You will find it said that the majority of people were good to their slaves, that it was their interest to be good to them. True, but unfortunately we have only to look round us to see how often nowadays a horse, or indeed any helpless creature dependent upon some careless man's good-will, is ill-used, even though ultimately that ill-usage means a loss to the owner. And so it was in Jamaica: a man did the best he could for his slaves, his favourites were pampered, but when it came to a pinch the slaves suffered. There was a terrible famine in Jamaica in the latter half of the eighteenth century; England had decreed that there should be no trade with her revolted colonies, supplies were therefore more restricted than they need have been, and it is recorded that the slaves died by thousands. Again and again we are told how, even in normal times, the slave spent his midday rest hour either in the bush picking berries and wild fruits with which to supplement his scanty fare, or else in searching the rubbish heap at the planters' door for gnawed bones which were ground small and boiled down to get what sustenance there was in them. No one troubled about a slave; some men would get a reputation for ill-treating their slaves, but no one thought of interfering. Besides, as I have remarked before, the pens and estates were so isolated. Anything might have happened to a slave on one of those estates, and it would have been long before rumour carried the tale to the next estate. And there was another side of the picture, the side at which the planter looked, especially when he thought of bringing a wife to his lonely Great House set high on a hill-top or a jutting rock. He was surrounded by some hundreds of these alien people, dumbly resentful of their condition--he didn't put it like that--ill-conditioned ruffians he probably called them, and he never knew when the worst might not influence the rest. And they were armed with machetes and knives and hoes and spades, for purposes of agriculture certainly, but agricultural implements make excellent weapons of offence in the hands of a fierce Timini or Krobo warrior. “He travels the fastest who travels alone,” as Kipling sings, and many a man thanked God he had no wife or children. He took to himself one of the dark women, and in later times there were the mulattoes and quadroons to be had for the choosing. We can easily see why the presence of a white woman was resented upon an estate. If the owner chose to live with some brown or yellow girl he naturally objected to his underlings choosing a mode of life which would be a reproach to him, and if he brought out a wife all those who had no wives felt that Madam exercised an undue espionage over their mode of life.