BITTERSWEET ISLES^115
tially uninhabited—theirs for taking and making. Upwind and well to
the east of the other Antilles, it was rarely visited by either Caribs or
Spanish. Jamaica, far bigger than any of these, came later (1655). It had
been turned over by the Spanish crown to eight noble families, who
were unwilling to share it and unable to develop it; so that when the
English took the island, whites and blacks together counted no more
than 3,000.^3 In fact, Jamaica was a hellhole of sandflies, gnats, cock
roaches, and malarial mosquitoes; but then, bugs were everywhere in
the Caribbean, either too big to be believed or too small to be seen.
Even the smallest were maddeningly audible and excruciatingly ven
omous. Gendefolk put the legs of their tables and beds in bowls of
water to keep the crawlers grounded.^4
The English initially saw these Caribbean islands as settier colonies,
like the east coast of North America. Homesteaders came in number,
attracted by cheap and fertile land, and grew tobacco, indigo, cotton.
(The tobacco, singularly poor, made the lowest prices on the London
market.) Indentured servants came with them, ready to work a few
years for someone else until they could farm on their own. By 1640,
littie more than a decade after first occupation, the population of Bar
bados was said to be over 30,000, equal to that of Massachusetts and
Virginia combined, 200 to the square mile.^5
After them, however, came the sugar planters, inspired by Dutch ex
ample and even financed in part by Hollanders; and sugar swallowed
all the rest. No commercial crop paid more. And no commercial crop
cost more: heavy capital expenditure for crushing mills, boilers, tanks,
and stills (for rum), and a large estate to match. The biggest items of
expenditure were livestock, which might multiply, and slave labor,
which typically did not. The slave population of the Caribbean could
be maintained only by continuing imports.
The success of the sugar plantations was the ruin of the small and
middling tobacco and cotton farms. The resulting concentration of
landholding made indenture less attractive: what was the point of la
boring for years if one could not count on a homestead at expiration
of contract? Besides, sugar work was uniquely demanding and dis
agreeable, and too often the planters treated their servants like curs,
beating them until the blood ran. Many jumped their indenture and
ran away, to try their luck on other islands or join the buccaneers.
Many "died of hunger and hardship in this pitiful dispersal."^6
The French followed close behind the English. They concentrated
at first on Guadeloupe and Martinique (1635), which had not attracted
the English because they were full of those nasty Caribs, who sprang