In 1843 George Leopold O'Donnell took office as Captain-General. No despot who had preceded him surpassed him in cruelty. He turned every possible happening to his personal advantage, and lined his pockets with Cuban money. It was during his tenure of office that the most wide-spread and most dangerous of the insurrections among the slaves happened. Of the methods used in subduing this we shall write in another chapter, but they were the most disgraceful that have blotted the pages of the history of any nation. General O'Donnell himself, his wife and daughter were said to have profited by the slave trade. The wife of the Captain-General, by the way, seems to have had a painfully itching palm. It is told of her that she had a number of loaves of bread left after a reception, and that she sent for the baker at three o'clock in the morning, to require him to take back the surplus. When he demurred, that he could only sell it for stale bread, and would thus lose money on it, she said: "Oh, I sent for you early because now you can mix it with the other bread, and sell it to the masses, and no one will know the difference." She is accused of having been engaged in all kinds of schemes by which she profited in an illegitimate way. She dabbled in the letting of contracts for the cleansing of sewers and for the removal of dirt and manure from the city streets, demanding her bonus from the one who secured the contract, and these municipal operations stained her hands with illgotten gains. It is said that O'Donnell, who had a large interest in marble quarries in the Isle of Pines, had his agents select able bodied laborers, and trump up charges of treason against them. They were then sentenced to deportation to work in the Captain-General's stone quarries, and thus solved the problem of low priced labor. O'Donnell was fertile also in inventing new taxes and new methods of extorting money, which of course brought him into high favor at court. So pleasing was his rule to his masters and to his aides that he was allowed to stay in office longer than usual, and was not succeeded until 1848. One of the most ridiculous figures in Cuban history came next, in the person of General Frederico Roncali. Some 400 Americans had taken up their abode on an island far distant from Cuba. Rumors reached General Roncali that they intended to free Cuba from Spanish rule. He promptly marched 4,000 picked soldiers to garrisons in Cuba, and promised them double pay if they would fight bravely when the enemy landed. Of course, the enemy never came, and General Roncali presented a foolish figure. But after all there was a portent in this of the fear which the Spaniards were beginning to entertain, that the end of their rule in Cuba was at hand.