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 livestock 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."

[Footnote 1: Richard Ligon, _History of Barbados_ (London, 1657).]

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