AGRICULTURE IN 1829. 29 
departure with the whole crop of a plantation 5 bags of 
coffee or cacao, or a bale of cotton. Those were happy 
times. In the whole colony security could not be found 
for a Mortgage of £30,000. There was no credit and 
consequently no debt, and the Patriarchal Burgomaster of 
Cartabo smoked his smuggled varinas, drank his con- 
signed Scheidam, eat his fish, flesh and fowl, and wore 
his gorgeous suit of Salempores and Osnaburgs, without 
a thought of going home, or a care for the dun of a Mort- 
gagee. 3 
Had you told the old fixture of Cartabo, that one day 
there would be 70,000 negroes in the colony and a million 
of money vested for every hundred then—that two muta- 
tions were to remove his grandchildren from these beauti- 
ful hills and clear streams of the upper rivers to the muddy 
and flat seashores—that his dandy little 6 Gun Battery 
on Kyk-Over-All would be allowed to moulder into ruin— 
and that the transparent anchorage, where barnacle and 
shipworm dare not exist was to be changed for that 
stinking Paradise the mud-flats of Demerary—he would 
have smothered you with a wrathful expiration of his 
mundungus and “Soth for dommed you for a Liggen 
blexcum.” But, needs must where the devil of wealth 
drives. 
Notwithstanding the epicurean indolence of the Old 
Planter, he made money, and being of simple habits and 
unacquainted with luxuries, he knew not how to spend 
it. In an evil day, he began to think that by a little 
more exertion, he might remove the scene of his enjoy- 
ments to Europe, and then came ambition, speculation, 
negroes from Africa, desertion of the delicious hill and 
vale of the interior and occupation of the muddy shores 
