An intelligent English traveller, writing on “Antigua and the Antiguans” in 1844, says in regard to the question, whether the freed negro will work, that he has often observed, when a piece of land was to be holed for sugar-cane by task-work, the negroes rising by one or two o’clock in the morning during moonlight, going to the field and accomplishing a usual day’s work (300 cane-holes) by five or six o’clock in the forenoon; then, after resting a short time, they were prepared for another task, which they completed; and still had some hours left for their own provision-grounds.  When the heat is considered, and the labor of digging one cane-hole, (a trench three or four feet square and one foot deep,) we may imagine what the work of opening 600 in a day must be.  The same author states that plantations which could not find a purchaser before emancipation are now worth L10,000.  Another writer, quoted by Cochin, says in 1845, with reference to the efficiency of labor of the Antiguan negroes, and their employment of machinery, “The colony has made this year, with a field-force of less than 10,000, a harvest almost equal to that which has employed 30,000 laborers in Barbadoes.”

Of the other Leeward Islands, Sewell says, (p. 164,) “The condition of the free peasant rises infinitely above that of the slave.  In all, the people are more happy and contented; in all, they are more civilized; in all, there are more provisions grown for home-consumption than ever were raised in the most flourishing days of slavery; in all, the imports have largely increased; in all, a very important trade has sprung up with the United States; from all, there is an exportation of minor articles which were not cultivated twenty years ago, and which, in estimating the industry of a people under a free system, are often most unjustly overlooked.  These are considerations from which the planter turns with contemptuous indifference.  Sugar, and sugar alone, is his dream, his argument, his faith.”  Yet the following table of exports of sugar shows that even in that free labor has been successful.

Comparative Table of Sugar Exportations in Pounds from the
Leeward Islands.[K]

Islands.     Annual average from    Exports in
1820 to 1832.          1858. 
Antigua,      20,580,000 lbs.      26,174,000 lbs. 
Dominica,      6,000,000            6,263,000
Nevis,         5,000,000            4,400,000
Montserrat,    1,840,000            1,308,000
St. Kitt’s,   12,000,000           10,000,000
----------           ----------
Total,  45,420,000 lbs.      48,145,000 lbs.

Table of Imports in Value.

Islands.   Annual average value   Value of imports
from 1820 to 1832.       in 1858. 
Antigua,       L130,000             L266,364
Dominica,        62,000               84,906
Nevis,           28,000               36,721
Montserrat,      18,000               17,844
St. Kitt’s,      60,000              109,000
--------             --------
Total,   L298,000             L514,835

Excess of sugar exportations under free labor, 2,725,000 lbs. 
Excess of imports with free labor, L216,835