however unwillingly, to confess that, as to the unity or variety of the human race, he is not, and never can be, authorized to claim a right to decide; he can already say that, on the one hand, if the races of men are of different descent, languages could not be expected to be more diverse than they in fact are; and that, on the other hand, if all mankind are of one blood, their tongues need not be more alike than we actually find them. Whether physical science will not be finally brought to a like confession of incompetence, is at least very doubtful: as yet, its methods are in a far less developed condition, its conclusions less assured, than those of its sister branch of ethnological inquiry. But, whatever resources it may hereafter display, it cannot well be doubted that, in making out the ethnic story of the human race, the greater part must be borne by the study of language; this alone can convert what would otherwise be a barren classification into something like a true history.

ARTICLE III.-THE LATE INSURRECTION IN JAMAICA.

The West Indies, By Rev. Dr. UNDERHILL. London: 1862. The Light and Shadows of Jamaica History. By Hon. RICHARD HILL. Kingston, Jamaica: 1859.

The Ordeal of Free Labor in the British West Indies. By W. G. SEWELL. New York: 1862.

The Present Crisis, and How to meet it. By Rev. Mr. PANTON. Jamaica: 1866.

Reflections on the Gordon Rebellion. By S. R. WARD. Jamaica: 1866.

Report of the Jamaica Royal Commission. London: 1866. Jamaica Papers. Published by the Jamaica Committee. London: 1866.

Report of W. Morgan, Esq., on his Mission to Jamaica.

1866.

THE island of Jamaica is divided into three counties and thirty-two parishes. Each parish has a vestry and presiding officer, called the Custos. The vestry, which is composed of the leading men of the parish-members of the Established Church-perform certain ecclesiastical duties, and hold courts for the trial of minor civil and criminal causes. Petty officers of government, and volunteer companies of soldiers, are main tained in each parish, who are invariably colored men.

The parish of St. Thomas, in the east, was the seat of the disturbance of October, 1865. The most fertile and densely populated portion of this parish is the valley of the Plantain Garden River. Here are the richest lands and largest sugar estates, the smallest number of freeholders, and the most degraded population in the island. The Court House, a large stone building with a wooden roof, stood on one side of the market place at Morant Bay, on a river of that name, about thirty-two miles from Kingston.

In the autumn of 1865 writs of ejectment were served on squatters at Stony Gut, a village of blacks, a few miles from the Court House. Paul Bogle, a small freeholder, a black man of note in his little circle, and a minister of the native Baptist Church, determined to resist the officers. For this purpose he organized a small company of laborers from the neighboring estates, and officered them by freeholders. At a court held on Saturday, the seventh of October, some disturbance arose. A man was arrested, and subsequently rescued from the police, who were beaten, and forced to retreat. The following Monday the police went to arrest the rioters, but were again attacked and repulsed. Three of their number were made prisoners, and released upon taking the oath to "join their color, and cleave to the blacks." Threats were uttered by the rioters of their intention of going to the Bay to kill all the white men and all the blacks who would not join them. When the Custos, Baron Ketelhodt, heard of this, he ordered a volunteer company to be present at the vestry the following day, and sent to Governor Eyre for troops.

On the 11th of October the vestry assembled at the Court House, and proceeded with their regular business for several hours without interruption. Some of the members, anticipating no disturbance, had left for home, when, at three o'clock in the afternoon, an alarm was given that a crowd of negroes were coming. It was a mob of two or three hundred men, women, and children armed with clubs, stones, and machettesan implement resembling a cutlass, and used in cutting canes. They approached the Court House and commenced an attack by throwing stones. The soldiers who were stationed around the building fired a volley and killed several persons, when the mob retreated, but seeing the troops defenseless rushed in and overpowered them before they could reload. The troops broke; a few retreated into the Court House-the rest were lost in the crowd. A fight then commenced, which lasted several hours. Suddenly a cry was heard, "Go and fetch fire! Burn the brutes out! If we don't we will not manage the volunteers and Buckra." A school-house near by was fired-the flames spread to the roof of the Court House. The inmates fled; one or two made their escape, but the greater portion

were overtaken by the mob, and brutally beaten until long after life was extinct. The next morning a crowd of negroes were gathered about the physician, Dr. Major, who was caring for their wounded, when an armed cutter, with 100 regulars from Kingston, appeared in sight. The terrified negroes fled, leaving the doctor the only man on the shore to receive the troops. Most of the negroes had returned to their homes, but some had fled eastward, where they were joined by others from the estates. They plundered the houses of planters, broke open stores, stole property of every description, drank all the rum they could find, and killed a few white planters who were especially hated by their laborers. The disturbance lasted three or four days, the rioters moving slowly eastward from Morant Bay to Elmwood, a distance of thirty miles. They did not spread westward, but confined their fury to the sugar estates on and near the Plantain Garden River District. Not a woman or child was injured, nor a single house burned. The same day Governor Eyre received information of the massacre. He immediately ordered troops by water to Port Antonio, and sent others across the mountains to hem in the insurgents at the various gaps and passes. These movements were well planned and promptly executed. No resistance was anywhere offered to the soldiers. The frightened multitude fled at their approach; yet, as soon as the troops arrived at their several stations, they commenced indiscriminately whipping and killing men and women, burning houses, ravaging the country, sometimes under the direction of courts martial, often without. The inhabitants of the island, colored as well as white, terrified lest the insurrection should spread over the island, urged on the soldiers in their work of destruction, until their barbarity and inhumanity exceeded that of the negro mob. Governor Eyre, though he had no direct control over the troops, advised their movemen's, and knew and approved of their operations. The cooler judgment of those removed from the scene of action is that the soldiers and police, with such aid as would have been rendered, could have repressed the revolt, arrested the ringleaders, and delivered them to the proper tribunal for trial and punishment. The execution of justice by the ordinary civil tribunals would have made a more powerful impression on the negro than he inhuman treatment he received, and the cruelties he witness

ed, betraying as they did the terror of the white man.* But this is not the view of the people of Jamaica, either then or now.

* A stranger, unacquainted with life in Jamaica, does not appreciate the immense disproportion of the white to the black population;-the distance which separates one family from another, and the insufficiency of the military force for their protection. He cannot understand the terror which made the people think measures prompt and energetic, which were only cruel and barbarous. The writer of this Article rode with his party for some weeks daily among the St. Andrews mountains, only three or four months after the insurrection. The women and children watched for our coming, and at the first sound of approaching horses rushed to the roadside to exchange a pleasant greeting. "Good day, massa! Good morning, sweet missus," were their salutations, while they dropped at the same time a short, quick, spasmodic little courtesy, and looked up with glad faces, and a brilliant display of ivories. We traveled through the mountains of Port Royal, and the high lands of St. Ann's. Here we missed the welcome of familiar faces, though our greeting was always cordially and cheerfully answered. We entered the houses, begged a drink of cocoanut water, or a sweet orange, inquired into the mysteries of cassava bread making; and examined into the simple and homely domestic arrangements. So on leaving Kingston for Morant Bay, and driving along the sea-coast, we noticed no especial difference in the appearance of the people until we crossed the Yallahs, a river a few miles west of the Morant. Here we were struck at once by the scowling face. the sullen, averted look, or the angry, defiant gaze of the women; we realized that we were among those who had suffered bitter wrongs, who had neither forgotten nor forgiven injustice and cruelty, and whose muttered words seemed to threaten vengeance on every white man and woman. We visited also the houses of the planters in the neighborhood which had been pillaged by a furious mob, and to which the owners had just dared to return We saw marks of the machette on the windows, walls, and furniture. We heard accounts from the planters of their escape in the darkness, while the yells and shouts of the savages sounded but a few yards from their flying footsteps;—of mothers, with young infants and sick children, spending days and nights in the bush, in heavy rains, without food, not knowing where to seek for shelter. We spent several days with one who was himself in the Court House at the time of the attack and massacre, and whose life was spared because he was a surgeon and physician, and the blacks had need of him. The horrors of that scene, and the terrors of the few succeeding days we would not repeat if we could. It is sufficient that we hardly needed the warning not to drive out far after dark, and certainly, as we recrossed the Yallahs, it was with a feeling of relief and satisfaction that made us somewhat appreciate the feelings of fathers, mothers, and children flying in scattered groups for their lives but a few months before. We would not be understood to approve the measures used in quelling the insurrection. Nothing but the wildest terror can explain the wholesale and indiscriminate hanging and shooting. No wonder that we feared these dark, revengeful faces. No wonder that the memory of houses burned, husbands and sons murdered, and wives and daughters cruelly whipped, should still rankle in their hearts, and look out of their eyes. Their huts have been rebuilt, but in their midst are the graves into which hundreds of their kindred were thrown, heaped high by the whites as a warning to them and their descendants.