There were regulations for their feeding too. By these, each servant was to have 4 lbs. of good flesh or good fish weekly, and such convenient plantation provisions as might be sufficient. Most plantations had a “mountain” attached where the slaves grew their provisions, the cattle were turned out to recruit, and hogs were raised, and in a country like Jamaica there should have been no difficulty in supplying plenty of meat. But practically, I am afraid, it was not often supplied, and the 4 lbs. of good flesh became Irish salt beef, which was admittedly very coarse, and as it had often been months on the way, was probably a great deal nastier than it sounds. The poor bondsman found himself hemmed in by all manner of regulations. No one could trade with a servant--or slave for that matter--without the consent of the master on penalty of forfeiting treble the value of the thing traded and £10 in addition. Human nature was frail, and if a freeman got a woman servant with child he had to pay £20 for the maintenance of the woman and child or serve the master double the time the woman was to serve. If he married her though, lucky woman, after he had paid that £20 she was free; if they married without the master's consent the man had to serve two years. True, he had some privileges this luckless bondservant. He could not be whipped on the naked back without the order of a justice of the peace under a penalty of £5; less, you see, than a man had to pay for trading with him without the consent of his master. And sometimes, of course, he was a favourite; Lesley says he has known servants to dine “on the same victuals as their master, wear as good clothes, be allowed a horse and a negro boy to attend them.” But to me this only emphasises how much the unfortunate servant was dependent for his comfort, his happiness, his success in life, not upon his worth but upon the caprice of the fine gentleman who was his master. If he were “stupid or roguish” he was hardly used, often put in the stocks and beaten severely, and he got nothing to eat but the salt provisions and the ground food the law insisted he should have, and at the end of his four years naturally, if his master would not give him a character, nobody could be found to employ him. His lot was worse than that of the black slave, whom custom and public opinion decreed should not be cast off in his old age whatever his record. How low was the status of a bond-servant is told by a chance remark of Lesley's, who says that Sir Henry Morgan was at first only a servant to a planter in Barbadoes, and “though that state of life be the meanest and most disgraceful, yet he caused to be painted round his portrait a chain and pothooks, that marked the punishment to which he was like to be subjected in those days.”