PLANTER AND MERCHANT 47 



(to distinguish it from the smallpox, la petite verole), 

 was a scourge for which no remedy had then been found. 

 Every slave was branded with a hot iron on the breast, 

 with both the name of his master and that of the parish 

 to which he belonged, but notwithstanding such pre- 

 cautions desertions were far from uncommon. 



The Santo Domingan blacks were put to work in 

 the morning with a crack of the arceau, a short-handled 

 whip, delivered on their backs or shoulders, and so ac- 

 customed had they become to the regularity of this 

 stimulus that they could hardly be set in motion with- 

 out it. How to manage the true bossal, as distinguished 

 from the African creole, with humanity and success was 

 a problem to which many considerate planters must 

 have addressed themselves in vain, if, as this one de- 

 clared, the black's ruling passion was to do nothing, and 

 he was by nature a thief, to whom indulgence was weak- 

 ness and injustice a defect of judgment that excited 

 both his hatred and his contempt. 



Stanilaus further observed that the soil of Santo 

 Domingo was then already becoming exhausted, and he 

 believed that the day of rapid fortunes for the planter 

 had passed. "Calculate now," said he, "the privations 

 of every kind, the commercial vicissitudes, the perpetual 

 apprehensions, the disgusting details, inseparable from 

 the nature of slavery; the state of languor or anxiety 

 in which he vegetates between a burning sky, and a soil 

 always ready to swallow him up, and you will allow 

 with me that there is no peasant, no day-labourer in 

 Europe, whose condition is not preferable to that of a 

 planter of San Domingo." "I never met," he adds, 

 "a West Indian in France who did not enumerate to 

 me with more emphasis than accuracy, the charms of a 

 residence at Saint Domingo; since I have been here, I 



