Subject to an enervating climate, which Europeans with their intemperate habits could seldom endure for long, the planter, though weak and sick himself, was often obliged to be overseer, driver, apothecary, and nurse to his negroes, the slave of his slaves. In spite of every care, out of one hundred imported negroes the mortality was nearly twenty per cent in the first year. Where less oversight was given to their food, the slightest scratch was likely to degenerate into a dangerous wound, while the most dreaded disease, then known in English as the "yaws" and in French as _la grosse vérole_ (to distinguish it from the smallpox, _la petite vérole_), was a scourge for which no remedy had then been found. Every slave was branded with a hot iron on the breast, with both the name of his master and that of the parish to which he belonged, but notwithstanding such precautions desertions were far from uncommon. The Santo Domingan blacks were put to work in the morning with a crack of the _arceau_, a short-handled whip, delivered on their backs or shoulders, and so accustomed had they become to the regularity of this stimulus that they could hardly be set in motion without it. How to manage the true _bossal_, as distinguished from the African creole, with humanity and success was a problem to which many considerate planters must have addressed themselves in vain, if, as this one declared, the black's ruling passion was to do nothing, and he was by nature a thief, to whom indulgence was weakness and injustice a defect of judgment that excited both his hatred and his contempt. Stanilaus further observed that the soil of Santo Domingo was then already becoming exhausted, and he believed that the day of rapid fortunes for the planter had passed. "Calculate now," said he, "the privations of every kind, the commercial vicissitudes, the perpetual apprehensions, the disgusting details, inseparable from the nature of slavery; the state of languor or anxiety in which he vegetates between a burning sky, and a soil always ready to swallow him up, and you will allow with me that there is no peasant, no day-labourer in Europe, whose condition is not preferable to that of a planter of San Domingo." "I never met," he adds, "a West Indian in France who did not enumerate to me with more emphasis than accuracy, the charms of a residence at Saint Domingo; since I have been here, I have not found a single one who has not cursed both Saint Domingo, and the obstacles, eternally reviving, which, from one year to another, prolong his stay in this abode of the damned."