After describing the immense sources of wealth to be found in Jamaica, an intelligent eye-witness says: "Such are some of the natural resources of this dilapidated and poverty-stricken country. Capable as it is of producing almost every thing, and actually producing nothing which might not become a staple with a proper application of capital and skill, its inhabitants are miserably poor, and daily sinking deeper into the utter helplessness of abject want.
"'Magnas inter opes inops.'
"Shipping has deserted her ports; her magnificent plantations of sugar and coffee are running to weeds; her private dwellings are falling to decay; the comforts and luxuries which belong to industrial prosperity have been cut off, one by one, from her inhabitants; and the day, I think, is at hand when there will be none left to represent the wealth, intelligence, and hospitality for which the Jamaica planter was once distinguished."[176]
"It is impossible," says Mr. Carey, "to read Mr. Bigelow's volume, without arriving at the conclusion that the freedom granted to the negro has had little effect except that of enabling him to live at the expense of the planter so long as any thing remained. Sixteen years of freedom did not appear to its author to have 'advanced the dignity of labor or of the laboring classes one particle,' while it had ruined the proprietors of the land, and thus great damage had been done to the one class without benefit of any kind to the other.
From a statistical table, published in August, 1853, it appears, says one of our northern journals, that, since 1846, "the number of sugar estates on the island that have been totally abandoned amounts to one hundred and sixty-eight, and the number partially abandoned to sixty-three; the value of which two hundred and thirty-one estates was assessed, in 1841, at £1,655,140, or nearly eight millions and a half of dollars. Within the same period two hundred and twenty-three coffee-plantations have been totally, and twenty partially, abandoned, the assessed value of which was, in 1841, £500,000, or two millions and a half of dollars; and of cattle-pens, (grazing farms,) one hundred and twenty-two have been totally, and ten partially, abandoned, the value of which was a million and a half of dollars. The aggregate value of these six hundred and six estates, which have been thus ruined and abandoned in the island of Jamaica, within the last seven or eight years, amounted by the regular assessments, ten years since, to the sum of nearly two and a half millions of pounds sterling, or twelve and a half millions of dollars."[177]
In relation to Jamaica, another witness says: "The marks of decay abound. Neglected fields, crumbling houses, fragmentary fences, noiseless machinery—these are common sights, and soon become familiar to observation. I sometimes rode for miles in succession over fertile ground, which used to be cultivated, and which is now lying waste. So rapidly has cultivation retrograded, and the wild luxuriance of nature replaced the conveniences of art, that parties still inhabiting these desolated districts have sometimes, in the strong language of a speaker at Kingston, 'to seek about the bush to find the entrance into their houses.'
"The towns present a spectacle no less gloomy. A great part of Kingston was destroyed, some years ago, by an extensive conflagration: yet multitudes of the houses which escaped that visitation are standing empty, though the population is little, if at all, diminished. The explanation is obvious. Persons who have nothing, and can no longer keep up their domestic establishments, take refuge in the abodes of others, where some means of subsistence are still left; and in the absence of any discernible trade or occupation, the lives of crowded thousands appear to be preserved from day to day by a species of miracle. The most busy thoroughfares of former times have now almost the quietude of a Sabbath.
"'The finest land in the world,' says Mr. Bigelow, 'may be had at any price, and almost for the asking.' Labor 'receives no compensation, and the product of labor does not seem to know how to find the way to market.'"[178]
From the report made in 1849, and signed by various missionaries, the moral and religious state of the island appears no less gloomy than its scenes of poverty and distress. The following extract from that report we copy from Mr. Carey's "Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign:"—