Others, from an unpardonable greediness, purchased, in the names of their acquaintances or families, several lots of land, each containing the number of acres limited in the grants; by which means, persons who would have been more fit settlers, were deprived of them; and large quantities of land thus purchased, are now in the same state (in woods) as they were, when first sold at the Commissioners sales nearly thirty years ago. Another material cause, to which the reduction of sugar plantations in this island may be attributed, is, that several of the first English settlers, from a want of knowledge in the choice of lands, proper for the immediate cultivation of the sugar-cane, had chosen such places in the interior parts of the country, as were on the tops of high mountains, or surrounded by vast woods; which affording too much shelter from the sun, and being subject to too frequent great rains, chilled the canes, rendering their juice unfit for making sugar. Not but that, was the whole of the cultivable lands there to be cleared of their woods, there are few situations, even in the most interior parts, but would be proper for the growth of that article. By this imprudent conduct of such of the new settlers, after they had spent considerable sums of money, which they had borrowed on the credit of their plantations so situated, and having lost a number of negroes and cattle by the dampness of the climate in those places, together with the difficult and laborious roads to them, they were at length driven to the necessity of abandoning their possessions to the mortgagees in Europe. These latter, it is presumed, having taken an unfavourable opinion of the mortgaged premises, from having been sufferers already in the loss of considerable sums they had lent on them; and not knowing, or not considering the value of such property at a future period, are unwilling to advance more; at least the majority of the mortgagees seem to be disposed to let their lands remain in the same neglected, abandoned situation they have been in these several years past, to the great hindrance of the prosperity of that valuable island, as well as their own detriment. It is computed, that on an average, one year with another, there are not more than three thousand hogsheads of sugar made annually in Dominica. This is certainly a very small quantity of that article for such an extensive island, or even for the number of plantations in it, at present under cultivation: for, supposing these fifty estates contained only two thousand acres of land in canes, which is a very small calculation, as several single estates have upwards of one hundred acres, and few less than sixty: this is at the rate only of a hogshead and a half per acre.