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 régime.

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