248 THE OCEAN RIVER 



the old-time white minorities became too acute and the colo- 

 nies themselves instituted repressive legislation. 



In Jamaica in 1733 all persons were considered white who 

 were three degrees removed from exclusive Negro ancestry, 

 and such people possessed full free privileges. The degrees of 

 ancestry from Negro to white were called mulatto, quadroon, 

 and mustee. The Spanish inserted more complicated varia- 

 tions of degree, and also distinguished between Negro and 

 Indian mixture of blood strain. Similar distinctions were rec- 

 ognized also in Virginia; until 1691 Negro-white marriages 

 were legal in that colony, and until 1723 free Negroes and 

 mulattos had the vote. But the story of growing economic 

 pressure repeats itself in Virginia as elsewhere. In the fifty 

 years between 1670 and 1730 the slave population increased 

 from 2,000 to 26,000; and this also forced a growing class of 

 dispossessed poor whites, and the laws protecting the free 

 Negro or the Negro of mixed blood were revoked. 



The temptation to dwell in the Caribbean with the first 

 great turn of the Ocean River is great. But the Stream carries 

 us on into the Florida Straits, leaving behind in the eighteenth 

 and nineteenth centuries a free Negro republic in Haiti, a 

 Negro British colony in Jamaica, a Spanish-dominated island 

 of Cuba of mixed bloods and inheritance, and the outer islands 

 divided among the British, French, and Dutch. One main thing 

 stands out. Spain missed her bid for empire in the islands, and 

 as a whole the European migration to the west in the seven- 

 teenth and eighteenth centuries failed to take root in the 

 Caribbean, where the original slaves by number and in adap- 

 tability outlasted the white conquerors. Africa, not Europe, 

 won most of the islands; though without political sovereignty 

 except partly in Jamaica and totally in Haiti. And the gentle, 

 nonbelligerent, sensuous Arawaks, never understanding the 

 zeal and lust of the European for property, simply disappeared 

 from the face of the earth. 



