HORRORS OF HAYTI.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1142, 21 February 1884, Page 3

HORRORS OF HAYTI.

We left Jamaica (says a writer in the Home Journal) in late July or early August, and steamed across through indigo seas to Jacmel and other Haytian parts, making the circuit of the entire island, shooting into shelter harbors here and there. Nearly always the mountains lay like great iridescent lizards against the horizon —monstrous saurians sprawling in blue or in bronze-green against the edge of the sky ; singular and fantastic mountain piles in whose hidden gorges the half wild negro tribes live aud spawn. The infamies said to be practised by this population are beyond description. Cannibalism is said to prevail, the white man is bald in the greatest abhorrence, and we heard of the rooted determination of the jet-blacks to exterminate the yellowskinned, feeble, mulatto castes of the seaports. Onr captain warned us not to spend the night on shore in any of the ports we visited for fear of personal violence or simple malignity. The island is pretty thickly peopled, and is divided between the EUytians of the west, and the light-skinned, intelligent Frenchspeaking San Domingoans of the east. The San Domingo people are full of energy and push, eager for railroads and telegraphs, enlightened, and more or less civilised. The Haytians are reported by those who know them intimately to be savage, depraved, opposed to every form of white civilisation, and devoured by the most baneful vices and diseases. They speak a French jargon very hard to understand, a lingo made up of lacerated French conjunctions and genders, plentifully sprinkled with words of their own coinage. There are peculiar horrible maladies prevailing among them ; their sense of decency is of the slightest ; and their reputation for trickery is such that we hiive had to guard ourselves constantly against their cunning and fraud. The country is one of striking loveliness, a flower garden stocked with the rarest growths. We saw the finest growths of

rosewood ,-iod mahogany, woods smothered in imperial vines, an atmosphere laden with suggestions of blossoming spices ; but to get to all this nothing but difficult bridle paths or inaccessible lancss, with here and there a road wide enough for a carriage. We met troops of silent, malicious-looking, oblique-glancing blacks as we rode on horseback or wandered through the towns ; creatures that gazed with amazement and horror to see white people invade their demesne. One old woman riding on a horse was so staitled by our cavalcade that she forgot herself and was suddenly taken under the chin by an over-reaching limb, and deposited not very gently on the ground below, to the infinite amusement of the party. It >vas painful and shocking to hear the stories of Haytian depravity to which we had to listen—the foul superstitions, the rank barbarism, the total illiteracy and indifference to education prevailing in the country. We were told that a traveller had discovered human ffesh for sale in one of the markets of the interior, and had bought a piece of it to bring away with him as a curiosity, and as a piece of evidence of the state of things there, Witchcraft, voodouism, nameless immorality are rampant. If there is aDy Christianity it is of the lowest type. The grossest corruption festers in the municipal organisation and in the administrative scheme, if there is anything that can be called such.