Merchant, Colonel Bishop had purchased no less than twenty-five.
The remainder had gone to lesser planters, some of them to
Speightstown, and others still farther north. What may have been
the lot of the latter he could not tell, but amongst Bishop's slaves
Peter Blood came and went freely, sleeping in their quarters, and
their lot he knew to be a brutalizing misery. They toiled in the
sugar plantations from sunrise to sunset, and if their labours
flagged, there were the whips of the overseer and his men to quicken
them. They went in rags, some almost naked; they dwelt in squalor,
and they were ill-nourished on salted meat and maize dumplings -
food which to many of them was for a season at least so nauseating
that two of them sickened and died before Bishop remembered that
their lives had a certain value in labour to him and yielded to
Blood's intercessions for a better care of such as fell ill. To
curb insubordination, one of them who had rebelled against Kent, the
brutal overseer, was lashed to death by negroes under his comrades'
eyes, and another who had been so misguided as to run away into the
woods was tracked, brought back, flogged, and then branded on the
forehead with the letters "F. T.," that all might know him for a
fugitive traitor as long as he lived. Fortunately for him the poor
fellow died as a consequence of the flogging.

After that a dull, spiritless resignation settled down upon the
remainder. The most mutinous were quelled, and accepted their
unspeakable lot with the tragic fortitude of despair.

Peter Blood alone, escaping these excessive sufferings, remained
outwardly unchanged, whilst inwardly the only change in him was a
daily deeper hatred of his kind, a daily deeper longing to escape
from this place where man defiled so foully the lovely work of his