Penny Dreadfuls, 1916 · page 285 of 400
Tom Anderson, Dare-Devil: A Young Virginian in the Revolution — page 285: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Page 267: Running Prose from "A Mulatto from the Rebel Plantations" This is a page of running prose narrative (page 267) from what appears to be a Victorian penny dreadful. The text describes a dramatic scene at a slave auction where a young enslaved man named Tom, identified as "mulatto from the Rebel Plantations," attacks his trader Hopwood Higgins after being insulted, striking his head against a brick pillar. The passage then shifts forward a week, detailing Higgins's sale of Tom to Richard Knatchbull for two thousand pounds and the departure of the ship Nancy Ireson from Carlisle Bay, before closing with Tom's confinement in a Bridgetown jail awaiting further orders.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
A Mutatro FROM THE REBEL PLANTATIONS 267 -Hoarse with the sense of performance, sweating like a stoker, the auctioneer mopped his dripping face. Men laughed and swore in the zest of such bidding. ‘There was hubbub. “Where did you get that boy, Higgins?” *Mulatto from the Rebel Plantations, Doctor.” “Hm-m-m. I'll bet you a guinea —” The speakers stood at Tom’s back. He wheeled round and looked straight in the face of Hopwood Higgins. “Liar! Thief!’’ he screamed. He was pretty weak; and he was without a weapon. But he was furious. He launched himself from the block like a wildcat from a limb, catching Higgins by the throat. His weight— and mad impulse — overset the trader. He fell backward, and his head struck an angle of a brick pillar. Tom was seized; and the man was carried away on a shutter, quite unconscious. It was a week before Higgins was ready to conclude his bargain with Dick Knatchbull. When he could leave his bunk, he made over his right and title to “one mulatto boy, Tom, from the Rebel Plantations, to Rich’d Knatch- bull, Esq.,” and, with Bank of England notes for the sum of two thousand pounds, in his old dirty wallet, the Nancy Ireson weighed anchor and sped out of Carlisle Bay. He had postponed the passing of the papers until the brig lay down the bay, with her nose to the Caribbean Sea. The interview with Knatchbull ended, and just as he was about to step into the dinghy, Higgins dispatched a mes- senger, with a couple of half-crowns, to the Bridgetown jail. The “‘ contumacious slave,’ who had been confined in a cell for a week (pending further orders from the skipper of the slaver), had borne this patiently; or at least with for- titude. Had n’t he “broken Higgins’s head for him?” Certain insults had been wiped out. Therefore he would not grumble; even though he had been thrust into jail for attacking his “owner.” He did not understand Higgins’s CORNICLMOOO® SS (C©) mn