To the denizens of the valley below it is known as the Jumbé Rock—a name characteristic of the superstitious ideas attached to it. Though constantly before their eyes, and accessible by an hour’s climbing up the forest path, there is not a negro on the estate of Mount Welcome, nor on any other for miles around, that would venture alone to visit the Jumbé rock; and to most, if not all of them, the top of this mountain is as much of a terra incognita as the summit of Chimborazo!
I am speaking of a period more than half a century ago. At that time the terror, that was attached to the Jumbé Rock, did not altogether owe its origin to a mere superstition. It had been partly inspired by the remembrance of a horrid history. The rock had been the scene of an execution, which for cruel and cold-blooded barbarity rather deserves to be called a crime.
That table-summit, like the blood-stained temples of the Moctezumas, had been used as an altar, upon which a human sacrifice had been offered up. Not in times long past, neither by the sanguinary priesthood of Azteca, but by men of white skin and European race—their victim a black and an African.
This incident, illustrating Jamaica justice during the dark days of slavery, deserves to be given in detail.
Volume One—Chapter Two.
The Myal-Man.
In the West Indies, a few years previous to the Emancipation, there was much agitation on the subject of Obeah-ism.
The practice of this horrid art had become appallingly common—so common that upon almost every extensive estate in the island there was a “professor” of it; in other words, an “Obeah-man.” “Professor,” though often used in speaking of these charlatans, is not a correct title. To have professed it—at least in the hearing of the whites—would have been attended with peril: since it was punishable by the death penalty. Practitioner is a more appropriate appellation.