For over all that earthly paradise there brooded not alone its terrible
malaria, its days of fever and its nights of deadly chill, but the worse
shadows of oppression and of sin, which neither day nor night could
banish. The first object which met Stedman's eye, as he stepped on shore,
was the figure of a young girl stripped to receive two hundred lashes,
and chained to a hundred-pound weight. And the few first days gave a
glimpse into a state of society worthy of this exhibition,--men without
mercy, women without modesty, the black man a slave to the white man's
passions, and the white man a slave to his own. The later West-Indian
society in its worst forms is probably a mere dilution of the utter
profligacy of those early days. Greek or Roman decline produced nothing
more debilitating or destructive than the ordinary life of a Surinam
planter, and his one virtue of hospitality only led to more unbridled
excesses and completed the work of vice. No wonder that Stedman himself,
who, with all his peculiarities, was essentially simple and manly, soon
became disgusted, and made haste to get into the woods and cultivate the
society of the Maroons.

The rebels against whom this expedition was sent were not the original
Maroons of Surinam, but a later generation. The originals had long since
established their independence, and their leaders were flourishing their
honorary silver-mounted canes in the streets of Paramaribo. Fugitive
negroes had begun to establish themselves in the woods from the time when
the colony was finally ceded by the English to the Dutch, in 1674. The
first open outbreak occurred in 1726, when the plantations on the
Seramica River revolted; it was found impossible to subdue them, and the
government very imprudently resolved to make an example of eleven
captives, and thus terrify the rest of the rebels. They were tortured to
death, eight of the eleven being women: this drove the others to madness,
and plantation after plantation was visited with fire and sword. After a