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.