For the least fault the slaves received the harshest punishment.  In 1685 the Negro Code authorised whipping, and in 1702 one colonist, a Marquis, thought any punishment which demanded more than 100 blows of the whip was serious enough to be handed over to the authorities.  …  But the colonists paid no attention to these regulations and slaves were not unfrequently whipped to death….  The slaves received the whip with more certainty and regularity than they received their food.  It was the incentive to work and the guardian of discipline.  But there was no ingenuity that fear or a depraved imagination could devise which was not employed to break their spirit and satisfy the lusts and resentment of their owners and guardians – irons on the hands and feet, blocks of wood that the slaves had to drag behind them wherever they went, the tin-plate mask designed to prevent the slaves eating the sugar-cane, the iron collar.  Whipping was interrupted in order to pass a piece of hot wood on the buttocks of the victim; salt, pepper, citron, cinder, aloes, and hot ashes were poured on the bleeding wounds.  Mutilations were common, limbs, ears, and sometimes the private parts, to deprive them of the pleasures which they could indulge in without expense.  Their masters poured burning wax on their arms and hands and shoulders, emptied the boiling cane sugar over their heads, burned them alive, roasted them on slow fires, filled them with gunpowder and blew them up with a match; buried them up to the neck and smeared their heads with sugar that the flies might devour them; fastened them near to nests of ants or wasps; made them eat their excrement, drink their urine, and lick the saliva of other slaves.  One colonist was known in his moments of anger to throw himself on his slaves and stick his teeth into their flesh.

--- C.L.R. James (Black Jacobins, pp. 12-13)