Under the head of Extraordinary Punishments, (for those already named are reckoned only ordinary), mention is made of iron collars with hooks[8], heavy cattle chains, and a half hundred weight fastened to them, which the negroes are forced to drag after them, when working in the field, suspending by the hands ’till the fingers mortify; flogging with ebony bushes ’till they are forced to go on all fours, unable to get up, being tied up to the branch of a tree, with a heavy weight round the neck, exposed to the noon-day sun--thumb-screws; a man was put on the picket, so long as to occasion a mortification of his foot and hand, on suspicion of robbing his master, a public officer, of a sum of money, which it afterwards appeared, the master had taken himself. Yet the master was privy to the punishment, and the slave had no compensation. He was punished by order of the master, who did not then chuse to make it known that he himself had made use of the money. A girl’s ears were nailed to a post, afterwards torn away, and clipt off close to her head, with a pair of large scissors; besides this, she was unmercifully flogged, and all for--BREAKING A PLATE, OR SPILLING A CUP OF TEA! A negro, impelled by hunger, had stolen part of a turkey, his master caused him to be held down, and, with his own hands, took a hammer and punch and knocked out four of his teeth. The hand is cut off if lifted up against a white man, and the leg for running away. A planter sent for a surgeon to cut off the leg of a negro who had run away. On the surgeon’s refusing to do it, the planter took an iron bar, and broke the leg in pieces, and then the surgeon took it off. This planter did many such acts of cruelty, and all with impunity. The practice of dropping hot lead upon the negroes, is here mentioned. H. Ross saw a young female suspended by her wrists to a tree, swinging to and fro, while her master applied a lighted torch to the different parts of her writhing body. It was notorious that Ruthie tortured so many of his negroes to death, that he was obliged to sell his estate. Another planter, in the same Island[9], destroyed forty slaves out of sixty (in three years) by severity. The rest of the conduct of this infamous wretch was cancelled by the Committee of the House of Commons, as containing circumstances too horrible to be given to the world. We, however, go on to read of knocking on the head and stabbing, of a hot iron forced between the teeth, of a slave thrown into the boiling juice, and killed, of a negro shot and his head cut off. And it appears, that the women, deemed of respectability and rank, not only order and superintend, but sometimes actually inflict with their own hands severe punishments on their slaves.