The alarm was not given till the morning of the day on which the conspiracy was to have broken out. Then the arrests began. Five hundred of the conspirators were thrown into the prison of Matanzas, which town was the headquarters of the conspiracy, and gave its name to it. But the negroes finding themselves discovered, and expecting no mercy, resolved at least to glut their vengeance as far as the time would allow them. Overseers were flung into their sugar-boilers, two entire families at Matanzas were poisoned, and other excesses took place. The reprisals exercised were most horrible; two hundred prisoners were immediately butchered, and numerous straggling parties shot down like dogs; some wretched victims were flogged to death to induce them to betray their accomplices. Further outbreaks were the result of these severities. The planters who fell into the hands of the negroes were mercilessly massacred; numerous plantations were burned. The insurrectionary movements were, however, isolated and without organization; the Spaniards succeeded in repressing them, and then, furious and alarmed at the imminence of the peril they had so narrowly escaped, inflicted the most terrible punishment on the unsuccessful mutineers. Eight hundred prisoners had been secured in the Matanzas Jail; of these two hundred were shot without trial, the remainder, for the most part, strangled in their dungeons. The meaning of the Spanish word _Matanzas_ is "a place of slaughter," and such, indeed, the town became. Placido, the chief of the conspiracy, made a tremendous resistance before he was taken. "He fired three pistols, killing or wounding a man at each discharge, and then hacked and hewed away with his sword, speedily making for himself a ring of more than its span, and clearing a space around him as rapidly as an Utreran bull when he rushes into the circus. But a soldier's musket soon brought him to the ground, and bleeding and faint he was flung into the Matanzas carcel." As the prisoners refused to a man to make disclosures, torture was resorted to. The lash was applied till they confessed or fainted. Most of them yielded, the plot was acknowledged to be of ancient date, and to have Placido at its head. Placido bore, with the resolution of a stoic, the rude and unsparing stripes with which his broad shoulders and back were speedily covered. Not a groan nor a sigh escaped him; but he fainted away at last from loss of blood, and with such little apparent change, that the executioners continued to flog for some time after he was senseless. He was loosed from the triangles, and tied to a neighbouring stake, after the mummery of a five minutes' court-martial. He was still senseless when bound to the stake--lifeless, for all that his _verdugos_ knew to the contrary. Ere he received the fusillade, he recovered from his fainting fit sufficiently to exclaim, in an audible tone. "_Los dias de la esclavitud son contados!_" "The days of slavery are numbered."