nius of a celestial intelligence, all the gold "which the profound earth hides," would never be any thing in the eyes of the poorest, the most paltry, the most stupid, the most contemptible of the whites, but the dregs of the human race, a worthless slave, a black!

" He has relations on the coast!" Such, Sir, is the expression by which they manifest their contempt, on the slightest suspicion that a single drop of African blood has found its way into the veins of a white. And such is the force of prejudice, that it requires an effort of reason and courage to enable you to contract with such an unfortunate being, that kind of familiarity, which a state of equality pre-supposes and demands.'

In opposition to the general outcry against the climate of the West Indies, the Baron puts these questions: • Can the population of the Whites be only maintained by emigrations from Europe? Is there any law to prevent the women from breeding here? Or was it ever heard or said that the air of this country was prejudicial (insalubrious) to a Creole?" - Let us, (adds he,) introduce good morals into St. Domingo. Let the planters, instead of attaching themselves to those black, yellow, livid complexioned mistresses, who brutify, and deceive them; marry women of their own colour, and we shall soon see the country assume, in the eyes of the observer, a very different aspect.'

Baron de Wimpffen joins with those writers who so strongly reprobate what he calls the infamous traffic we maintain on the coasts of Africa:' but he thinks that they have justly merited the reproaches of combating by vain and empty declamation an abuse, whose defects are more than balanced by its advantages. I farther think, that, as every proceeding of this kind ought to have in view the common good, it is dangerous, nay unlawful, to excite a prejudice against an order of things involving the safety and fortune of the public, without producing at the same time a remedy for the necessary evil. We have no need of those officious gentlemen to tell us that slavery is a hateful thing."

• Your colonies, (he continues) such as they are, cannot exist without slavery. This is a frightful truth, I confess; but the not recognising it is more frightful still, and may produce the most terrible consequences. You must then sanction slavery, or renounce the colonies: and as thirty thousand whites can only controul four hundred and sixty thousand negroes by the force of opinion, (the sole guarantee of their existence) every thing which tends to weaken or destroy that opinion, is a crime against society.'

Of the first settlement made by Europeans in the French part of St. Domingo, the author gives the following account: • Some Frenchmen, driven from Saint Kitts by the Spaniards, with other adventurers of their nation, together with a few English, found found themselves on the western coast of St. Domingo, then uninhabited. They established themselves there in 1627, and were the original stock of the Flebustiers; of those men, whose audacity in undertaking, whose prodigious courage in executing the most difficult enterprises, reduced to the level of children's play, the fabulous exploits of the demi-gods of antiquity; and whose ferocity occasioned one of their chiefs to be called MONBARS the EXTERMINATOR.

6

Disgusted with their vagabond and perilous mode of existence, some of these extraordinary men, of whom the greater part were English, betook themselves to the isle of Tortua*, (which they had made their magazine in 1630, after driving away about five and twenty Spaniards) on the coast of Saint Domingo, where they joined themselves to the Buccaneers, a species of hunters, whose wandering and precarious habits of life, served the Flebustiers as an intermediate step in their passage from the state of sailors and soldiers, to that of planters.

• Two things which will always unite men in society closer together, the necessity of order, and of perpetuating themselves, determined these new inhabitants to ask for a chief, and for women. The government sent them at first Duparquet, and soon after Bertrand d'Ogeron de la Bouére, a gentleman of Angers, who arrived on the sixth of June 1636. He was succeeded by Ducasse, and L'Arnage; and the selection of these men, worthy in every respect to command others, proves that governments are not always deceived in the choice of those to whom they delegate a part of their power. " Mild and firm," says a modern historian, speaking of D'Ogeron, "patient and adroit: instructed by misfortune, and the habitude of living with this ferocious people; cherished by them, and respected by those above him, he was still superior to the opinion they had formed, I would not say of his virtues, but of his talents †."

• The choice of women was less difficult to make. France, at that time, abounded with poor, industrious, and modest females, whose sweet and ingenuous dispositions would have softened, nay, purified the morals of men, rather unformed than corrupted. What, Sir, did they do? They sent them prostitutes from the hospitals, abandoned wretches raked up from the mud of the capital, disgusting compounds of filth and impurity of the grossest kind. And it is astonishing to me, that their manners, as dissolute as their language,

* At first occupied by the English in 1638, under the command of Willis. A French engineer of the name of Le Vasseur drove them out; adopted, with the title of prince, the manners of a tyrant, and was assassinated by two of his nephews. Tortua then fell under the command of the Chevalier de Fontenay, who restored it to the Spanish; when a third adventurer, Deschamps du Rausset, took it from them again in 1669, and five years afterwards, sold it to the West India Company. See Labat, Nouveau Voyage aux Isles Françoises de L'Amérique. Tom. 5. Chap. 6.

+

Histoire Générale de l'Asie, de l'Afrique, et de PAmérique,

Tome 14.'

are

are not perpetuated in their posterity, to a greater degree than they really appear to be.'

M. de Charmilly, in a work which we lately reviewed, has blamed Mr. Edwards for giving too unfavourable an account of Port au Prince, and of the treatment of the slaves in St. Domingo: our readers may therefore not be displeased at seeing what the Baron de Wimpffen writes on these topics.-Of the first, he says,

• When a person has been acquainted in France with colonists, and above all with Creole colonists, he cannot approach Port-auPrince, now become the residence of the civil and military powers, the capital of the richest country on the face of the globe ! the most fertile in delights! the throne of luxury! the center of voluptuousness! without experiencing that secret shivering, that pleasing and vague anxiety, which precedes admiration, and prepares the soul for enthusiasm-To be brief; I entered between two rows of huts, jolting along a dusty track called a street, and searching in vain for Persepolis, amongst a chaotic mass of wooden barracks!

I defy, Sir, the most volcanic imagination to resist the first effects of such a surprize. In a state of stupefaction, I asked my companion where we were? At Port-au-Prince. -Yes, just as we are at Paris, in the suburbs of Saint Marceau, I suppose? - You will see that to-morrow.

• The next day, although my eagerness to satisfy myself made me get up before the sun, yet ten o'clock surprized me, still seeking the true Port-au-Prince, the Pot-au-Pince * of the inhabitants, without being able to find it. I discovered, indeed, from time to time, some casas, more large, more ornamented than the rest. An insulated edifice of stone, and of a tolerably regular construction, announced to me the residence of the governor; I saw, also, a market place, which the present intendant, Mons. Barbet de Marbois, has lately decorated with two fountains, in a good taste, but which are absolutely inaccessible from the filth which the negroes, who come for water, never fail to leave behind them. Adjoining this place, on a rising ground which overlooks it, I observed too, a little esplanade, planted with a few rows of young trees, and a bason with a jet d'eau in the midst of it, destined to serve for a terrace to the new government offices, which they propose building-but all this, even granting the streets were more regular than they are, would scarcely constitute a city of the third rank with us. Besides, most of this is the work of Mons. de Marbois, and of the last two or three years; and clearly proves that the inhabitants of St. Domingo saw, and still see, the present Port-au-Prince as the Jews are said to see the New Jerusalem in the old one.'

Of the treatment of the negroes, the author gives the following among other instances;

* The Creolian method of pronunciation.'

A lady,

• A lady, whom I have seen, a young lady, and one of the hand, somest in the island, gave a grand dinner. Furious at seeing a dish

of

pastry brought to the table overdone, she ordered her negro cook to be seized, and thrown into the oven, yet glowing with beat-And this horrible Megæra, whose name 1 suppress out of respect to her family; this infernal fiend whom public execration ought to drive with every mark of abhorrence from society; this worthy rival of the too famous Chaperon *, is followed, and admired for she is rich and beautiful!

• So much for what I have heard, and now for what I have seen. • The day after my return, I was walking before the casa of a planter with one of his neighbours, when we overheard him bid a negro go into the inclosure of this very neighbour, pull up two young trees which he pointed out to him, and re-plant them immediately on a terrace he was then forming.

• The negro went: the neighbour followed him, surprized him in the fact, and brought him to his master, whom I had by this time joined, in the hope of witnessing a scene of confusion which promised to be amusing.

• Conceive, Sir, what passed in my mind, when, on the complaint of the neighbour, I heard the master coldly order another of his negroes to tie the pretended culprit to a ladder, and give him an hundred lashes! We were both of us struck with such astonishment, that, stupified, pale, and shuddering, while the unhappy negro received the barbarous chastisement in silence, we looked at one another without being able to utter a single word-And he who ordered, he who thus punished his own crime on the blind instrument of his will; at once the dastardly perpetrator and the unfeeling witness of the most atrocious injustice, is here one of the first organs of the law, the official protector of innocence! Heavens! if a pitiful respect for decorum forbids me to devote the name of this monster to eternal infamy, let me at least be permitted to hope that Divine Justice will hear the cries of the sufferer, and sooner or later accumulate on the tyrant's head, all the weight of its vengeance!'

In his xxviith letter, the author gives an account of the extent and divisions of the French part of St. Domingo, its population, &c. He makes the surface of it equal to nearly 2000 square leagues; and the inhabitants, as enumerated in 1790, to amount to 38,360 Whites; 8370 people of colour; and 455,000 Blacks; exclusive of the Whites and Blacks of whose residence there was no legal document; and he thinks that, comprehending the garrisons and crews of vessels, the total population of the French part of the island might have been fairly estimated at 506,000 souls; consequently, that, duting the five years preceding 1790, there

* A planter of Saint Domingo, who, in the same circumstances, seeing the heat shrivel and draw open the lips of the unhappy negro, exclaimed in a fury, "The rascal laughs."

• Nouveau Voyage aux Isles Françoises de L'Amérique. Tom. I, Chap. 1.'

had

45

had been an addition of more than 150,000 negroes; their number at the end of 1785 having amounted only to 300,000. He afterward states the average value of sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo, cacao, molasses, rum, hides, dying woods, and tortoise-shell, annually exported, at 205,370,067 livres.

Of the dress, manners, &c. of the white females in the French part of St. Domingo, the author gives the following description.

• If we put off here, Sir, to the epoch when innocence begins to blush at its nakedness, the precaution of giving a veil to the modesty of the daughters; that of the mothers has merely what is necessary. to conceal the nudity, without hiding the shape of their limbs. A single petticoat and a loose gown of the finest muslin compose their asual dress-there is no occasion for a long and narrow examination to distinguish across the faint carnation tinge which floats along this airy vesture, the impostures of art from the real treasures of nature! When circumstances require them to be dressed with more care, they add a coloured under petticoat, and a corset: if there be any who have the folly of attempting to set themselves out with more parade, so much the worse for them-they are certainly not the most handsome; and the art which deprives beauty of some of its charms, can never embellish ugliness. With respect to the face, that must be left at all events as it came out of the hands of nature; for however skilfully the paint may be applied, we should see in a few minutes the charms of the prettiest made-up face melt away with the ceruse and the carmine that composed it.

• A female Creole, who has never been out of Saint Domingo, would be a creature of a particular species, were it not for the conformity which an education, similar almost in every instance, establishes between her and the female mulatto. Let this, however, be a secret between us: for you will easily comprehend that with the prejudices which exist here, such a comparison must be an inexpiable crime in the eyes of those whose dignity it compromises.

• I have no intention to speak of their morals, yet I cannot help observing that the female Creoles have so much the more merit in living chaste, as the example of the males, and the education they receive, leave them absolutely without resource against the influence of the climate, and the dangers of an eternal idleness. They pass their lives either stretched at length, or chinta, that is, sitting in the oriental manner on mats, where their supreme delight is to have the soles of their feet tickled by a female slave. With the exception of a little cookery, they never employ themselves in the occupations of their sex: for in all parts of the world, where labour is the lot of the slave, idleness is necessarily an essential prerogative of the master. The only art in which they excel, the only one in which, I am told, their diligence equals their knowledge, is the art which constitutes not the least indifferent part of the Ars Amandi of Ovid or of Bernard.'

Our readers will now be able to judge of the general merits of this work. It must, however, be remembered that the au

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