Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Slave Who Has A Hut And A Family
Is Less Miserable Than He Who Is Purchased As If He Formed Part Of A
Flock.
The greater the number of slaves established with their
families in dwellings which they believe to be their own property, the
more rapidly will their numbers increase.
The annual increase of the last ten years in the United States
(without counting the manumission of 100,000), was twenty-six on a
thousand, which produces a doubling in twenty-seven years. Now, if the
slaves at Jamaica and Cuba had multiplied in the same proportion,
those two islands (the former since 1795, and the latter since 1800)
would possess almost their present population, without 400,000 blacks
having been dragged from the coast of Africa, to Port-Royal and the
Havannah.
The mortality of the negroes is very different in the island of Cuba,
as in all the West Indies, according to the nature of their treatment,
the humanity of masters and overseers, and the number of negresses who
can attend to the sick. There are plantations in which fifteen to
eighteen per cent perish annually. I have heard it coolly discussed
whether it were better for the proprietor not to subject the slaves to
excessive labour and consequently to replace them less frequently, or
to draw all the advantage possible from them in a few years, and
replace them oftener by the acquisition of bozal negroes. Such are the
reasonings of cupidity when man employs man as a beast of burden!
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