The agricultural regime in the islands was accordingly kept relatively stagnant as long as Spain preserved her full West Indian domination.  The sugar industry, which by 1542 exported the staple to the amount of 110,000 arrobas of twenty-five pounds each, was standardized in plantations of two types—­the trapiche whose cane was ground by ox power and whose labor force was generally thirty or forty negroes (each reckoned as capable of the labor of four Indians); and the inqenio, equipped with a water-power mill and employing about a hundred slaves.[15] Occasional slave revolts disturbed the Spanish islanders but never for long diminished their eagerness for slave recruits.  The slave laws were relatively mild, the police administration extremely casual, and the plantation managements easy-going.  In short, after introducing slavery into the new world the Spaniards maintained it in sluggish fashion, chiefly in the islands, as an institution which peoples more vigorous industrially might borrow and adapt to a more energetic plantation regime.

[Footnote 15:  Saco, pp. 127, 128, 188; Oviedo, Historia General de las Indias, book 4. chap. 8.]

CHAPTER II

THE MARITIME SLAVE TRADE

At the request of a slaver’s captain the government of Georgia issued in 1772 a certificate to a certain Fenda Lawrence reciting that she, “a free black woman and heretofore a considerable trader in the river Gambia on the coast of Africa, hath voluntarily come to be and remain for some time in this province,” and giving her permission to “pass and repass unmolested within the said province on her lawfull and necessary occations."[1] This instance is highly exceptional.  The millions of African expatriates went against their own wills, and their transporters looked upon the business not as passenger traffic but as trade in goods.  Earnings came from selling in America the cargoes bought in Africa; the transportation was but an item in the trade.

[Footnote 1:  U.B.  Phillips, Plantation and Frontier Documents, printed also as vols.  I and II of the Documentary History of American Industrial Society (Cleveland, O., 1909), II, 141, 142.  This publication will be cited hereafter as Plantation and Frontier.]

The business bulked so large in the world’s commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that every important maritime community on the Atlantic sought a share, generally with the sanction and often with the active assistance of its respective sovereign.  The preliminaries to the commercial strife occurred in the Elizabethan age.  French traders in gold and ivory found the Portuguese police on the Guinea Coast to be negligible; but poaching in the slave trade was a harder problem, for Spain held firm control of her colonies which were then virtually the world’s only slave market.