A second negro plot startled New York in 1741, showing itself, as before, in sudden incendiary fires. It was thought that the slaves had been incited to destroy the town; and there was an uneasy suspicion that these disturbing occurrences were in some way connected with the slave insurrections in the south. Uprisings of the slaves had recently occurred in the West Indies. South Carolina had suffered such an outbreak a little more than two years before. In 1738 armed insurgent negroes had begun there, in a quiet parish, the execution of a terrible plot of murder and burning which it had taken very prompt and summary action to check and defeat. Such risings were specially ominous where the slaves so outnumbered the whites; and it was known in South Carolina whence the uneasiness of the negroes came. At the south of the province lay the Spanish colonies in Florida. Negroes who could manage to run away from their masters and cross the southern border were made very welcome there; they were set free, and encouraged in every hostile purpose that promised to rob the English settlements of their ease and peace. Bands of Yamassees wandered there, too, eager to avenge themselves as they could for the woful defeat and expulsion they had suffered at the hands of the Carolinians, and ready to make common cause with the negroes. When bands of negroes, hundreds strong, began their sudden work of burning, plunder, and murder where the quiet Stono runs to the sea no one doubted whence the impulse came. And though a single rising was easily enough put down, who could be certain that that was the end of the ominous business? No wonder governors at Charleston interested themselves to increase the number of white settlers and make their power of self-defence sure.