244 THE OCEAN RIVER 



Admiral Penn and General Venables, came ashore in 1655, 

 some 8,000 people took to the hills. The British, never able to 

 subdue the Maroons completely, finally made peace treaties 

 with them, giving them freedom and property on a reserva- 

 tion. Even today in Jamaica you have this subdivision of modi- 

 fied authority called the Kingdom of the Maroons. 



With the English, the buccaneers moved in and used Ja- 

 maica as a port of repair for raiding the Spanish treasure fleets. 

 At the same time sugar plantations were established and the 

 slave trade necessarily flowed in to fill the labor vacuum. From 

 a statistical standpoint the answer by 1780 was self-evident. 

 Jamaica supported 30,000 whites (and 'white" was open to 

 local definition), 10,000 free colored, 1,400 free Maroons in 

 the hills, and 250,000 slaves, in a total population of less than 

 300,000. That tells the story of the kind and quantity of popu- 

 lation increase in the West Indies at the time of our Revolu- 

 tion, with some natural but not greatly different variation in 

 the smaller islands. 



The above figures of the tremendous population increase 

 and the plantation growth in Jamaica, as in other Caribbean 

 islands, spelled one thing — sugar. The Dutch traders, able, 

 ubiquitous, and transitory in the New World, first brought the 

 art of commercially successful sugar making to the Barbadoes 

 from Brazil in 1640. Long before this, of course, Columbus 

 had introduced sugar cane from the Canaries, but the Span- 

 iards had made little real progress as planters. In the seven- 

 teenth century the French and English, stimulated by the 

 Dutch merchants, made over the derelict Spanish island em- 

 pire with sugar and molasses. The Barbadoes, Jamaica, Haiti, 

 Antigua, and other islands prospered immensely. The French 

 West Indies in particular specialized in the manufacture of 

 refined sugar because their home government placed no restric- 

 tions on the trade, and Haiti had some of the best soil in the 

 Caribbean. The Dutch meanwhile, though driven out of Bra- 



