BITTERSWEET ISLES^123labor to the point of exhaustion. For a time Indians and blacks were
used indifferendy in field work and the mill, but the African proved
far more productive because more resistant. Trade wisdom had it
that one black equaled four Indians. Many Indians simply collapsed
and died, so many that the Spanish crown issued decrees in 1596
and 1599 prohibiting the use of Indians in the mills. This created
problems at harvest time, and planters petitioned for emergency
exemptions to press indios de socorro into service, but in November
1601 Philip III prohibited the use of Indians in any plantation
activity. From then on, Mexican sugar was a slave industry.
The brutalities perpetrated by these plantations and ingenios can
only be explained by the assumption that blacks were seen as no
better than inanimate pieces of equipment, to be used up and
replaced as needed, or as fuel to be consumed in the fires. Work
during the grinding season ran around the clock. Overseers and
drivers imposed near-continuous toil; adult males worked twenty
hours a day. Food was typically provided by the master, but some
masters felt no obligation to feed their hands. Some gave the slaves a
free day on Sunday to work their plots and gather food for the week;
others simply left their slaves to fend for themselves. In general the
masters had more care for their animals than for their slaves, resting
them as needed—not presumably because of love for animals, but
because these dumb creatures would simply stop where a slave, who
had the mind and imagination to fear worse, would work on.
It goes without saying that such mistreatment aroused resistance,
both passive (suicide, abortions, and infanticide) and active
(sabotage, murder, flight to a life of brigandage). Suicide took a
variety of forms, but one of the more common was eating dirt
instead of food. The whites took most sabotage for accident; they
thought the black too dull to imagine such tricks. This did not deter
masters from making slaves pay for mistakes, or others pay, in flesh
and blood. How else teach these brutes to be careful? In the
meantime, fugitives (cimarrones) were as ferocious and cruel as their
masters had taught them and as reasonable expectations of white
punishment led them to apprehend, to the dismay of the white
population. Not good for industry.
The largest Spanish sugar plantations were self-sufficient domains,
very much like medieval manors. They grew food, kept herds, built
chapels for the cultivation of piety and pursuit of salvation,
sometimes even wove their own clothing for slaves and tenants. The
master and family lived a life of flamboyant luxury, as though to shut