1204 CUBA AND POHTO El( K I 



traders. The mixture of these peculiar elements of the 

 seventeenth-century population Spanish, mulattos, ne- 

 groes, apprenticed Scotch, Irish, and English peasantry, 

 Minorcau Jews has gone far toward producing the pecu- 

 liarities and language of the lower classes of the presenl 

 Jamaican people. 



Shortly after the establishment of English control, 

 Jamaica became a busy center of bucaneering and the 

 slave-trade. The old town of Port Royal, through its 

 superior advantages as a maritime and naval station, 

 became a great stronghold. It was here that the famous 

 corsair Morgan prepared his expeditions, and in 1762 Lord 

 Abercrombie organized the land and naval forces that 

 reduced Havana; and here the slave-traders brought their 

 newly captured negroes from Africa, to be distributed 

 throughout the West Indies and tropical mainland. 



Jamaica, according to Bryan Edwards, attained the 

 meridian of its prosperity in 1780, at which time it was 

 occupied by large plantations worked by African slaves, 

 and operated by resident English owners who lived in 

 princely state. The island was then the most productive 

 of England's West Indian colonies. The same author 

 estimates that 2,130,000 blacks were imported by the 

 Bristol and Liverpool slave-traders between the years 

 1680 and 1786, and that 610,000 of these were landed at 

 Port Royal. 



In 1807 the importation of slaves was abolished by 

 Great Britain, and in 1833 the remaining 309,000 slaves 

 were emancipated, the owners being liberally remunerated. 

 Owing to the English system of slavery, as distinguished 

 from that of the Spanish colonies, concerning which we 

 have spoken in our descriptions of Cuba and Porto Rico, 

 the freeing of the blacks resulted in the almost total ruin 

 of the Jamaican plantations, and the island has never re- 

 gained its agricultural and commercial prestige since that 

 event. The free negro preferred to earn his living by in- 

 dependent efforts, and showed a dislike for plantation 

 labor. The better class of landlords pocketed the profits 



