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DeLucena |
Scenes from the West Indies.
"What me ? - No!
It canīt be right! For life?
Please - I am only a simple poor peasant girl.
Have pity Sir . "
"You have
been found guilty in stealing from
the bakerīs shop, and I sentence you to be deported and sold for the
highest bid as a laboure in the West Indies."
"Nooo
! - Please no !
I am innocent - I have done nothing wrong.
Please !"
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was the future life for the girls, who were sentenced. White girls arrived in more than sufficient quantities and were sold very cheap, so their owners permitted their foremen to drive them very hard, and feed them as cheap as possible. Such things as decent clothes, were looked apone as an unnecessary expence. It would cost more to treat them well and keep them for decades, than it was to drive them hard, and buy new girls, as they became worn-out. |
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These restrains are historical correct.
A
recaptured runaway slave is draged around the plantation, to which she
belongs, as a warning to the others. She has already received her
first several whipping, and her left thomb has been brocken as punishment.
Because she, durring the 3 weeks, she managed to stay free, stayed with a
young man, who helped hidding her, she has been branded as an adulteress,
even though she has never been married.
Maria was a young
Spanish girl, who was so unlucky, her brother couldnīt pay his gambling
debt to an English Lord. Here she walks from the prison to the docks
for her transportaition to the West Indies.
Maria after her arrivial,
on display before she is sold.
Another girl is probed
by buyers
before the auction.
A mulatto girl on her
way to work.
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| The
punishments for violations of the rules were very hard. One of the worst crimes was to try to escape. This girl was caught, when she was stupid enough to light a fire in the forrest, where she was hidding. After receiving fifty lashes, she was hung by one of her wrists to die, as a warning to the other slaves. |
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| Laziness
was also a offence, which was severely punished. This girl was found sleeping in the field, and received twenty lashes with the bullwhip. |
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Mary was traveling alone
as a passenger on a merchant ship. She was on her way to the
new world to meet her husband, who had gone ahead of her, to prepare their
new lifes together.
Unluckily for her, the captain was a dishonest man. At a stop on the
way at an island in the West Indies, he sold his young passenger to a plantation
owner.
Mary was a honest and hard-working girl and was soon by her owner as a reward permitted to wear an old discarded dress, as a compensation for her own clothes, which had all been confiscated at her arrival.
But after only 4
months her luck changed to the worse again. While the plantation
owner took on a business trip, his wife was in charge. She
didnīt like having pretty young girls in the near of her husband,
and she specially disliked Mary.
"You can just as
well confess adulteress !
It wil be three months before my husband is back again, so he canīt help
you, and nobody els will !"
After nearly a week on her knees and without any sleep, Mary finally confessed having tried to seduce her owner, in an attempt to get free again.
She was placed in the stocks at the islandīs prison, to await her sentence to be carried out
There was only one punishment
for adultery.
Maryīs sufferings ended together with a slave girl from another
plantation, covicted of the same crime.
Her husband remarried two years later, believing Mary had run away with
someone els, never knowing what really had happened.