Gibbeting alive was another mode of punishment formerly in use; and when adopted, the sufferers have been known to live more than a week. That any one could deliberately condemn a fellow-creature to such intolerable anguish seems almost impossible; yet that such has been the case in Antigua, is remembered by some alive; I have heard of one instance in which a white man was the sufferer. I should not have noticed it in this place, was it not that it proves how much cruelty was practised even in those days. All will allow, or at least ought to do, that when a criminal suffers the extreme penalty of the law, it is done for the sake of example, not revenge; and consequently, the mildest and quickest kind of death should be practised. The circumstance alluded to, was as follows. A white man, known as Captain White, the owner of a small vessel, had for some length of time committed piracy upon the high seas; but at last was taken, and brought into Antigua. He was condemned to die, and that death to be by gibbeting. A gibbet was accordingly prepared; the wretched man was carried to a bay, near where St. James’s Fort is now erected, and there, in the face of heaven, _he was hung up in chains, alive!_ with a loaf of bread and a calabash of water almost within his reach; but which, like the waters of Tartarus to him of old, only mocked him with their approach, as the wind blew them backwards and forwards. The man lived nine days in this situation; and in the extremity of his hunger, actually ate the flesh from off his shoulders. The place where he was executed is well known to many in Antigua as White’s Bay, and a few years ago, the remains of the gibbet was to be met with. How ought we to bless God, that we lived not in those days; that our feelings are now not outraged by any of those dreadful exhibitions: certainly, his crime (piracy) was a dreadful one, but who cannot but feel for his after-sufferings? The following letter from a white inhabitant throws a further light upon the insurrection of the negroes, in 1736, which we have noticed in the “Legend of the Ravine;” and points out the particular punishment awarded to many of the actors in that tragedy:— Antigua, Jan. 15th, 1736. “Dear Friend, “We are in a great deal of trouble in this island; the burning of negroes, hanging them up on gibbets alive, racking them upon the wheel, &c., takes up all our time; that from the 20th of October to this day, there have been destroyed _sixty-one_ intelligent negroes, most of them tradesmen, as carpenters, coopers, and masons.