PREFACE.
This work has been written at a moment when the feelings of the Author are roused up to a high pitch of indignant excitement, by a statement of the cruel manner in which the slave-holders of America deal with their slave-children. Not being able to imagine that even that dissolver of natural bonds—slavery—can shade over the hideousness of begetting children for the purpose of turning them out into the fields to labour at the lash’s sting, he has ventured to sketch out the line of conduct, which a high-spirited and sensitive person would probably follow, if he found himself picking cotton under the spurring encouragement of “Jimboes” or “Quimboes” on his own father’s plantation.
The machinery, or ground-work of the story is based on truth—the known history of the Boucaneers. It is scarcely necessary to tell the reader that the other parts are fiction.
The scenes are laid principally in the Island of Trinidad. This is done entirely from natural predilection, for Trinidad is the Author’s native isle, whose green woods, smiling sky, beautiful flowers, and romantic gulf, together with a thousand sweet and melting associations, eternally play on his willing memory, and make him cherish ever the fond hope, that when the spark of life shall have been extinguished, his bones may be deposited on the rising ground that looks over the sea, and that already contains the being who, in death, as well as she was in life, was the object of his deep love and high veneration.
4, Elm Court,Temple.
February, 1854.