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.

[Footnote 15: Long, III, 432; Edwards, book 4, chap. 2.]

[Footnote 16: _Abridgement of the evidence taken before a committee of the
whole House: The Slave Trade_, no. 2 (London, 1790), pp. 48, 80.]

[Footnote 17: Clement Caines, _Letters on the Cultivation of the Otaheite
Cane_ (London, 1801), pp. 274-281.]

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