[16] At least one public-spirited planter
advocated in 1801 the heroic measure of closing the slave trade in order
to raise the price of labor and coerce the planters into saving it both by
improving their apparatus and by diminishing the death rate.[17] But his
fellows would have none of his policy.
[Footnote 15: Long, III, 432; Edwards, book 4, chap. 2.]
[Footnote 16: _Abridgement of the evidence taken before a committee of the
whole House: The Slave Trade_, no. 2 (London, 1790), pp. 48, 80.]
[Footnote 17: Clement Caines, _Letters on the Cultivation of the Otaheite
Cane_ (London, 1801), pp. 274-281.]
While in the other plantation staples the crop was planted and reaped in
a single year, sugar cane had a cycle extending through several years. A
typical field in southside Jamaica would be "holed" or laid off in furrows
between March and June, planted in the height of the rainy season between
July and September, cultivated for fifteen months, and harvested in the
first half of the second year after its planting. Then when the rains
returned new shoots, "rattoons," would sprout from the old roots to yield
a second though diminished harvest in the following spring, and so on for
several years more until the rattoon or "stubble" yield became too small to
be worth while.
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