Page:Abstract of the evidence for the abolition of the slave-trade 1791.djvu/158

( 124 ) years 1782 and 1783, he never heard any complaint of the want of negroes to carry on the plantation or other business. And yet he does not recollect: the sale of a single cargo of slaves during that time.

2.Field slaves cultivating cotton, pimento, and coffee, are described by Mr. Cook as being treated better, and as increasing faster by birth than those employed on sugar estates.

3.Domestics are universally said to be treated better on the whole than field slaves, and these are generally said to increase. There are many more children, says Jeffreys, among domestics than field slaves. Captain Hall says, that in his time the domestics were understood to increase by birth, and Lieutenant Davison, that they did actually increase. Mr. Forster gives an instance of rapid increase among the domestics. A widow Shervington was left in debt with five or six negroes, who by kind treatment in fifteen or twenty years increased to fifteen or more. He knows several instances of the kind.

4.The Maroon negroes, originally Africans, who live in small communities in Jamaica, as free people, and who of course are not subject to ill usage like the slaves, are said to increase also. M. Cook believes the Maroon negroes to be increasing very fast. Lieutenant Davison asserts, that in his time they increased most certainly. He has often been in all their towns, and always saw great numbers of children. Their numbers were considerably more when he left, than when he came to the island. It was impossible for them to have received any addition of number from other quarters.

5.African negroes also, when transported to the East Indies, have, by good usage, increased there. Mr. Botham says, that in the year 1764, the East India Company sent slave ships to Africa and Madagascar, and transported to Bencoolen, for their public and other works, nearly a thousand slaves, and in much the same proportion of men, women, and children, as they are carried from Africa to the