A summer on the borders of the Caribbean sea.Harris, J. Dennis
History
A summer on the borders of the Caribbean sea.
Harris, J. Dennis
Caribbean Area -- Description and travel
A party of us went out to see Mr. Smith, a fugitive slave, whose energy
and well-directed enterprise had attracted some attention heretofore. He
is not so fine looking a man as I expected to see. He is under five and
a half feet in height, limps a little, and is altogether but little in
advance, to use a most contemptible Americanism, of his “kind of people”
in the States. He speaks no Spanish, and for that matter very little
English; but he has a will of his own, and a determination to do
something, which gives him an advantage over half a dozen persons who go
to school to lose their common sense.
Mr. Smith was a slave in South Carolina; was brought by sea to Key West,
and there hired out to work for a Republican government. He and some
other of his fellow-slaves, including his wife, took sail-boat, set
sail, and after suffering almost incredibly from sea-sickness and want
of food, finally reached New Providence, which he had previously learned
to be an English colony. He proceeded to declare his intention to become
a British subject, and went to work; but wages being low, he concluded
to remove to Dominicana and go to farming. He purchased a piece of land
near the town of Porto Plata, and with the assistance of his
“help-mate,” (which in this country means a wife,) soon cleared the land
of its tropical undergrowth, and planted it in corn and potatoes. In
breaking up the ground he used a plow, a startling innovation here, but
which produced most salutary results. A neighbor of his has since bought
one. So great was the yield of Mr. Smith and his wife’s crop that in
little more than a year’s time they have a house and forty acres of land
all paid for, and a new crop worth over five hundred dollars, which will
soon be ready for market.
This may not seem very remarkable to any one who has never seen a
sand-hill, nor yet been to Canada; but to me it is a miracle. My object
in mentioning this fact, however, is, to state that Mr. Smith also
planted a few seeds of Sea-Island cotton, the product of which has been
sent to New York and pronounced worth 14c. per pound. Now, there are
numbers of colored men recently from the Southern States skilled in, and
some who have made small fortunes by, the cultivation of cotton, at
perhaps not more than eight or nine cents per pound, when, too, it had
to be replanted every year. It produces here without replanting almost
indefinitely, but it is safe to say seven years.
The query is this: give half a dozen such men as Smith a cotton-gin
($350), send them out here, and would they not accomplish more for the
elevation of the colored race by the successful cultivation of cotton,
in eighteen months, than all the mere talkers in as many years?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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