In 1643, as compared with some five thousand negroes of all sorts, there were about eighteen thousand white men capable of bearing arms; and in the little island's area of 166 square miles there were nearly ten thousand separate landholdings.

Then came the introduction of sugar culture, which brought the beginning of the end of the island's transformation.

A fairly typical plantation in the transition period was described by a contemporary.

Of its five hundred acres about two hundred were planted in sugar-cane, twenty in tobacco, five in cotton, five in ginger and seventy in provision crops; several acres were devoted to pineapples, bananas, oranges and the like; eighty acres were in pasturage, and one hundred and twenty in woodland.

There were a sugar mill, a boiling house, a curing house, a distillery, the master's residence, laborers' cabins, and barns and stables.