following, there was a great multiplication and extension
of plantations devoted almost wholly to this
profitable crop, and a vast increase in the number of
slaves by whom the labour in the fields and in the
mills was almost wholly performed under white
overseers and slave-drivers.
The political history of the last century was barren,
save for the occasional visits of hostile privateers or
pirates, and the great alarm caused in 1782 when the
French and Spanish fleets were preparing for an attack
upon the island. The people were saved from
that serious peril by the great victory of Rodney over
De Grasse off Dominica, and their gratitude was long
embodied in a statue of Rodney in Spanish Town,
which was transferred to Kingston when that became
the capital, and now stands in the Victoria marketplace.
When, near the end of the last century, the
adtation for the abolition of the slave o trade began, it
had no more vigorous opponents than the planters
of Jamaica, the life blood of whose prosperity had
been slave labour. When slavery itself was abolished,
they deemed themselves and their fair island
forever ruined. It did have a disastrous effect upon
the sugar planters. They had been absolutely dependent
upon the negroes for labour, and these had
been so treated that most of them refused to work
on the plantations as hired men. They sought
small holdings of land for themselves, and many of
them “ squatted ” in the ample spaces that were
unoccupied, away from the cultivated tracts. No
political rights had been granted to them; they received
no more social recognition or religious or
educational care than before, and nothing was done
to conciliate them. On the other hand, there had
been no white-labour force built up in the island,
while Cuba continued her competition with slave
labour.
To some extent coolies were brought from India
and China under contract, but this did not counteract
the depression under which the sugar estates
sank into decay. The owners left them in
the hands of agents, and most of the whites who
could get away emigrated, while the blacks took to
multiplying as never before. The absentee planters
became embarrassed, and their estates were heavily
encumbered by the liens of merchants who made
advances to keep them going; and the Encumbered
Estates A c t of 1854 being applied to them, many
were sold out and divided up. The large sugar
plantations which numbered eight hundred and fifty-
nine in 1805, were only three hundred in 1865. The
freed negroes were more and more becoming small
land-owners, and were even beginning to raise
sugar cane on a small scale, uniting to support one
cheap mill to thirty of their little farms. In later
years they increased the scale of these operations
and obtained improved machinery.
Trouble between the whites and negroes did not
cease with emancipation. The very year before the
passage of the Abolition A c t in England there was
a serious rising of slaves, due to a belief on their
part that they had already been freed by law but
were kept in bondage by the masters and would not
escape without an effort of their own. The revolt