48 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
have not found a single one who has not cursed both 
Saint Domingo, and the obstacles, eternally reviving, 
which, from one year to another, prolong his stay in 
this abode of the damned.” 
Having followed De Wimpffen to this point, the 
reader is entitled to hear his parting epigrams. “The 
more I know,” he said, of the inhabitants of Saint Do- 
mingo, “the more I felicitate myself on quitting it. I 
came hither with the noble ambition of occupying myself 
solely in acquiring a fortune; but destined to become a 
master, and consequently to possess slaves, I saw, in 
the necessity of living with them, that of studying them 
with attention to know them, and I depart with much 
less esteem for the one, and pity for the other. When a 
person is what the greater part of the planters are, he 
is made to have slaves; when he is what the greater part 
of the slaves are, he is made to have a master.” 
Whether Jean Audubon’s long experience would 
have confirmed all that has just been said is doubtful, 
for he was primarily a merchant or dealer and thus be- 
longed to the favored class. But what especially inter- 
ests us now is that both he and De Wimpffen were 
owners of plantations in the southern province of Santo 
Domingo at the same time. The one who wished to 
retain a valuable property followed the custom of the 
time by confiding the management of his affairs to an 
agent, either at a fixed salary or on a profit-sharing 
basis; while the other, who stayed long enough to dis- 
cern the trend of events, was glad to sell his land and 
his slaves and shake the dust of the island from his feet 
forever.® 
Before resuming the intimate details of our narra- 
° Baron de Wimpffen sailed from Port-au-Prince for Norfolk, Virginia, 
in July, 1790, about a year after Jean Audubon had left the island. 
