346 CUBAN PLANTATION. 
by the English Colonial tobacco. In the conquest of the 
New World, Spanish energy and enterprise seem to have 
exhausted themselves; and as Spain was declining, its 
colonies could not be expected rapidly to advance. The 
history of the Spanish conquest in America is a record of 
cruelty and of blood, while that of English colonization is 
marked by English rigor and enterprise, and is one of suc- 
cessful daring and ultimate triumph. 
The West India plantations, however, were still worked, and 
for more than a century St. Domingo yielded a vast amount 
of tobacco, until the soil of Cuba was found to be better 
adapted for its production than any other of the West India 
islands, not excepting even the island of Trinidad. 
Hazard, in his work on Cuba, describes the celebrated vegas 
or tobacco plantations, of the island as follows: 
“The best properties known as vegas, or tobacco farms, 
are comprised in a narrow area in the south-west part of the 
island, about twenty-seven leagues broad. Near the western 
extremity of the Island of Cuba, on the southern coast, is 
found one of the finest tobaccos in the world. Within a 
space of seventy-three miles long and eighteen miles wide, 
grows the plant that stands as eminent among tobacco plants 
4 CUBAN vega. 
as the lordly Johannisberger among the wines of the Rhine. 
Shut in on the: north by mountains; and: south-west. by 
