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]

[Footnote 6:  Original MS. in the Bodleian Library, A. 248, 3.  Copy used through the courtesy of Dr. F.W.  Pitman of Yale University.]

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]