310 THE STORY OF A BIRD LOVER 



alive the people of the adjacent valleys ; whole settlements 

 sunk into the bowels of the earth, plantations were removed 

 en masse. 



" The sentence of desolation was thus, however, but partially 

 fulfilled ; a noxious miasma, generated by the shoals of putre- 

 fying bodies that floated about in the harbor of Port Royal, or 

 lay in heaps in the suburbs, slew thousands of the survivors." 



Again, with the development of the sugar- 

 cane industry, the island blossomed into fabulous 

 prosperity. At the time of the abolition of the 

 slave-trade, 1807, the proprietors were gleaning a 

 harvest and amassing annual wealth that, if put 

 in figures, would hardly seem credible. A single 

 bi-product of the cane, rum, was alone worth 

 many times the entire value of the present annual 

 sugar crop. 



With the emancipation of the slaves, and their 

 purchase by the English Government, in 1833, 

 began the decline of the second period in the 

 fortunes of the island. About the same time one 

 of the principal enemies of the sugar estates, the 

 brown rat, was brought by ships from foreign 

 ports. The depredations of this rat finally became 

 so marked that on most estates it was conceded 

 that a loss of about thirty per cent of the entire 

 crop accrued from this source alone. Various 

 remedies were sought to overcome the devasta- 

 tions so wrought, and sundry panaceas were tried 

 to remedy the evil. 



