Theodore Foulks recounts his experiences during the 1865 rebellion in Jamaica and his 18-month imprisonment by the Jamaican authorities. This book provides important insights into the politics and social conditions of Jamaica during the mid-19th century and sheds light on the complicated relationship between the British Empire and its colonial subjects. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

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Excerpt from Eighteen Months in Jamaica: With Recollections of the Late Rebellion To those, however, who have never been at sea, there is something very striking in the appearance of a ship during a heavy gale of wind. The vessel seems to be shorn of much of her beauty. She is, perhaps, lying-to under a reefed main-tri-sail, or close reefed main-top-sail and mizen. She seems stripped of her clothing, groaning and labouring in the midst of the tumult by which she is surrounded. The waves rise in angry struggle around her; they open, as it were, a watery grave; while death sits frowning on every foaming billow. It is in scenes like these, that the British sailor shines forth in his peculiar character. No howling nor violence of the storm, no heaving nor pitching of the ship daunts his English heart. He mounts the rigging with intrepidity, lays himself out on the yard, sits on the yard arm, steadily and cheerfully exerting himself to perform his allotted duty. This noble self-possession must be seen to be fully appreciated. A late British admiral once declared, that in a storm or a battle, an English sailor was more than human. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award “Impeccably researched and seductively readable...tells the story of Sam Sharpe’s revolution manqué, and the subsequent abolition of slavery in Jamaica, in a way that’s acutely relevant to the racial unrest of our own time.” —Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising The final uprising of enslaved people in Jamaica started as a peaceful labor strike a few days shy of Christmas in 1831. A harsh crackdown by white militias quickly sparked a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. The rebels lost their daring bid for freedom, but their headline-grabbing defiance triggered a decisive turn against slavery. Island on Fire is a dramatic day-by-day account of these transformative events. A skillful storyteller, Tom Zoellner uses diaries, letters, and colonial records to tell the intimate story of the men and women who rose up and briefly tasted liberty. He brings to life the rebellion’s enigmatic leader, the preacher Samuel Sharpe, and shows how his fiery resistance turned the tide of opinion in London and hastened the end of slavery in the British Empire. “Zoellner’s vigorous, fast-paced account brings to life a varied gallery of participants...The revolt failed to improve conditions for the enslaved in Jamaica, but it crucially wounded the institution of slavery itself.” —Fergus M. Bordewich, Wall Street Journal “It’s high time that we had a book like the splendid one Tom Zoellner has written: a highly readable but carefully documented account of the greatest of all British slave rebellions, the miseries that led to it, and the momentous changes it wrought.” —Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains