quite different; ... every one regards the colony as a temporary lodging place where they must sojourn in sugar and molasses till their mortgages will let them live elsewhere.  They call England their home though many of them have never been there....  The French colonist deliberately expatriates himself; the Englishman never."[11] Absenteeism was throughout a serious detriment.  Many and perhaps most of the Jamaica proprietors were living luxuriously in England instead of industriously on their estates.  One of them, the talented author “Monk” Lewis, when he visited his own plantation in 1815-1817, near the end of his life, found as much novelty in the doings of his slaves as if he had been drawing his income from shares in the Banc of England; but even he, while noting their clamorous good nature was chiefly impressed by their indolence and perversity.[12] It was left for an invalid traveling for his health to remark most vividly the human equation:  “The negroes cannot be silent; they talk in spite of themselves.  Every passion acts upon them with strange intensity, their anger is sudden and furious, their mirth clamorous and excessive, their curiosity audacious, and their love the sheer demand for gratification of an ardent animal desire.  Yet by their nature they are good-humored in the highest degree, and I know nothing more delightful than to be met by a group of negro girls and to be saluted with their kind ‘How d’ye massa? how d’ye massa?’"[13]

[Footnote 10:  Lord Chesterfield, Letters to his Son (London, 1774), II, 525.]

[Footnote 11:  H.N.  Coleridge, Six Months in the West Indies, 4th ed.  (London, 1832), pp. 131, 132.]

[Footnote 12:  Matthew G. Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (London, 1834).]

[Footnote 13:  H.N.  Coleridge, p. 76.]

On the generality of the plantations the tone of the management was too much like that in most modern factories.  The laborers were considered more as work-units than as men, women and children.  Kindliness and comfort, cruelty and hardship, were rated at balance-sheet value; births and deaths were reckoned in profit and loss, and the expense of rearing children was balanced against the cost of new Africans.  These things were true in some degree in the North American slaveholding communities, but in the West Indies they excelled.

In buying new negroes a practical planter having a preference for those of some particular tribal stock might make sure of getting them only by taking with him to the slave ships or the “Guinea yards” in the island ports a slave of the stock wanted and having him interrogate those for sale in his native language to learn whether they were in fact what the dealers declared them to be.  Shrewdness was even more necessary to circumvent other tricks of the trade, especially that of fattening up, shaving and oiling the skins of adult slaves to pass them off as youthful.  The ages most desired in purchasing were between fifteen and twenty-five years.  If these were not to be had well grown children were preferable to the middle-aged, since they were much less apt to die in the “seasoning,” they would learn English readily, and their service would increase instead of decreasing after the lapse of the first few years.