They marched us to a field about half a mile from our village or camp, and there, drawing us up in line, set us to work. Our task was, with the hoe, to dig out square holes, each of the same depth and size, in which the sugar canes are planted, a small piece of old cane being laid in each. These holes are cut with regularity and exactness, in long lines and equally distant from each other. It is the driver's business to keep all at work at the same rate of progress, so that no one should lag behind, no one should stop to rest or breathe, no one should do less than his neighbours. The poor wretches, with bent bodies streaming with their exertions, speedily become afflicted with a burning thirst; their legs tremble; their backs grow stiff and ache; their whole bodies become full of pain; and yet they may not rest nor stand upright to breathe a while, nor stop to drink, until the driver calls a halt. From time to time the negroes--men and women alike--were dragged out of the ranks and laid on the ground three or four at a time, to receive lashes for not making the holes deep enough or fast enough. At home one can daily see the poor creatures flogged in Bridewell; every day there are rogues tied to the cart-wheel and flogged wellnigh to death; but a ploughman is not flogged for the badness of his furrow, nor is a cobbler flogged because he maketh his shoon ill. And our men do not shriek and scream so wildly as the negroes, who are an ignorant people and have never learned the least self-restraint. It was horrid also to see how their bodies were scarred with the marks of old floggings, and branded with letters to show by whom they had been bought. As for our poor fellows, who had been brave recruits in Monmouth's army, they trembled at the sight and worked all the harder; yet some of them with the tears in their eyes, to think that they should be brought to such a dismal fate and to herd with these poor, ignorant, black people.