BITTERSWEET ISLES^117thing by hand. The idea was to make work and keep the hands busy,
because idleness invited trouble. In the sugar mill, the workers fed the
stalks into rollers; the smallest inattention, catch a hand, a finger, and
the rest would follow. The boilers had their own small hell. Stir care
fully: a splash of syrup, and the pain was excruciating. "If a Boyler get
any part into the scalding sugar, it sticks like Glew, or Birdlime, and 'tis
hard to save either Limb or Life."^9
The sugar planters wanted to hire white men, but white men, that
is, free men, would not do such work—at least not at wages that the
planter could afford to pay. The Spanish would have compelled Indi
ans to the task, but in the Caribbean the Indians were gone. In Mex
ico and Peru, Indians were bound to encomenderos; they were not for
hire on the open market. Insofar as they were forced to labor, they were
wanted above all in the mines. Even so, some Indians were pressed into
service on the sugar plantations of Vera Cruz. They did not do well.
Their masters worked them to death—when they did not die of disease.
The answer to labor needs, in the islands as on the mainland, was to
bring in African slaves, by the tens of thousands. Even Bartolomé de
Las Casas, that paragon of clerical humanism, distinguished between
Indians and Africans in this regard. He wanted to encourage white
immigration while protecting the natives, who were already dying in
large numbers and whom he saw as a special responsibility: he wanted
to save their souls, because they had souls. He was apparently not sure
that blacks did. Each settier, he proposed, should be allowed to bring
in a dozen black slaves, that the Indians might be spared.^10 Needless to
say, such a modest proposal soon proved grossly inadequate. For one
thing, Africans also died of disease and mistreatment.
How many Africans were imported into the New World? Estimates
have grown over the years by way of aggravating the crime, but it is not
unreasonable to speak of some 10 million over the course of three
centuries. And these are just the survivors of a deadly traffic. The track
from point of capture or sale in the interior to port of embarkation was
marked by the bones and shackles of those who died along the way—
up to half, guesses a leading student of the subject.^11 That was just the
beginning. On the coast, the captives were kept under conditions that
would undermine the strongest constitution. Then, because it took
time for slavers to select a full cargo of apparentiy healthy bodies, large
numbers were held on board and died before the ship even set sail. The
so-called middle passage, a transoceanic swim in tight-packed filth,
mucous, vomit, and diarrheic excrement, was a killer. Yet the trader was