Aaron Trow | Page 5

discipline. His heart was sore to death with
an idea of injury, and he lashed himself against the bars of his cage
with a feeling that it would be well if he could so lash himself till he
might perish in his fury.
And then a day came in which an attempt was made by a large body of
convicts, under his leadership, to get the better of the officers of the
prison. It is hardly necessary to say that the attempt failed. Such
attempts always fail. It failed on this occasion signally, and Trow, with
two other men, were condemned to be scourged terribly, and then kept
in solitary confinement for some lengthened term of months. Before,
however, the day of scourging came, Trow and his two associates had
escaped.
I have not the space to tell how this was effected, nor the power to
describe the manner. They did escape from the establishment into the
islands, and though two of them were taken after a single day's run at
liberty, Aaron Trow had not been yet retaken even when a week was
over. When a month was over he had not been retaken, and the officers
of the prison began to say that he had got away from them in a vessel to

the States. It was impossible, they said, that he should have remained in
the islands and not been discovered. It was not impossible that he might
have destroyed himself, leaving his body where it had not yet been
found. But he could not have lived on in Bermuda during that month's
search. So, at least, said the officers of the prison. There was, however,
a report through the islands that he had been seen from time to time;
that he had gotten bread from the negroes at night, threatening them
with death if they told of his whereabouts; and that all the clothes of the
mate of a vessel had been stolen while the man was bathing, including
a suit of dark blue cloth, in which suit of clothes, or in one of such a
nature, a stranger had been seen skulking about the rocks near St.
George. All this the governor of the prison affected to disbelieve, but
the opinion was becoming very rife in the islands that Aaron Trow was
still there.
A vigilant search, however, is a task of great labour, and cannot be kept
up for ever. By degrees it was relaxed. The warders and gaolers ceased
to patrol the island roads by night, and it was agreed that Aaron Trow
was gone, or that he would be starved to death, or that he would in time
be driven to leave such traces of his whereabouts as must lead to his
discovery; and this at last did turn out to be the fact.
There is a sort of prettiness about these islands which, though it never
rises to the loveliness of romantic scenery, is nevertheless attractive in
its way. The land breaks itself into little knolls, and the sea runs up,
hither and thither, in a thousand creeks and inlets; and then, too, when
the oleanders are in bloom, they give a wonderfully bright colour to the
landscape. Oleanders seem to be the roses of Bermuda, and are
cultivated round all the villages of the better class through the islands.
There are two towns, St. George and Hamilton, and one main high-road,
which connects them; but even this high-road is broken by a ferry, over
which every vehicle going from St. George to Hamilton must be
conveyed. Most of the locomotion in these parts is done by boats, and
the residents look to the sea, with its narrow creeks, as their best
highway from their farms to their best market. In those days--and those
days were not very long since--the building of small ships was their
chief trade, and they valued their land mostly for the small scrubby

cedar-trees with which this trade was carried on.
As one goes from St. George to Hamilton the road runs between two
seas; that to the right is the ocean; that on the left is an inland creek,
which runs up through a large portion of the islands, so that the land on
the other side of it is near to the traveller. For a considerable portion of
the way there are no houses lying near the road, and, there is one
residence, some way from the road, so secluded that no other house lies
within a mile of it by land. By water it might probably be reached
within half a mile. This place was called Crump Island, and here lived,
and had lived for many years, an old gentleman, a native of Bermuda,
whose business it had been to buy up cedar wood and