27 women, 16 boys, 16 girls and 6 children, all new Congoes; and in the next year 51 males and 30 females, part Congoes and part Coromantees and nearly all of them eighteen to twenty years old.  Thirty new huts were built; special cooks and nurses were detailed; and quantities of special foodstuffs were bought—­yams, plantains, flour, fresh and salt fish, and fresh beef heads, tongues, hearts and bellies; but it is not surprising to find that the next outlay for equipment was for a large new hospital in 1794, costing L341 for building its brick walls alone.  Yaws became serious, but that was a trifle as compared with dysentery; and pleurisy, pneumonia, fever and dropsy had also to be reckoned with.  About fifty of the new negroes were quartered for several years in a sort of hospital camp at Spring Garden, where the routine even for the able-bodied was much lighter than on Worthy Park.

One of the new negroes died in 1792, and another in the next year.  Then in the spring of 1794 the heavy mortality began.  In that year at least 31 of the newcomers died, nearly all of them from the “bloody flux” (dysentery) except two who were thought to have committed suicide.  By 1795, however, the epidemic had passed.  Of the five deaths of the new negroes that year, two were attributed to dirt-eating,[21] one to yaws, and two to ulcers, probably caused by yaws.  The three years of the seasoning period were now ended, with about three-fourths of the number imported still alive.  The loss was perhaps less than usual where such large batches were bought; but it demonstrates the strength of the shock involved in the transplantation from Africa, even after the severities of the middle passage had been survived and after the weaklings among the survivors had been culled out at the ports.  The outlay for jobbing gangs on Worthy Park rapidly diminished.

[Footnote 21:  The “fatal habit of eating dirt” is described by Thomas Roughley in his Planter’s Guide (London. 1823) pp. 118-120.]

The list of slaves at the beginning of 1794 is the only one giving full data as to ages, colors and health as well as occupations.  The ages were of course in many cases mere approximations.  The “great house negroes” head the list, fourteen in number.  They comprised four housekeepers, one of whom however was but eight years old, three waiting boys, a cook, two washerwomen, two gardeners and a grass carrier, and included nominally Quadroon Lizette who after having been hired out for several years to Peter Douglass, the owner of a jobbing gang, was this year manumitted.

The overseer’s house had its proportionate staff of nine domestics with two seamstresses added, and it was also headquarters both for the nursing corps and a group engaged in minor industrial pursuits.  The former, with a “black doctor” named Will Morris at its head, included a midwife, two nurses for the hospital, four (one of them blind) for the new negroes, two for the children in the day nursery,