A Crown of Shame, Volume II by Florence Marryat

Jerusha, the East Indian coolie, sat at the door of her hut, nursing her baby on her knee, and with a very sullen expression on her countenance. Indeed, all the hands on Beauregard had borne more or less of a rebellious look of late. They had no particular grudge against Mr Courtney, who was a kind, if rather an indolent master, delegating all his duties to his overseer; but they detested Henri de Courcelles, and the accounts of his cruelty, and selfishness, and dishonesty, formed the staple portion of their conversation. His very beauty, and evident self-consciousness of it, the vast superiority which he assumed over them, and the rigour with which he carried out the rules of the plantation, all combined to set the coolies against him, and they thirsted to find out something which might degrade him from his office. The reports from the Fort, too, the constant attempts at rising which had to be quelled, had incited them on to imitation, and altogether the plantation workers were seething under a sense of wrong, and ripe for rebellion. Poor little Jerusha, with her handsome half-caste baby in her arms, might have furnished them with a pretext for denouncing the overseer, had not her case been too common a one amongst them.

But to the girl it meant the devastation of her life. She had not courted her destiny. She had been landed in San Diego, a poor trembling Indian coolie amongst a herd of fellow-sufferers, who had been persuaded to leave Calcutta under a promise of good wages, and plenty of food, and very little work, and after a voyage of four months (during which they had been herded between decks like so many swine), had been marched ashore at San Diego, too weak and frightened and disappointed to have any hope left in them, unless it were that they might die. They had been all standing together for hire, when De Courcelles had sauntered by and picked out the likely ones for Mr Courtney's plantation. Jerusha well remembered how he came like a prince amongst them, and how handsome he had looked in his white linen suit and broad-brimmed hat, with the blue silk handkerchief knotted at his throat, and the crimson rose blooming in his button-hole, -- and when he had stopped beside her and spoken to her in his low soft tone, she had thought him more glorious still. She had not sought him out, this poor little Indian girl, but he had pertinaciously come after her. He had asked for her the very day after she had entered the plantation, and put so many questions as to whether her hut was comfortable, and her food sufficient, that Jerusha was quite bewildered. And then he had given her new clothes, smart dresses -- such as the natives love to deck themselves in -- and gold earrings for her ears; and the usual consequence followed.