Page:The West Indies, and Other Poems.djvu/84

he gave to the public afterwards. He communicated them also, with a copy of the trial, to the Lords of the Admiralty, as the guardians of justice upon the seas, and to the Duke of Portland, as principal minister of state. No notice, however, was taken by any of these of the information which had been thus sent them.'—Clarkson's History of the Abolition, &c., page 95—7.

Note ³. Page 39. line 18.—The earth-evouring anguish of despair.—The negroes sometimes, in deep and irrecoverable melancholy, waste themselves away, by secretly swallowing large quantities of earth. It is remarkable that 'earth-eating,' as it is called, is an infectious, and even a social malady: plantations have been occasionally almost depopulated, by the slaves, with one consent, betaking themselves to this strange practice, which speedily brings them to a miserable and premature end.

Note ⁴. Page 43, line 4.—Counts his sure gains, and hurries back for more.—See Note 2 of this Part.

Note ⁵. Ibid., line 5.—Lives there a reptile baser than the slave? &c.—The character of the Creole Planter here drawn is justified both by reason and fact: it is no monster of imagination, though, for the credit of human nature, we may hope that it is a monster as rare as it is shocking. It is the double curse of slavery to degrade all who are concerned with it, doing or suffering. The slave himself is the lowest in the scale of human beings,—except the slave-dealer. Dr Pinkard's Notes on the