“No, no: ’tis all men’s office to speak patience
To those that wring under the load of sorrow
But no man’s virtue nor sufficiency
To be so moral when he shall indure
The like himself. Therefore give me no counsel
My griefs cry louder than advertisement.”
Much Ado About Nothing.
The next night, about the same hour, Charles Hamilton again betook himself to the cabin-prison of Appadocca, who resumed his narrative as he had promised.
“When I arrived at Jamaica, I proceeded at once,” he continued, “to San Domingo, where I knew there were many at that time to whom the world was as disgusting as it was to myself, and who, I judged, would be the proper instruments to aid me in my schemes. The French revolution had torn up whole families together, from the soil on which they had been rooted for generations, and had driven them to distant countries for protection and subsistence. They had carried with them, to their new homes, a strong hatred for their then democratic country, in particular, and for the whole world in general. For suffering tends not to soften the feelings or expand the heart. Pain, either mental or bodily, sours the sweetest nature, and it requires the strongest fortitude to endure it without anger.—Even Zeno strangled himself when he had known pain.
“Among such men only who hated the world from having, like myself, experienced injustice, I thought I could live. When I arrived at San Domingo, I found that even my anticipations were exceeded. I found the exiles existing in a state of cynical philosophy, in the midst of the virgin forests that covered the island. They lived in rude huts, erected apart from each other, which they called boucans. There they passed their lives in the society only of their dogs, and of their apprentices or servants, that jointly aided them in the chase by which they subsisted.