The earth and its inhabitants The earth and its inhabitants .. earthitsinhabita291recl Year: 1891 406 MEXICO, CENTRAL AMERICA, WEST INDIES. island, where the plantations began gradually to spread. The chief point now was the introduction of a better class of negroes in the agricultural districts. In most of the other Antilles the gangs of slaves had to be continually recruited by fresh purchases, owing to the lack of women. But such was not the case in Haiti, where the buccaneers, more eager for booty than agricultural work, had from the first introduced the négresses captured in other island
The earth and its inhabitants The earth and its inhabitants .. earthitsinhabita291recl Year: 1891 406 MEXICO, CENTRAL AMERICA, WEST INDIES. island, where the plantations began gradually to spread. The chief point now was the introduction of a better class of negroes in the agricultural districts. In most of the other Antilles the gangs of slaves had to be continually recruited by fresh purchases, owing to the lack of women. But such was not the case in Haiti, where the buccaneers, more eager for booty than agricultural work, had from the first introduced the négresses captured in other islands or on board the slave vessels. At the census of 1687 the coloured population, about half of the whole, comprised more women than men, while the community increased normally by the excess of births over deaths. Although more males were afterwards imported than women, still the disproportion between the sexes was never so great as in the other West Fig. 193.—Chief Slave-Teade Routes. Scale 1 : 150,000,000. 3,.100 Miles. Indian islands ; and the flourishing state of the indigo and sugar trades during the eighteenth century enabled the planters to procure the very best ' raw material ' in the slave market. But probably to this very circumstance was due the defeat and massacre of the white proprietors. The blacks imported as slaves gradually merged in a vigorous race ripe for independence. The Haitian negroes are still noted for their size, strength, and muscular development. At the dawn of the revolution those of the French colony numbered half a million, owned by Tather more than 30,000 whites, while the intermediate class of mulattos, nearly all freedmen, scarcely exceeded 27,000. In the Spanish part of the island the whole population was much less, and the two elements far more evenly balanced. Here the plantations numbered only about 5,500, not half as many as in the French part, which supplied Europe with more than half of its annual con- sumption of cotton and sugar.
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