To keep the restless body of an African Negro in a position to which he has not been accustomed--to cramp his splay-feet, with his great toes standing out, into European shoes made for feet of a different form--to place a collar round his neck, which is called a stock, and which to him is cruel torture--above all, to confine him every night to his barracks--are almost insupportable.

One unacquainted with the habits of the Negro cannot conceive with what abhorrence he looks on having his disposition to nocturnal rambles checked by barrack regulations.

{172} 'Formerly the "King's man," as the black soldier loved to call himself, looked (not without reason) contemptuously on the planter's slave, although he himself was after all but a slave to the State: but these recruits were enlisted shortly after a number of their recently imported countrymen were wandering freely over the country, working either as free labourers, or settling, to use an apt American phrase, as squatters; and to assert that the recruit, while under military probation, is better off than the free Trinidad labourer, who goes where he lists and earns as much in one day as will keep him for three days, is an absurdity.

Accordingly we find that Lieutenant-Colonel Bush, who commanded the 1st West India Regiment, thought that the mutiny was mainly owing to the ill advice of their civil, or, we should rather say, unmilitary countrymen.

This, to a certain degree, was the fact: but, by the declaration of Daaga and many of his countrymen, it is evident the seeds of mutiny were sown on the passage from Africa.
'It has been asserted that the recruits were driven to mutiny by hard treatment of their commanding officers.