Chapter 5

PILLAGE.

THE REVOLT IN SANTO DOMINGO.

I thought that I must be dreaming. None who did not
witness the sight could form any idea of it. I will, however,
endeavour to depict something of it. I will simply recount
what I saw with my own eyes. This small portion of
a great scene minutely reproduced will enable you to form
some notion as to the general aspect of the town during the
three days of pillage. Multiply these details ~ad libitum~
and you will get the ensemble.

I had taken refuge by the gate of the town, a puny barrier
made of long laths painted yellow, nailed to cross laths
and sharpened at the top. Near by was a kind of shed in
which some hapless colonists, who had been driven from
their homes, had sought shelter. They were silent and
seemed to be petrified in all the attitudes of despair. Just
outside of the shed an old man, weeping, was seated on the
trunk of a mahogany tree which was lying on the ground
and looked like the shaft of a column. Another vainly
sought to restrain a white woman who, wild with fright,
was trying to flee, without knowing where she was going,
through the crowd of furious, ragged, howling negroes.

The negroes, however, free, victorious, drunk, mad, paid
not the slightest attention to this miserable, forlorn group
of whites. A short distance from us two of them, with
their knives between their teeth, were slaughtering an ox,
upon which they were kneeling with their feet in its blood.
A little further on two hideous negresses, dressed as
marchionesses, covered with ribbons and pompons, their
breasts bare, and their heads encumbered with feathers and
laces, were quarrelling over a magnificent dress of Chinese
satin, which one of them had grasped with her nails while
the other hung on to it with her teeth. At their feet a
number of little blacks were ransacking a broken trunk
from which the dress had been taken.

The rest was incredible to see and impossible to describe.
It was a crowd, a mob, a masquerade, a revel, a hell, a
terrible buffoonery. Negroes, negresses and mulattoes, in
every posture, in all manner of disguises, displayed all sorts
of costumes, and what was worse, their nudity.

Here was a pot-bellied, ugly mulatto, of furious mien,
attired like the planters, in a waistcoat and trousers of
white material, but with a bishop's mitre on his head and a
crosier in his hand. Elsewhere three or four negroes with
three-cornered hats stuck on their heads and wearing red
or blue military coats with the shoulder belts crossed upon
their black skin, were harassing an unfortunate militiaman
they had captured, and who, with his hands tied behind his
back, was being dragged through the town. With
loud