For nearly a hundred years the western half of Santo Domingo had been held by France, and to every outward appearance it had enjoyed such unbounded and steadily increasing prosperity that it was regarded with envy on every side; in fine, it seemed to be one of the richest and most desirable colonies in the whole world. Historians, said an observer of a later day,[30] were "never weary of enumerating the amount of its products, the great trade, the warehouses full of sugar, cotton, coffee, indigo and cocoa; its plains covered with splendid estates, its hillsides dotted with noble houses; a white population, rich, refined, enjoying life as only a luxurious colonial society can enjoy it." Few could then see the foul blot beneath so fair a surface, or realize that what had been bought by the misery and blood of a prostrate race would demand an equivalent, and that a settlement might be forced. Negroes had been imported into Santo Domingo from the African coasts in incredible numbers, first by Spain after she had succeeded in exterminating the inoffensive native Caribs, and later by France. One hundred thousand blacks of all ages were entering the colonies each year, and to secure this number of _bossals_, as the native Africans were called, involved the death of nearly as many more, either through the fighting that preceded their capture on land, or from the terrors of pestilence or shipwreck that awaited them at sea. By 1790 the blacks of Santo Domingo outnumbered the whites sixteen to one, and the number of blacks then in the island was estimated at 480,000, in contrast to 30,800 whites, and about 24,000 free mulattoes or "people of color." Under French rule the blacks had been subjected, as many believed, to a system of slavery unsurpassed for cruelty and barbarity. No doubt there were Frenchmen who, in their fierce struggle to become rich, worked their slaves beyond human endurance and did not hesitate to terrorize them with the severest punishment upon the first symptoms of revolt; but, on the whole, such sweeping denunciations were probably unjust. An impartial observer and historian of that day, himself an Englishman,[31] declared that the French treated their slaves quite as well as the English did theirs, and clothed them better. He believed that the lot of the Santo Domingo blacks at the period of which we speak would compare favorably with that of the peasantry of Europe, a comment made familiar to American ears when applied to the slave population of the South. The real trouble came from the more enlightened disaffection of the mulattoes and free negroes, fanned by the fanatic zeal of abolitionists abroad, particularly of those who formed the society of _Les Amis des Noirs_ in France, who were determined to carry out their policies by any means and at whatever cost.