University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER III
THE SUGAR ISLANDS

AS regards negro slavery the history of the West Indies is
inseparable from that of North America. In them the
plantation system originated and reached its greatest
scale, and from them the institution of slavery was extended to
the continent. The industrial system on the islands, and particularly
on those occupied by the British, is accordingly instructive
as an introduction and a parallel to the continental regime.

The early career of the island of Barbados gives a striking
instance of a farming colony captured by the plantation system.
Founded in 1624 by a group of unprosperous English emigrants,
it pursued an even and commonplace tenor until the Civil War
in England sent a crowd of royalist refugees thither, together
with some thousands of Scottish and Irish prisoners converted
into indentured servants. Negro slaves were also imported to
work alongside the redemptioners in the tobacco, cotton, ginger,
and indigo crops, and soon proved their superiority in that climate,
especially when yellow fever, to which the Africans are
largely immune, decimated the white population. In 1643, as
compared with some five thousand negroes of all sorts, there were
about eighteen thousand white men capable of bearing arms; and
in the little island's area of 166 square miles there were nearly
ten thousand separate landholdings. Then came the introduction
of sugar culture, which brought the beginning of the end
of the island's transformation. A fairly typical plantation in the
transition period was described by a contemporary. Of its five
hundred acres about two hundred were planted in sugar-cane,
twenty in tobacco, five in cotton, five in ginger and seventy in
provision crops; several acres were devoted to pineapples,
bananas, oranges and the like; eighty acres were in pasturage,
and one hundred and twenty in woodland. There were a sugar

mill, a boiling house, a curing house, a distillery, the master's
residence, laborers' cabins, and barns and stables. The live-stock
numbered forty-five oxen, eight cows, twelve horses and sixteen
asses; and the labor force comprised ninety-eight "Christians,"
ninety-six negroes and three Indian women with their children.
In general, this writer said, "The slaves and their posterity,
being subject to their masters forever, are kept and preserved
with greater care than the (Christian) servants, who are theirs
for but five years according to the laws of the island.[1] So that
for the time being the servants have the worser lives, for they
are put to very hard labor, ill lodging and their dyet very light"

As early as 1645 George Downing, then a young Puritan
preacher recently graduated from Harvard College but later a
distinguished English diplomat, wrote to his cousin John Winthrop,
Jr., after a voyage in the West Indies: "If you go to
Barbados, you shal see a flourishing Iland, many able men. I
beleive they have bought this year no lesse than a thousand Negroes,
and the more they buie the better they are able to buye,
for in a yeare and halfe they will earne (with God's blessing)
as much as they cost."[2] Ten years later, with bonanza prices
prevailing in the sugar market, the Barbadian planters declared
their colony to be "the most envyed of the world" and estimated
the value of its annual crops at a million pounds sterling.[3] But
in the early sixties a severe fall in sugar prices put an end to the
boom period and brought the realization that while sugar was the
rich man's opportunity it was the poor man's ruin. By 1666
emigration to other colonies had halved the white population; but
the slave trade had increased the negroes to forty thousand, most
of whom were employed on the eight hundred sugar estates.[4] For
the rest of the century Barbados held her place as the leading
producer of British sugar and the most esteemed of the British
colonies; but as the decades passed the fertility of her limited

fields became depleted, and her importance gradually fell secondary
to that of the growing Jamaica.

The Barbadian estates were generally much smaller than those
of Jamaica came to be. The planters nevertheless not only controlled
their community wholly in their interest but long maintained
a unique "planters' committee" at London to make representations
to the English government on behalf of their class.
They pleaded for the colony's freedom of trade, for example,
with no more vigor than they insisted that England should not
interfere with the Barbadian law to prohibit Quakers from admitting
negroes to their meetings. An item significant of their
attitude upon race relations is the following from the journal
of the Crown's committee of trade and plantations, Oct. 8, 1680:
"The gentlemen of Barbados attend, . . . who declare that the
conversion of their slaves to Christianity would not only destroy
their property but endanger the island, inasmuch as converted
negroes grow more perverse and intractable than others, and
hence of less value for labour or sale. The disproportion of
blacks to white being great, the whites have no greater security
than the diversity of the negroes' languages, which would be destroyed
by conversion in that it would be necessary to teach them
all English. The negroes are a sort of people so averse to learning
that they will rather hang themselves or run away than submit
to it." The Lords of Trade were enough impressed by this
argument to resolve that the question be left to the Barbadian
government.[5]

As illustrating the plantation regime in the island in the period
of its full industrial development, elaborate instructions are extant
which were issued about 1690 to Richard Harwood, manager
or overseer of the Drax Hall and Hope plantations belonging
to the Codrington family. These included directions for
planting, fertilizing and cultivating the cane, for the operation of
the wind-driven sugar mill, the boiling and curing houses and the
distillery, and for the care of the live stock; but the main concern
was with the slaves. The number in the gangs was not

stated, but the expectation was expressed that in ordinary years
from ten to twenty new negroes would have to be bought to keep
the ranks full, and it was advised that Coromantees be preferred,
since they had been found best for the work on these estates.
Plenty was urged in provision crops with emphasis upon plantains
and cassava,—the latter because of the certainty of its harvest,
the former because of the abundance of their yield in years
of no hurricanes and because the negroes especially delighted in
them and found them particularly wholesome as a dysentery diet
The services of a physician had been arranged for, but the manager
was directed to take great care of the negroes' health and
pay special attention to the sick. The clothing was not definitely
stated as to periods. For food each was to receive weekly a
pound of fish and two quarts of molasses, tobacco occasionally,
salt as needed, palm oil once a year, and home-grown provisions
in abundance. Offenses committed by the slaves were to be punished
immediately, "many of them being of the houmer of avoiding
punishment when threatened: to hang themselves." For
drunkenness the stocks were recommended. As to theft, recognized
as especially hard to repress, the manager was directed to
let hunger give no occasion for it[6]

Jamaica, which lies a thousand miles west of Barbados and has
twenty-five times her area, was captured by the English in 1655
when its few hundreds of Spaniards had developed nothing but
cacao and cattle raising. English settlement began after the Restoration,
with Roundhead exiles supplemented by immigrants
from the Lesser Antilles and by buccaneers turned farmers.
Lands were granted on a lavish scale on the south side of the
island where an abundance of savannahs facilitated tillage; but
the development of sugar culture proved slow by reason of the
paucity of slaves and the unfamiliarity of the settlers with the
peculiarities of the soil and climate. With the increase of prosperity,
and by the aid of managers brought from Barbados, sugar
plantations gradually came to prevail all round the coast and in
favorable mountain valleys, while smaller establishments here

and there throve more moderately in the production of cotton,
pimento, ginger, provisions and live stock. For many years the
legislature, prodded by occasional slave revolts, tried to stimulate
the increase of whites by requiring the planters to keep a fixed
proportion of indentured servants; but in the early eighteenth
century this policy proved futile, and thereafter the whites numbered
barely one-tenth as many as the negroes. The slaves were
reported at 86,546 in 1734; 112,428 in 1744; 166,914 in 1768; and
210,894 in 1787. In addition there were at the last date some
10,000 negroes legally free, and 1400 maroons or escaped slaves
dwelling permanently in the mountain fastnesses. The number
of sugar plantations was 651 in 1768, and 767 in 1791; and they
contained about three-fifths of all the slaves on the island.
Throughout this latter part of the century the average holding
on the sugar estates was about 180 slaves of all ages.[7]

When the final enumeration of slaves in the British possessions
was made in the eighteen-thirties there were no single Jamaica
holdings reported as large as that of 1598 slaves held by James
Blair in Guiana; but occasional items were of a scale ranging from
five to eight hundred each, and hundreds numbered above one
hundred each. In many of these instances the same persons are
listed as possessing several holdings, with Sir Edward Hyde
East particularly notable for the large number of his great
squads. The degree of absenteeism is indicated by the frequency
of English nobles, knights and gentlemen among the large proprietors.
Thus the Earl of Balcarres had 474 slaves; the Earl
of Harwood 232; the Earl and Countess of Airlie 59; Earl Talbot
and Lord Shelborne jointly 79; Lord Seaford 70; Lord Hatherton
jointly with Francis Downing, John Benbow and the Right
Reverend H. Philpots, Lord Bishop of Exeter, two holdings of
304 and 236 slaves each; and the three Gladstones, Thomas,
William and Robert 468 slaves jointly[8]

Such an average scale and such a prevalence of absenteeism
never prevailed in any other Anglo-American plantation commutiny,

largely because none of the other staples required so
much manufacturing as sugar did in preparing the crops for market.
As Bryan Edwards wrote in 1793: "the business of sugar
planting is a sort of adventure in which the man that engages
must engage deeply. . . . It requires a capital of no less than
thirty thousand pounds sterling to embark in this employment
with a fair prospect of success." Such an investment, he particularized,
would procure and establish as a going concern a
plantation of 300 acres in cane and 100 acres each in provision
crops, forage and woodland, together with the appropriate buildings
and apparatus, and a working force of 80 steers, 60 mules
and 250 slaves, at the current price for these last of £50 sterling
a head.[9] So distinctly were the plantations regarded as capitalistic
ventures that they came to be among the chief speculations
of their time for absentee investors.

When Lord Chesterfield tried in 1767 to buy his son a seat in
Parliament he learned "that there was no such thing as a borough
to be had now, for that the rich East and West Indians had
secured them all at the rate of three thousand pounds at the
least."[10] And an Englishman after traveling in the French and
British Antilles in 1825 wrote: "The French colonists, whether
Creoles or Europeans, consider the West Indies as their country;
they cast no wistful looks toward France. . . . In our colonies it
is quite different; . . . every one regards the colony as a temporary
lodging place where they must sojourn in sugar and molasses
till their mortgages will let them live elsewhere. They call
England their home though many of them have never been
there. . . . The French colonist deliberately expatriates himself;
the Englishman never."[11] Absenteeism was throughout a serious
detriment. Many and perhaps most of the Jamaica proprietors
were living luxuriously in England instead of industriously on
their estates. One of them, the talented author "Monk"
Lewis, when he visited his own plantation in 1815–1817, near the
end of his life, found as much novelty in the doings of his slaves

as if he had been drawing his income from shares in the Bank
of England; but even he, while noting their clamorous good nature
was chiefly impressed by their indolence and perversity.[12] It
was left for an invalid traveling for his health to remark most
vividly the human equation: "The negroes cannot be silent; they
talk in spite of themselves. Every passion acts upon them with
strange intensity, their anger is sudden and furious, their mirth
clamorous and excessive, their curiosity audacious, and their love
the sheer demand for gratification of an ardent animal desire.
Yet by their nature they are good-humored in the highest degree,
and I know nothing more delightful than to be met by a group
of negro girls and to be saluted with their kind 'How d'ye massa?
how d'ye massa?'"[13]

On the generality of the plantations the tone of the management
was too much like that in most modern factories. The laborers
were considered more as work-units than as men, women and
children. Kindliness and comfort, cruelty and hardship, were
rated at balance-sheet value; births and deaths were reckoned in
profit and loss, and the expense of rearing children was balanced
against the cost of new Africans. These things were true in
some degree in the North American slave-holding communities,
but in the West Indies they excelled.

In buying new negroes a practical planter having a preference
for those of some particular tribal stock might make sure of getting
them only by taking with him to the slave ships or the
"Guinea yards" in the island ports a slave of the stock wanted and
having him interrogate those for sale in his native language to
learn whether they were in fact what the dealers declared them
to be." Shrewdness was even more necessary to circumvent other
tricks of the trade, especially that of fattening up, shaving and
oiling the skins of adult slaves to pass them off as youthful. The
ages most desired in purchasing were between fifteen and twenty-five
years. If these were not to be had well grown children
were preferable to the middle-aged, since they were much less

apt to die in the "seasoning," they would learn English readily,
and their service would increase instead of decreasing after the
lapse of the first few years.

The conversion of new negroes into plantation laborers, a process
called "breaking in," required always a mingling of delicacy
and firmness. Some planters distributed their new purchases
among the seasoned households, thus delegating the task largely
to the veteran slaves. Others housed and tended them separately
under the charge of a select staff of nurses and guardians and
with frequent inspection from headquarters. The mortality rate
was generally high under either plan, ranging usually from twenty
to thirty per cent. in the seasoning period of three or four years.
The deaths came from diseases brought from Africa, such as the
yaws which was similar to syphilis; from debilities and maladies
acquired on the voyage; from the change of climate and food;
from exposure incurred in running away; from morbid habits
such as dirt-eating; and from accident, manslaughter and suicide.[14]

The seasoned slaves were housed by families in separate huts
grouped into "quarters," and were generally assigned small tracts
on the outskirts of the plantation on which to raise their own provision
crops. Allowances of clothing, dried fish, molasses, rum,
salt, etc., were issued them from the commissary, together with
any other provisions needed to supplement their own produce
The field force of men and women, boys and girls was generally
divided according to strength into three gangs, with special details
for the mill, the coppers and the still when needed; and permanent
corps were assigned to the handicrafts, to domestic service
and to various incidental functions. The larger the plantation,
of course, the greater the opportunity of differentiating
tasks and assigning individual slaves to employments fitted to
their special aptitudes.

The planters put such emphasis upon the regularity and vigor
of the routine that they generally neglected other equally vital

things. They ignored the value of labor-saving devices, most of
them even shunning so obviously desirable an implement as the
plough and using the hoe alone in breaking the land and cultivating
the crops. But still more serious was the passive acquiescence
in the depletion of their slaves by excess of deaths over births.
This decrease amounted to a veritable decimation requiring the
frequent importation of recruits to keep the ranks full. Long
estimated this loss at about two per cent. annually, while Edwards
reckoned that in his day there were surviving m Jamaica little
more than one-third as many negroes as had been imported in the
preceding career of the colony.[15] The staggering mortality rate
among the new negroes goes far toward accounting for this; but
even the seasoned groups generally failed to keep up their numbers.
The birth rate was notoriously small; but the chief secret
of the situation appears to have lain in the poor care of the newborn
children. A surgeon of long experience said that a third of
the babies died in their first month, and that few of the imported
women bore children; and another veteran resident said that commonly
more than a quarter of the babies died within the first nine
days of "jaw-fall," and nearly another fourth before they passed
their second year.[16] At least one public-spirited planter advocated
in 1801 the heroic measure of closing the slave trade in order to
raise the price of labor and coerce the planters into saving it both
by improving their apparatus and by diminishing the death
rate.[17] But his fellows would have none of his policy.

While in the other plantation staples the crop was planted and
reaped in a single year, sugar cane had a cycle extending through
several years. A typical field in southside Jamaica would be
"holed" or laid off in furrows between March and June, planted
in the height of the rainy season between July and September,
cultivated for fifteen months, and harvested in the first half of
the second year after its planting. Then when the rains returned
new shoots, "rattoons," would sprout from the old roots to yield

a second though diminished harvest in the following spring, and
so on for several years more until the rattoon or "stubble" yield
became too small to be worth while. The period of profitable rattooning
ran in some specially favorable districts as high as fourteen
years, but in general a field was replanted after the fourth
crop. In such case the cycles of the several fields were so arranged
on any well managed estate that one-fifth of the area in
cane was replanted each year and four-fifths harvested.

This coördination of cycles brought it about that oftentimes almost
every sort of work on the plantation was going on simultaneously.
Thus on the Lodge and Grange plantations which
were apparently operated as a single unit, the extant journal of
work during the harvest month of May, 1801,[18] shows a distribution
of the total of 314 slaves as follows: ninety of the "big
gang" and fourteen of the "big gang feeble" together with fifty
of the "little gang" were stumping a new clearing, "holing" or
laying off a stubble field for replanting, weeding and filling the
gaps in the field of young first-year or "plant" cane, and heaping
the manure in the ox-lot; ten slaves were cutting, ten tying and
ten more hauling the cane from the fields in harvest; fifteen were
in a "top heap" squad whose work was conjecturally the saving
of the green cane tops for forage and fertilizer; nine were tending
the cane mill, seven were in the boiling house, producing a
hogshead and a half of sugar daily, and two were at the two stills
making a puncheon of rum every four days; six watchmen and
fence menders, twelve artisans, eight stockminders, two hunters,
four domestics, and two sick nurses were at their appointed
tasks; and eighteen invalids and pregnant women, four disabled
with sores, forty infants and one runaway were doing no work.
There were listed thirty horses, forty mules and a hundred oxen
and other cattle; but no item indicates that a single plow was in
use.

The cane-mill in the eighteenth century consisted merely of
three iron-sheathed cylinders, two of them set against the third,
turned by wind, water or cattle. The canes, tied into small bundles
for greater compression, were given a double squeezing while

passing through the mill. The juice expressed found its way
through a trough into the boiling house while the flattened stalks,
called mill trash or megass in the British colonies and bagasse in
Louisiana, were carried to sheds and left to dry for later use as
fuel under the coppers and stills.

In the boiling house the cane-juice flowed first into a large receptacle,
the clarifier, where by treatment with lime and moderate
heat it was separated from its grosser impurities. It then passed
into the first or great copper, where evaporation by boiling began
and some further impurities, rising in scum, were taken off.
After further evaporation in smaller coppers the thickened fluid
was ladled into a final copper, the teache, for a last boiling and
concentration; and when the product of the teache was ready for
crystallization it was carried away for the curing. In Louisiana
the successive caldrons were called the grande, the propre, the
flambeau and the batterie, the last of these corresponding to the
Jamaican teache.

The curing house was merely a timber framework with a roof
above and a great shallow sloping vat below. The sugary syrup
from the teache was generally potted directly into hogsheads resting
on the timbers, and allowed to cool with occasional stirrings;
Most of the sugar stayed in the hogsheads, while some of it
trickled with the mother liquor, molasses, through perforations
in the bottoms into the vat beneath. When the hogsheads were
full of the crudely cured, moist, and impure "muscovado" sugar,
they were headed up and sent to port The molasses, the scum,
and the juice of the canes tainted by damage from rats and hurricanes
were carried to vats in the distillery where, with yeast and
water added, the mixture fermented and when distilled yielded
rum.

The harvest was a time of special activity, of good feeling, and
even of a certain degree of pageantry. Lafcadio Hearn, many
years after the slaves were freed, described the scene in Martinique
as viewed from the Slopes of Mont Pélée: "We look back
over the upreaching yellow fan-spread of cane-fields, and winding'
of tortuous valleys, and the sea expanding beyond an opening to the
west . . . Far down we can distinguish a line of field-hands—

the whole atelier, as it is called, of a plantation—slowly descending
a slope, hewing the canes as they go. There is a woman to
every two men, a binder (amarreuse): she gathers the canes as
they are cut down, binds them with their own tough long leaves
into a sort of sheaf, and carries them away on her head;—the
men wield their cutlasses so beautifully that it is a delight to
watch them. One cannot often enjoy such a spectacle nowadays;
for the introduction of the piece-work system has destroyed
the picturesqueness of plantation labor throughout the islands,
with rare exceptions. Formerly the work of cane-cutting resembled
the march of an army;—first advanced the cutlassers in line,
naked to the waist; then the amarreuses, the women who tied
and carried; and behind these the ka, the drum,—with a paid
crieur or crieuse to lead the song;—and lastly the black Commandeur,
for general."[19]

After this bit of rhapsody the steadying effect of statistics may
be abundantly had from the records of the great Worthy Park
plantation, elaborated expressly for posterity's information. This
estate, lying in St. John's parish on the southern slope of the Jamaica
mountain chain, comprised not only the plantation proper,
which had some 560 acres in sugar cane and smaller fields in food
and forage crops, but also Spring Garden, a nearby cattle ranch,
and Mickleton which was presumably a relay station for the teams
hauling the sugar and rum to Port Henderson. The records,
which are available for the years from 1792 to 1796 inclusive,
treat the three properties as one establishment.[20]

The slaves of the estate at the beginning of 1792 numbered
355, apparently all seasoned negroes, of whom 150 were in the
main field gang. But this force was inadequate for the full
routine, and in that year "jobbing gangs" from outside were
employed at rates from 2s. 6d. to 3s. per head per day and at a
total cost of £1832, reckoned probably in Jamaican currency which
stood at thirty per cent. discount In order to relieve the need
of this outside labor the management began that year to buy new

Africans on a scale considered reckless by all the island authorities.
In March five men and five women were bought; and in
October 25 men, 27 women, 16 boys, 16 girls and 6 children, all
new Congoes; and in the next year 51 males and 30 females, part
Congoes and part Coromantees and nearly all of them eighteen
to twenty years old. Thirty new huts were built; special cooks
and nurses were detailed; and quantities of special foodstuffs
were bought—yams, plantains, flour, fresh and salt fish, and
fresh beef heads, tongues, hearts and bellies; but it is not surprising
to find that the next outlay for equipment was for a
large new hospital in 1794, costing £341 for building its brick
walls alone. Yaws became serious, but that was a trifle as compared
with dysentery; and pleurisy, pneumonia, fever and
dropsy had also to be reckoned with. About fifty of the new
negroes were quartered for several years in a sort of hospital
camp at Spring Garden, where the routine even for the able-bodied
was much lighter than on Worthy Park.

One of the new negroes died in 1792, and another in the next
year. Then in the spring of 1794 the heavy mortality began.
In that year at least 31 of the newcomers died, nearly all of
them from the "bloody flux" (dysentery) except two who were
thought to have committed suicide. By 1795, however, the epidemic
had passed. Of the five deaths of the new negroes that
year, two were attributed to dirt-eating,[21] one to yaws, and two
to ulcers, probably caused by yaws. The three years of the
seasoning period were now ended, with about three-fourths of
the number imported still alive. The loss was perhaps less than
usual where such large batches were bought; but it demonstrates
the strength of the shock involved in the transplantation
from Africa, even after the severities of the middle passage had
been survived and after the weaklings among the survivors had
been culled out at the ports. The outlay for jobbing gangs on
Worthy Park rapidly diminished.

The list of slaves at the beginning of 1794 is the only one giving
full data as to ages, colors and health as well as occupations.

The ages were of course in many cases mere approximations;
The "great house negroes" head the list, fourteen in number.
They comprised four housekeepers, one of whom however was
but eight years old, three waiting boys, a cook, two washerwomen,
two gardeners and a grass carrier, and included nominally
Quadroon Lizette who after having been hired out for several
years to Peter Douglass, the owner of a jobbing gang, was
this year manumitted.

The overseer's house had its proportionate staff of nine domestics
with two seamstresses added, and it was also headquarters
both for the nursing corps and a group engaged in minor industrial
pursuits. The former, with a "black doctor" named
Will Morris at its head, included a midwife, two nurses for the
hospital, four (one of them blind) for the new negroes, two for
the children in the day nursery, and one for the suckling babies of
the women in the gangs. The latter comprised three cooks to
the gangs, one of whom had lost a hand; a groom, three hog
tenders, of whom one was ruptured, another "distempered" and
the third a ten-year-old boy, and ten aged idlers including
Quashy Prapra and Abba's Moll to mend pads, Yellow's Cuba
and Peg's Nancy to tend the poultry house, and the rest to gather
grass and hog feed.

Next were listed the watchmen, thirty-one in number, to guard
against depredations of men, cattle and rats and against conflagrations
which might sweep the ripening cane-fields and the
buildings. All of these were black but the mulatto foreman,
and only six were described as able-bodied. The disabilities
noted were a bad sore leg, a broken back, lameness, partial blindness,
distemper, weakness, and cocobees which was a malady of
the blood.

A considerable number of the slaves already mentioned were
in such condition that little work might be expected of them.
Those completely laid off were nine superannuated ranging
from seventy to eighty-five years old, three invalids, and three
women relieved of work as by law required for having reared
six children each.
"Among the tradesmen, virtually all the blacks were stated to

be fit for field work, but the five mulattoes and the one quadroon,
though mostly youthful and healthy, were described as not fit
for the field. There were eleven carpenters, eight coopers, four
sawyers, three masons and twelve cattlemen, each squad with a
foreman; and there were two ratcatchers whose work was highly
important, for the rats swarmed in incredible numbers and
spoiled the cane if left to work their will. A Jamaican author
wrote, for example, that in five or six months on one plantation
"not less than nine and thirty thousand were caught."[22]

In the "weeding gang," in which most of the children from
five to eight years old were kept as much for control as for
achievement, there were twenty pickaninnies, all black, under
Mirtilla as "driveress," who had borne and lost seven children
of her own. Thirty-nine other children were too young for the
weeding gang, at least six of whom were quadroons. Two of
these last, the children of Joanny, a washerwoman at the
overseer's house, were manumitted in 1795.

Fifty-five, all new negroes except Darby the foreman, and
including Blossom the infant daughter of one of the women,
comprised the Spring Garden squad. Nearly all of these were
twenty or twenty-one years old. The men included Washington,
Franklin, Hamilton, Burke, Fox, Milton, Spencer, Hume
and Sheridan; the women Spring, Summer, July, Bashfull, Virtue,
Frolic, Gamesome, Lady, Madame, Dutchess, Mirtle and
Cowslip. Seventeen of this distinguished company died within
the year.

The "big gang" on Worthy Park numbered 137, comprising
64 men from nineteen to sixty years old and 73 women from
nineteen to fifty years, though but four of the women and nine
of the men, including Quashy the "head driver" or foreman,
were past forty years. The gang included a "head home
wainman," a "head road wainman," who appears to have been
also the sole slave plowman on the place, a head muleman, three
distillers, a boiler, two sugar potters, and two "sugar guards"
for the wagons carrying the crop to port. All of the gang

were described as healthy, able-bodied and black. A considerable
number in it were new negroes, but only seven of the whole
died in this year of heaviest mortality.

The "second gang," employed in a somewhat lighter routine
under Sharper as foreman, comprised 40 women and 27 men
ranging from fifteen to sixty years, all black. While most of
them were healthy, five were consumptive, four were ulcerated,
one was "inclined to be bloated," one was "very weak," and
Pheba was "healthy but worthless."

Finally in the third or "small gang," for yet lighter work
under Baddy as driveress with Old Robin as assistant, there
were 68 boys and girls, all black, mostly between twelve and
fifteen years old. The draught animals comprised about 80 mules
and 140 oxen.

Among the 528 slaves all told—284 males and 244 females—
74. equally divided between the sexes, were fifty years old and
upwards. If the new negroes, virtually all of whom were
doubtless in early life, be subtracted from the gross, it appears
that one-fifth of the seasoned stock had reached the half century,
and one-eighth were sixty years old and over. This is a good
showing of longevity.

About eighty of the seasoned women were within the age
limits of childbearing. The births recorded were on an average
of nine for each of the five years covered, which was hardly
half as many as might have been expected under favorable conditions.
Special entry was made in 1795 of the number of children
each woman had borne during her life, the number of these
living at the time this record was made, and the number of miscarriages
each woman had had. The total of births thus recorded
was 345; of children then living 159; of miscarriages
75. Old Quasheba and Betty Madge had each borne fifteen
children, and sixteen other women had borne from six to eleven
each. On the other hand, seventeen women of thirty years and
upwards had had no children and no miscarriages. The childbearing
records of the women past middle age ran higher than
those of the younger ones to a surprising degree. Perhaps conditions
on Worthy Park had been more favorable at an earlier

period, when the owner and his family may possibly have been
resident there. The fact that more than half of the children
whom these women had borne were dead at the time of the
record comports with the reputation of the sugar colonies for
heavy infant mortality. With births so infrequent and infant
deaths so many it may well appear that the notorious failure of
the island-bred stock to maintain its numbers was not due to
the working of the slaves to death. The poor care of the young
children may be attributed largely to the absence of a white
mistress, an absence characteristic of Jamaica plantations. There
appears to have been no white woman resident on Worthy Park
during the time of this record. In 1795 and perhaps in other
years the plantation had a contract for medical service at the
rate of £140 a year.

"Robert Price of Penzance in the Kingdom of Great Britain
Esquire" was the absentee owner of Worthy Park. His kinsman
Rose Price Esquire who was in active charge was not salaried
but may have received a manager's commission of six per
cent. on gross crop sales as contemplated in the laws of the colony.
In addition there were an overseer at £200, later £300,
a year, four bookkeepers at £50 to £60, a white carpenter at £120,
and a white plowman at £56. The overseer was changed three
times during the five years of the record, and the bookkeepers
were generally replaced annually. The bachelor staff was most
probably responsible for the mulatto and quadroon offspring and
was doubtless responsible also for the occasional manumission
of a woman or child.

Rewards for zeal in service were given chiefly to the "drivers"
or gang foremen. Each of these had for example every year a
"doubled milled cloth colored great coat" costing 11s. 6d. and a
"fine bound hat with girdle and buckle" costing l0s. 6d. As a
more direct and frequent stimulus a quart of rum was served
weekly to each of three drivers, three carpenters, four boilers,
two head cattlemen, two head mulemen, the "stoke-hole boatswain,"
and the black doctor, and to the foremen respectively
of the sawyers, coopers, blacksmiths, watchmen, and road wainmen,
and a pint weekly to the head home wainman, the potter,

the midwife, and the young children's field nurse. These
allowances totaled about three hundred gallons yearly. But a
considerably greater quantity than this was distributed, mostly
at Christmas perhaps, for in 1796 for example 922 gallons were
recorded of "rum used for the negroes on the estate." Upon
the birth of each child the mother was given a Scotch rug and a
silver dollar.

No record of whippings appears to have been kept, nor of
any offenses except absconding. Of the runaways, reports were
made to the parish vestry of those lying out at the end of each
quarter. At the beginning of the record there were no runaways
and at the end there were only four; but during 1794 and 1795
there were eight or nine listed in each report, most of whom were
out for but a few months each, but several for a year or two; and
several furthermore absconded a second or third time after returning.
The runaways were heterogeneous in age and occupation,
with more old negroes among them than might have been
expected. Most of them were men; but the women Ann, Strumpet
and Christian Grace made two flights each, and the old pad-mender
Abba's Moll stayed out for a year and a quarter. A few
of those recovered were returned through the public agency of
the workhouse. Some of the rest may have come back of their
own accord.

In the summer of 1795, when absconding had for some time
been too common, the recaptured runaways and a few other
offenders were put for disgrace and better surveillance into a
special "vagabond gang." This comprised Billy Scott, who was
usually a mason and sugar guard, Oxford who as head cooper
had enjoyed a weekly quart of rum, Cesar a sawyer, and Moll
the old pad-mender, along with three men and two women from
the main gangs, and three half-grown boys. The vagabond gang
was so wretchedly assorted for industrial purposes that it was
probably soon disbanded and its members distributed to their
customary tasks. For use in marking slaves a branding iron
was inventoried, but in the way of arms there were merely
two muskets, a fowling piece and twenty-four old guns without
locks. Evidently no turbulence was anticipated.

Worthy Park bought nearly all of its hardware, dry goods,
drugs and sundries in London, and its herrings for the negroes
and salt pork and beef for the white staff in Cork. Corn was
cultivated between the rows in some of the cane fields on the
plantation, and some guinea-corn was bought from neighbors.
The negroes raised their own yams and other vegetables, and
doubtless pigs and poultry as well; and plantains were likely
to be plentiful.

Every October cloth was issued at the rate of seven yards
of osnaburgs, three of checks, and three of baize for each adult
and proportionately for children. The first was to be made into
coats, trousers and frocks, the second into shirts and waists, the
third into bedclothes. The cutting and sewing were done in
the cabins. A hat and a cap were also issued to each negro old
enough to go into the field, and a clasp-knife to each one above
the age of the third gang. From the large purchases of Scotch
rugs recorded it seems probable that these were issued on other
occasions than those of childbirth. As to shoes, however, the
record is silent.

The Irish provisions cost annually about £300, and the English
supplies about £1000, not including such extra outlays as that
of £1355 in 1793 for new stills, worms, and coppers. Local expenditures
were probably reckoned in currency. Converted into
sterling, the salary list amounted to about £500, and the local
outlay for medical services, wharfage, and petty supplies came
to a like amount. Taxes, manager's commissions, and the depreciation
of apparatus must have amounted collectively to £800.
The net death-loss of slaves, not including that from the breaking-in
of new negroes, averaged about two and a quarter per
cent.; that of the mules and oxen ten per cent. When reckoned
upon the numbers on hand in 1796 when the plantation
with 470 slaves was operating with very little outside help, these
losses, which must be replaced by new purchases if the scale
of output was to be maintained, amounted to about £900. Thus
a total of £4000 sterling is reached as the average current expense
in years when no mishaps occurred.

The crops during the years of the record averaged 311 hogsheads

of sugar, sixteen hundredweight each, and 133 puncheons
of rum, no gallons each. This was about the common average
on the island, of two-thirds as many hogsheads as there
were slaves of all ages on a plantation.[23] If the prices had been
those current in the middle of the eighteenth century these crops
would have yielded the proprietor great profits. But at £15
per hogshead and £10 per puncheon, the prices generally current
in the island in the seventeen-nineties, the gross return was
but about £6000 sterling, and the net earnings of the establishment
accordingly not above £2000. The investment in slaves,
mules and oxen was about £28,000, and that in land, buildings
and equipment according to the island authorities, would reach
a like sum.[24] The net earnings in good years were thus less
than four per cent. on the investment; but the liability to
hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, epidemics and mutinies would
bring the safe expectations considerably lower. A mere pestilence
which carried off about sixty mules and two hundred oxen
on Worthy Park in 1793–1794 wiped out more than a year's
earnings.

In the twenty years prior to the beginning of the Worthy
Park record more than one-third of all the sugar plantations in
Jamaica had gone through bankruptcy. It was generally agreed
that, within the limits of efficient operation, the larger an estate
was, the better its prospect for net earnings. But though Worthy
Park had more than twice the number of slaves that the average
plantation employed, it was barely paying its way.

In the West Indies as a whole there was a remarkable repetition
of developments and experiences in island after island,
similar to that which occurred in the North American plantation
regions, but even more pronounced. The career of Barbados
was followed rapidly by the other Lesser Antilles under the English
and French flags; these were all exceeded by the greater
scale of Jamaica; she in turn yielded the primacy in sugar to
Hayti only to have that French possession, when overwhelmed
by its great negro insurrection, give the paramount place to

the Spanish Porto Rico and Cuba. In each case the opening of
a fresh area under imperial encouragement would promote
rapid immigration and vigorous industry on every scale; the
land would be taken up first in relatively small holdings; the
prosperity of the pioneers would prompt a more systematic husbandry
and the consolidation of estates, involving the replacement
of the free small proprietors by slave gangs; but diminishing
fertility and intensifying competition would in the course of
years more than offset the improvement of system. Meanwhile
more pioneers, including perhaps some of those whom the planters
had bought out in the original colonies, would found new
settlements; and as these in turn developed, the older colonies
would decline and decay in spite of desperate efforts by their
plantation proprietors to hold their own through the increase of
investments and the improvement of routine.[25]