and one for the suckling babies of the women in the gangs.  The latter comprised three cooks to the gangs, one of whom had lost a hand; a groom, three hog tenders, of whom one was ruptured, another “distempered” and the third a ten-year-old boy, and ten aged idlers including Quashy Prapra and Abba’s Moll to mend pads, Yellow’s Cuba and Peg’s Nancy to tend the poultry house, and the rest to gather grass and hog feed.

Next were listed the watchmen, thirty-one in number, to guard against depredations of men, cattle and rats and against conflagrations which might sweep the ripening cane-fields and the buildings.  All of these were black but the mulatto foreman, and only six were described as able-bodied.  The disabilities noted were a bad sore leg, a broken back, lameness, partial blindness, distemper, weakness, and cocobees which was a malady of the blood.

A considerable number of the slaves already mentioned were in such condition that little work might be expected of them.  Those completely laid off were nine superannuated ranging from seventy to eighty-five years old, three invalids, and three women relieved of work as by law required for having reared six children each.

Among the tradesmen, virtually all the blacks were stated to be fit for field work, but the five mulattoes and the one quadroon, though mostly youthful and healthy, were described as not fit for the field.  There were eleven carpenters, eight coopers, four sawyers, three masons and twelve cattlemen, each squad with a foreman; and there were two ratcatchers whose work was highly important, for the rats swarmed in incredible numbers and spoiled the cane if left to work their will.  A Jamaican author wrote, for example, that in five or six months on one plantation “not less than nine and thirty thousand were caught."[22]

[Footnote 22:  William Beckford, A Discriptive Account of Jamaica (London, 1790), I. 55, 56.]

In the “weeding gang,” in which most of the children from five to eight years old were kept as much for control as for achievement, there were twenty pickaninnies, all black, under Mirtilla as “driveress,” who had borne and lost seven children of her own.  Thirty-nine other children were too young for the weeding gang, at least six of whom were quadroons.  Two of these last, the children of Joanny, a washerwoman at the overseer’s house, were manumitted in 1795.

Fifty-five, all new negroes except Darby the foreman, and including Blossom the infant daughter of one of the women, comprised the Spring Garden squad.  Nearly all of these were twenty or twenty-one years old.  The men included Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Burke, Fox, Milton, Spencer, Hume and Sheridan; the women Spring, Summer, July, Bashfull, Virtue, Frolic, Gamesome, Lady, Madame, Dutchess, Mirtle and Cowslip.  Seventeen of this distinguished company died within the year.