For they died prematurely--we know they died. Even the ruling class died like flies often before they had reached their prime, and each and all set down the abnormal death rate to the pestilential climate. Really Jamaica has a beautiful climate, but they did not understand in those days the danger of the mosquito, and they thought the night air was deadly. All classes drank, the masters “Madera” and rum, and the servants rum that was doubtless not of the best. It is easy to sneer, but human nature needs some relaxation, and living on beef that was like brine, sleeping all night in a room from which the night air was carefully excluded, the gorgeous divine night of Jamaica, and overworked in the burning sun, we can hardly blame these bondsmen for drinking. They watered the cane pieces with their sweat and blood, and they died--died--died! They were not even pioneers. They were simply bond-servants on whom no one wasted pity. It seems to me that pity, that true pity which is not half-sister to contempt, but has eyes for suffering humanity, and the will to better things was hardly born among the majority till after the Great War. Now at last is the worker coming into his own, and if he wax fat and kick like the gentleman in Holy Writ, I think we must forgive him, for long has he served. CHAPTER III--Jamaica's first historian It is fascinating to read up the old books that have been written about Jamaica. Wearisome sometimes naturally, because for one illuminating remark you must wade through a mass of turgid stuff. I confess even to having skipped occasionally Hans Sloane, and I read Hans Sloane--in the original edition with the long “s's”--sitting on the verandah of my house looking over the Caribbean Sea, and when I had finished I felt I had known him, so charming is he. I was sorry I could not write and thank him for his book. It is a very strange thing how personality creeps out in writing. No one surely ever talked less of himself than Hans Sloane, but we somehow get a picture of a kindly, interesting man, patient and tactful, whom it must have been a privilege to know, and he manages to give us a very clear picture of life in Jamaica little more than thirty years after the first landing of the English. He was Physician to the Duke of Albemarle and lived in Jamaica for a year, 1687-88, and he looked at the country he had come to with seeing eyes, and described thoughtfully what he saw.