JAMES THE SECOND.

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once without lying on one another. They were never suffered crup.to go on deck. The hatchway was constantly watched by 16S5isentinels armed with hangers and blunderbusses. In thedungeon below all was darkness, stench, lamentation, diseaseand death. Of ninety-nine convicts who were carried out inone vessel, twenty-two died before they reached Jamaica,although the voyage was performed with unusual speed. Thesurvivors when they arrived at their house of bondage weremere skeletons. During some weeks coarse biscuit and fetidwater had been doled out to them in such scanty measure thatany one of them could easily have consumed the ration whichwas assigned to five. They were, therefore, in such a statethat the merchant to whom they had been consigned found itexpedient to fatten them before selling them.*

Meanwhile the property both of the rebels who had suf- Confisca-fered death, and of those more unfortunate men who were extortion,withering under the tropical sun, was fought for and torn inpieces by a crowd of greedy informers. By law a subjectattainted of treason forfeits all his substance; and this lawwas enforced after the Bloody Assizes with a rigour at oncecruel and ludicrous. The broken-hearted widows and destituteorphans of the labouring men whose corpses hung at the crossroads were called upon by the agents of the Treasury toexplain what had become of a basket, of a goose, of a flitchof bacon, of a keg of cider, of a sack of beans, of a truss ofhay.** While the humbler retainers of the government werepillaging the families of the slaughtered peasants, the ChiefJustice was fast accumulating a fortune out of the plunder of a

* The best account of the sufferings of those rebels who were sen-tenced to transportation is to be found in a very curious narrativewritten by John Coad, an honest, Godfearing carpenter, who joinedMonmouth, was badly wounded at Philip’s Norton, was tried by Jeffreys,and was sent to Jamaica. The original manuscript was kindly lent to meby Mr. Pbippard, to whom it belongs.

'* In the Treasury records of the autumn of 1685 are several lettersdirectingpsearch to be made for triQes of this sort.