their attention. The extensive plantations left by their predecessors,
who had made it their principal food and only support, soon, however,
began to fail. They were renewed; but whether it might be from the
want of attention, or of information in the new colonists, the plants
never succeeded under their management; so that, disgusted with the
troublesome and unprofitable cultivation, they soon substituted
indigo." Yet forests of cacao trees grow wild in Guiana, the Isthmus
of Darien, Yucatan, Honduras, Guatemala, Chiapa, and Nicaragua; while
in Cuba, St. Domingo, and Jamaica, it was once an indigenous plant.

The following were the expenses of a cacao plantation in Jamaica
during the early period of British possession:--

£ stg
Letters patent of five hundred acres of land 10
Six negroes 120
Four white persons, their passage and maintenance 80
Maintenance of six slaves for six months 18
Working implements 5
----
£233

In four to five years the produce of one hundred acres would usually
sell for £4,240 sterling. This was a monstrous and most unlooked-for
return; but then, what was it to the profits of sugar, which, owing to
the prodigious increase of the slave trade, was fast coming into
active operation, and eating up and destroying all other sources and
springs of industry? How dearly have the West Indians paid for the
short-lived affluence which the sugar cane conferred!