This decrease amounted to a veritable decimation, requiring the frequent importation of recruits to keep the ranks full.

Long estimated this loss at about two per cent.

annually, while Edwards reckoned that in his day there were surviving in Jamaica little more than one-third as many negroes as had been imported in the preceding career of the colony.[15] The staggering mortality rate among the new negroes goes far toward accounting for this; but even the seasoned groups generally failed to keep up their numbers.

The birth rate was notoriously small; but the chief secret of the situation appears to have lain in the poor care of the newborn children.

A surgeon of long experience said that a third of the babies died in their first month, and that few of the imported women bore children; and another veteran resident said that commonly more than a quarter of the babies died within the first nine days, of "jaw-fall," and nearly another fourth before they passed their second year.[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.