In the principal importing colonies careful study was given to the comparative qualities of the several African stocks.  The consensus of opinion in the premises may be gathered from several contemporary publications, the chief ones of which were written in Jamaica.[52] The Senegalese, who had a strong Arabic strain in their ancestry, were considered the most intelligent of Africans and were especially esteemed for domestic service, the handicrafts and responsible positions.  “They are good commanders over other negroes, having a high spirit and a tolerable share of fidelity; but they are unfit for hard work; their bodies are not robust nor their constitutions vigorous.”  The Mandingoes were reputed to be especially gentle in demeanor but peculiarly prone to theft.  They easily sank under fatigue, but might be employed with advantage in the distillery and the boiling house or as watchmen against fire and the depredations of cattle.  The Coromantees of the Gold Coast stand salient in all accounts as hardy and stalwart of mind and body.  Long calls them haughty, ferocious and stubborn; Edwards relates examples of their Spartan fortitude; and it was generally agreed that they were frequently instigators of slave conspiracies and insurrections.  Yet their spirit of loyalty made them the most highly prized of servants by those who could call it forth.  Of them Christopher Codrington, governor of the Leeward Islands, wrote in 1701 to the English Board of Trade:  “The Corramantes are not only the best and most faithful of our slaves, but are really all born heroes.  There is a differance between them and all other negroes beyond what ’tis possible for your Lordships to conceive.  There never was a raskal or coward of that nation.  Intrepid to the last degree, not a man of them but will stand to be cut to pieces without a sigh or groan, grateful and obedient to a kind master, but implacably revengeful when ill-treated.  My father, who had studied the genius and temper of all kinds of negroes forty-five years with a very nice observation, would say, noe man deserved a Corramante that would not treat him like a friend rather than a slave."[53]

[Footnote 52:  Edward Long, History of Jamaica (London, 1774), II, 403, 404; Bryan Edwards, History of the British Colonies in the West Indies, various editions, book IV, chap. 3; and “A Professional Planter,” Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies (London, 1803), pp. 39-48.  The pertinent portion of this last is reprinted in Plantation and Frontier, II, 127-133.  For the similar views of the French planters in the West Indies see Peytraud, L’Esclavage aux Antilles Francaises, pp. 87-90.]

[Footnote 53:  Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1701, pp. 720, 721.]