notoriously small; but the chief secret of the situation appears to have lain in the poor care of the newborn children.  A surgeon of long experience said that a third of the babies died in their first month, and that few of the imported women bore children; and another veteran resident said that commonly more than a quarter of the babies died within the first nine days, of “jaw-fall,” and nearly another fourth before they passed their second year.[16] At least one public-spirited planter advocated in 1801 the heroic measure of closing the slave trade in order to raise the price of labor and coerce the planters into saving it both by improving their apparatus and by diminishing the death rate.[17] But his fellows would have none of his policy.

[Footnote 15:  Long, III, 432; Edwards, book 4, chap. 2.]

[Footnote 16:  Abridgement of the evidence taken before a committee of the whole House:  The Slave Trade, no. 2 (London, 1790), pp. 48, 80.]

[Footnote 17:  Clement Caines, Letters on the Cultivation of the Otaheite Cane (London, 1801), pp. 274-281.]

While in the other plantation staples the crop was planted and reaped in a single year, sugar cane had a cycle extending through several years.  A typical field in southside Jamaica would be “holed” or laid off in furrows between March and June, planted in the height of the rainy season between July and September, cultivated for fifteen months, and harvested in the first half of the second year after its planting.  Then when the rains returned new shoots, “rattoons,” would sprout from the old roots to yield a second though diminished harvest in the following spring, and so on for several years more until the rattoon or “stubble” yield became too small to be worth while.  The period of profitable rattooning ran in some specially favorable districts as high as fourteen years, but in general a field was replanted after the fourth crop.  In such case the cycles of the several fields were so arranged on any well managed estate that one-fifth of the area in cane was replanted each year and four-fifths harvested.

This cooerdination of cycles brought it about that oftentimes almost every sort of work on the plantation was going on simultaneously.  Thus on the Lodge and Grange plantations which were apparently operated as a single unit, the extant journal of work during the harvest month of May, 1801,[18] shows a distribution of the total of 314 slaves as follows:  ninety of the “big gang” and fourteen of the “big gang feeble” together with fifty of the “little gang” were stumping a new clearing, “holing” or laying off a stubble field for replanting, weeding and filling the gaps in the field of young first-year or “plant” cane, and heaping the manure in the ox-lot; ten slaves were cutting, ten tying and ten more hauling the cane from the fields in harvest; fifteen were in a “top heap” squad whose work was conjecturally the saving of the green cane tops for forage and fertilizer;