per cent. When reckoned upon the numbers on hand in 1796 when the
plantation with 470 slaves was operating with very little outside help,
these losses, which must be replaced by new purchases if the scale of
output was to be maintained, amounted to about L900. Thus a total of L4000
sterling is reached as the average current expense in years when no mishaps
occurred.

The crops during the years of the record averaged 311 hogsheads of sugar,
sixteen hundredweight each, and 133 puncheons of rum, 110 gallons each.
This was about the common average on the island, of two-thirds as many
hogsheads as there were slaves of all ages on a plantation.[23] If the
prices had been those current in the middle of the eighteenth century these
crops would have yielded the proprietor great profits. But at L15 per
hogshead and L10 per puncheon, the prices generally current in the island
in the seventeen-nineties, the gross return was but about L6000 sterling,
and the net earnings of the establishment accordingly not above L2000. The
investment in slaves, mules and oxen was about L28,000, and that in land,
buildings and equipment according to the island authorities, would reach a
like sum.[24] The net earnings in good years were thus less than four per
cent. on the investment; but the liability to hurricanes, earthquakes,
fires, epidemics and mutinies would bring the safe expectations
considerably lower. A mere pestilence which carried off about sixty mules
and two hundred oxen on Worthy Park in 1793-1794 wiped out more than a
year's earnings.

[Footnote 23: Long, _Jamaica_, II, 433, 439.]

[Footnote 24: Edwards, _West Indies_, book 5, chap. 3.]

In the twenty years prior to the beginning of the Worthy Park record more
than one-third of all the sugar plantations in Jamaica had gone through
bankruptcy. It was generally agreed that, within the limits of efficient
operation, the larger an estate was, the better its prospect for net
earnings. But though Worthy Park had more than twice the number of slaves
that the average plantation employed, it was barely paying its way.

In the West Indies as a whole there was a remarkable repetition of
developments and experiences in island after island, similar to that
which occurred in the North American plantation regions, but even more
pronounced. The career of Barbados was followed rapidly by the other Lesser
Antilles under the English and French flags; these were all exceeded by the
greater scale of