passed by the putrefying bodies of sixteen dead slaves. ‘The stench was discernible from quite a distance—near the actual spot it was almost overpowering.’ One of his compatriots would later report.
These slaughtered slaves, shot by another militia for good reason, as would also be established, had been rotting in the sun for a few days. The carrion crows, in a squabbling tempest of black wings, were wrenching at sinews, pecking at crusty drying entrails, and cleaning a leg bone to bright white as John Howarth came upon the corpses. He shooed the birds. Bucked his horse into the affray until the crows soared like a thunder into the air; which just left a filthy shroud of flies and maggots feasting. But the discussion among this militia group of who should bury these dead negroes ended with John Howarth shrugging away the task as unnecessary. They rode on, leaving the crows to return, greedy, to the carnage.
Half-way between the town and Shepperton Pen, they had come upon a naked slave woman, tied to a coconut tree by her arms. As her feet could not reach the floor, she was slowly spinning in the sun’s heat. Dangling juicy as roasting meat upon a spit, crows kept pecking at her to test her as food. As she spat and kicked to shoo them, she would start to spin faster. She had been beaten before being tied up—with a stick or a short riding whip—for her skin, dusty and black, was in places torn off, creating a speckled pattern that appeared like dappled sunlight upon her. John Howarth frowned to himself, briefly, as he pondered upon the crime this negro must have committed for her to be given such a public disciplining. And then he rode on.
John Howarth did shake his head in mild reproach at the punishment of a negro boy they came across. The small boy had been running with messages to rebel slaves—a crime—there was no doubt in Howarth’s mind upon that. But the boy was then sealed into a barrel which was roughly pierced with over twenty-five long nails hammered into the shell. The boy, still trapped within that spiky cask, was then rolled down a hill. Howarth believed this reprimand to be a little . . . wanton.
But, upon that day, the act that made John Howarth question his God for allowing such barbarity within a world he knew, and gasp at the cruelty of his fellows, while a righteous anger fermented within his belly until he felt sickened, ashamed and disgusted, was the sight before him now: nine white men dressed as women.
To John Howarth’s mind, those ugly-beauties atop their horses were what sullied the good name of Jamaican planters. Using the frippery of the fairer sex as diabolic disguise branded them all merciless, callous and depraved. Nine gentlemen dressed in a clutter of bonnets and petticoats urged to humiliate, torment and torture a fellow white man before his children, before his wife. Tarring and feathering a man of God. A missionary. A Christian soul! To John Howarth this was cruelty beyond all reason. This was shame.
‘Stop this at once,’ he bellowed at that ludicrous group, ‘this is savagery.’
‘Leave alone, Howarth. Go about your business,’ came in petulant reply. And although John Howarth was staring upon a fat strumpet crowned in a blue turban with a feather that dangled like a dilberry from it, he at once identified the voice; it was that boring old attorney from Unity; he who had been supping at his table not a few days before.
‘Mr Barrett. I know you and this is not the act of gentlemen. No matter what this man has started, he does not deserve this,’ Howarth yelled at him.
Suddenly there was great commotion ‘Whose side are you on, Howarth? . . . Don’t give names away . . . On your way, on your way,’ was shouted from that bevy of jack-whores.
And in those angry faces Howarth saw George Sadler—that idiot from Windsor Hall—wearing a red stole and a gypsy bonnet. Had all left his table to raid their wives’ closets for this odious masquerade? ‘Have you no pity? Have you no shame? This is a man of God,’ Howarth pleaded with them.
Someone spat upon the ground to his left before saying, ‘This man is no better than a nigger.’ And Howarth leaped up to grab that man from his horse. Pulling fierce upon the rider’s leg, the man in a jumble of skirts and ripping cloth, tumbled