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]

[Footnote 22: William Beckford, _A Discriptive Account of Jamaica_ (London,
1790), I. 55, 56.]

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,"