, one of
whom however was but eight years old, three waiting boys, a cook, two
washerwomen, two gardeners and a grass carrier, and included nominally
Quadroon Lizette who after having been hired out for several years to Peter
Douglass, the owner of a jobbing gang, was this year manumitted.

The overseer's house had its proportionate staff of nine domestics with two
seamstresses added, and it was also headquarters both for the nursing corps
and a group engaged in minor industrial pursuits. The former, with a "black
doctor" named Will Morris at its head, included a midwife, two nurses for
the hospital, four (one of them blind) for the new negroes, two for the
children in the day nursery, and one for the suckling babies of the women
in the gangs. The latter comprised three cooks to the gangs, one of whom
had lost a hand; a groom, three hog tenders, of whom one was ruptured,
another "distempered" and the third a ten-year-old boy, and ten aged idlers
including Quashy Prapra and Abba's Moll to mend pads, Yellow's Cuba and
Peg's Nancy to tend the poultry house, and the rest to gather grass and hog
feed.

Next were listed the watchmen, thirty-one in number, to guard against
depredations of men, cattle and rats and against conflagrations which might
sweep the ripening cane-fields and the buildings. All of these were black
but the mulatto foreman, and only six were described as able-bodied. The
disabilities noted were a bad sore leg, a broken back, lameness, partial
blindness, distemper, weakness, and cocobees which was a malady of the
blood.

A considerable number of the slaves already mentioned were in such
condition that little work might be expected of them. Those completely laid
off were nine superannuated ranging from seventy to eighty-five years old,
three invalids, and three women relieved of work as by law required for
having reared six children each.

Among the tradesmen, virtually all the blacks were stated to be fit for
field work, but the five mulattoes and the one quadroon, though mostly
youthful and healthy, were described as not fit for the field. There were
eleven carpenters, eight coopers, four sawyers, three masons and twelve
cattlemen, each squad with a foreman; and there were two ratcatchers whose
work was highly important, for the rats swarmed in incredible numbers and
spoiled the cane if left to work their will. A Jamaican author wrote, for
example, that in five or six months on one plantation "not less