives all the same honors that they demand for themselves [138].

In countries where slavery exists, the first title to consideration is to be of the master race; the first cause of contempt is to be of the slave race. These dispositions are manifested in Batavia with the same energy as in Guiana and at the Cape of Good Hope. If men of the master race commit crimes, they are not punished for them, or they are punished only very lightly; but, if men of the enslaved race commit faults, they are hanged, broken alive on the wheel, or impaled without mercy [139].