The negroes had no longer any pity: they were men no longer, they were no longer a people, but a destroying element which spread over the land, annihilating every thing.
In a few hours eight hundred habitations, sugar and coffee stores, representing an immense capital, were destroyed.

The mills, magazines, utensils, and even the very plant which reminded them of their servitude and their compulsory labour, were cast into the flames.

The whole plain, as far as eye could reach, was covered with nothing but the smoke and the ashes of conflagration.

The dead bodies of whites, piled in hideous trophies of heads and limbs, of men, women, and infants assassinated, alone marked the spot of the rich residences, where they were supreme on the previous night.

It was the revenge of slavery: all tyranny has such fearful reverses.
Some whites, warned in time of the insurrection by the generous indiscretion of the blacks, or protected in their flight by the forests and the darkness, had taken refuge at the Cape Town; others, concealed with their wives and children in caves, were fed and attended to by attached slaves, at the peril of their lives.