,
in order the more speedily to collect the price of the ashes!_

If the treasury were by chance to become wiser and more generous
in Denmark than they have been, or than they are in any other
part of the globe, the islands of St. Thomas, of St. John, and of
Santa Cruz, might possibly prosper, and their productions might,
in some measure, compensate for the trifling value of those of
the mother-country.--ABBE RAYNAL, _A Philosophical and Political
History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East
and West Indies_, 1798, pp. 256-265.

III

SANTA CRUZ IN GENERAL IN 1838

St. Croix is an island, about eighteen miles long, situated in
latitude 17 deg. 45' north, longitude--west of Greenwich. It is
almost exclusively devoted to the cultivation of sugar-cane, and
the manufacture of sugar molasses, and rum. In a good season it
produces from fifty to sixty thousand hogsheads of muscovado
sugar of the best quality. It is generally calculated that the
molasses and rum will pay all the contingent expenses of the
estates; leaving the sugar for clear income, which at
seventy-five dollars the hogshead, for which it is generally sold
there, in a good season, amounts to three millions seven hundred
and fifty thousand dollars. This great revenue is produced by the
careful cultivation of almost every inch of the soil, the estates
generally consisting of but one hundred and fifty to three
hundred acres each; and nearly one hundred negroes being employed
upon each one hundred and fifty acres. The soil is dry and sweet,
producing the best cane, and consequently the best sugar known. I
had heard much of filthiness in the manufacture of sugar and
molasses, but the first view of a St. Croix sugar works
contradicted it. The kettles, the vats in which the sugar is
cooled, the hogsheads in which it is drained, and even the
molasses vats under them, are so perfectly neat and clean, that
no one who has seen them can feel any squeamishness in eating St.
Croix sugar, or molasses either. To look at a vat-full, a foot
deep, just chrystalizing over the surface, and perfectly
transparent to the bottom, would satisfy the most scrupulous upon
this point. There is about twenty-five thousand black, and three
thousand white population. Of course, it is seldom