The punishments among the Algerines are various, viz.
1. If they join any of the natives in open rebellion, they are strangled with a bowstring, or hanged on an iron hook.
2. If they speak against Mahomet, they must either turn Mahometan, or be impaled alive.
3. If they turn christians again, after having changed to the Mahometan persuasion, they are roasted alive, or thrown from the city walls, and caught upon large sharp hooks, where they hang in a miserable manner several days, and expire in the most exquisite tortures.
4. If they kill a Turk, they are burnt.
5. Those christians who attempt to escape from slavery, and are retaken, suffer death in the following manner, which is equally singular and brutal: the criminal is hung naked on a high gallows, by two hooks, the one fastened quite through the palm of one hand, and the other through the sole of the opposite foot, where he is left till death relieves him from his cruel sufferings.
Other punishments, for trifling crimes committed by the christians, are left to the discretion of the respective judges, who being usually of malicious and vindictive dispositions, decree them in the most inhuman manner.
In Tunis, if a christian slave is caught in attempting to escape, his limbs are all broken, and if he murders his master, he is fastened to the tail of a horse, and dragged about the streets till he expires.
Morocco and Fez conjointly form an empire, and are together the most considerable of the Barbary states. In this empire christian slaves are treated with the greatest cruelty: the rich have exorbitant ransoms fixed upon them; the poor are hard worked, and half starved sometimes murdered by the emperor, or their masters, for mere amusement.
_An Account of the Persecutions in Spanish America._
The bloody tenets of the Roman catholic persuasion, and the cruel disposition of the votaries of that church, cannot be more amply displayed or truly depicted, than by giving an authentic and simple narrative of the horrid barbarities exercised by the Spaniards on the innocent and unoffending natives of America. Indeed, the barbarities were such, that they would scarce seen credible from their enormity, and the victims so many, that they would startle belief by their numbers, if the facts were not indisputably ascertained, and the circumstances admitted by their own writers, some of whom have even gloried in their inhumanity, and, as Roman catholics, deemed these atrocious actions meritorious, which would make a protestant shudder to relate.
The West Indies, and the vast continent of America, were discovered by that celebrated navigator, Christopher Columbus, in 1492. This distinguished commander landed first in the large island of St. Domingo, or Hispaniola, which was at that time exceedingly populous, but this population was of very little consequence, the inoffensive inhabitants being murdered by multitudes, as soon as the Spaniards gained a permanent footing on the island. Blind superstition, bloody bigotry, and craving avarice, rendered that, in the course of years, a dismal desert, which, at the arrival of the Spaniards, seemed to appear as an earthly paradise; so that at present there is scarce a remnant of the ancient natives remaining.
The natives of Guatemala, a country of America, were used with great barbarity. They were formerly active and valiant, but from ill usage and oppression, grew slothful, and so dispirited, that they not only trembled at the sight of fire-arms, but even at the very looks of a Spaniard. Some were so plunged into despair, that after returning home from labouring hard for their cruel taskmasters, and receiving only contemptuous language and stripes for their pains, they have sunk down in their cabins, with a full resolution to prefer death to such slavery; and, in the bitterness of their anguish, have refused all sustenance till they perished.
By repeated barbarities, and the most execrable cruelties, the vindictive and merciless Spaniards not only depopulated Hispaniola, Porto-Rico, Cuba, Jamaica, and the Bahama islands, but destroyed above 12,000,000 of souls upon the continent of America, in the space of forty years.