AP Success - AP European History: The Slave Trade

Chapter 5 The Abuse of Slaves in the West Indies

While I was thus employed by my master, I was often a witness to cruelties of every kind, which were exercised on my unhappy fellow slaves... it was almost a constant practice with our clerks, and other whites, to commit violent depredations on the chastity of the female slaves... When we have had some of these slaves on board my master's vessel, to carry them to other islands, or to America, I have known oar mates to commit these acts most shamefully... I have even known them gratify their brutal passion with females not ten years old... And yet in Montserrat I have seen a negro man staked to the ground, and cut most shockingly, and then his ears cut off bit by bit, because he had been connected with a white woman... One Mr. D--- told me that he had sold 41,000 negroes, and that he once cut off a negro man's leg for running away... He then said that his scheme had the desired effect—it cured that man and some others of running away.