The Dominicans made a vain attempt to limit this branding
to the few genuine Caribs who were reduced to slavery; but the custom
was universal of marking Indians to compel them to pass for Caribs,
after which they were sold and transferred with avidity, the
authorities having no power to enforce the legal discrimination. The
very existence of this custom offered a premium to cruelty, by
furnishing the colonists with a technical permission to enslave.
But the supply could not keep up with the insatiable demand. The great
expeditions which were organized to sweep the Terra Firma and the
adjacent islands of their population found the warlike Caribs
difficult to procure.[4] The supply of laborers was failing just at
the period when the colonists began to see that the gold of Hayti was
scattered broadcast through her fertile soil, which became transmuted
into crops at the touch of the spade and hoe. Plantations of cacao,
ginger, cotton, indigo, and tobacco were established; and in 1506 the
sugar-cane, which was not indigenous, as some have affirmed, was
introduced from the Canaries. Vellosa, a physician in the town of San
Domingo, was the first to cultivate it on a large scale, and to
express the juice by means of the cylinder-mill, which he invented.
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