406 



MEXICO, CENTRAL AMERICA, WEST INDIES. 



island, where the plantations began gradually to spread. The chief point now 

 was the introduction of a better class of negroes in the agricultural districts. In 

 most of the other Antilles the gangs of slaves had to be continually recruited by 

 fresh purchases, owing to the lack of women. But such was not the case in Haiti, 

 where the buccaneers, more eager for booty than agricultural work, had from the 

 first introduced the négresses captured in other islands or on board the slave vessels. 

 At the census of 1687 the coloured population, about half of the whole, comprised 

 more women than men, while the community increased normally by the excess of 

 births over deaths. Although more males were afterwards imported than women, 

 still the disproportion between the sexes was never so great as in the other West 



Fig. 193. — Chief Slave-Teade Routes. 

 Scale 1 : 150,000,000. 



3,.100 Miles. 



Indian islands ; and the flourishing state of the indigo and sugar trades during the 

 eighteenth century enabled the planters to procure the very best " raw material " 

 in the slave market. But probably to this very circumstance was due the defeat 

 and massacre of the white proprietors. The blacks imported as slaves gradually 

 merged in a vigorous race ripe for independence. The Haitian negroes are still 

 noted for their size, strength, and muscular development. 



At the dawn of the revolution those of the French colony numbered half a 

 million, owned by Tather more than 30,000 whites, while the intermediate class of 

 mulattos, nearly all freedmen, scarcely exceeded 27,000. In the Spanish part of 

 the island the whole population was much less, and the two elements far more evenly 

 balanced. Here the plantations numbered only about 5,500, not half as many as in 

 the French part, which supplied Europe with more than half of its annual con- 

 sumption of cotton and sugar. 



