ANNUAL EXPENDITURE. 53 good as the Florida, for they are moist, whereas the latter are dry; but it is a profitable business, sugar-planting. At present there are not too many engaged in it, and our Government gives every encouragement to us in the shape of protecting duties. I may say, that on an average the seven hundred and forty sugar-estates in Louisiana yield a profit of from six to ten per cent. on the investment." "But are not these estates cultivated at considerable expense ?" I enquired. Yes, and here is a memorandum for you, which will show you the usual cost annually. Each slave, including wages for Sundays' work, physicians' bills, keep of horses and mules, 105 dollars. The items are, on an estate of eighty negroes, salt meat and spirits, 830 dollars; clothing, 1200; medical attendance and medicines, 400; Indian corn, 1000; overseer's and sugarmaker's salary, 1000; taxes, 300; annual loss on a capital of 50,000 in negroes, at two and a half per cent. 1250; horses and oxen 1500; repairs of boilers, 550; ditto of ploughs, carts, &c. 300; total, 8330." You talk of ploughs—are they extensively used in the state?" "Beginning to be so; and we find great advantage from them, for they turn up old lands much deeper than the miserable hoe. We use one-horse ploughs for ground that has been already broken, and a two-horse plough for new 54 "NUTS" FOR THE ABOLITIONISTS. land. We take two crops of canes off the land; it then lies fallow for two years, or corn is raised on it, for we are careful not to exhaust our soil, rich though it be." "Fewer hands are of course required where the plough is used ?" 66 Undoubtedly; and though some of the old planters are prejudiced, particularly the French and Spaniards, and will not adopt anything new, either in their agriculture or manufacture of sugar, yet we Yankees try experiments, and adopt new systems, if we find them profitable. The plough and steam-engine are far better than the hoes and cattle-mill, and in the course of a few years we might do without slaves at all." "I sincerely hope so." I may here mention a discovery in Africa, which will doubtless be very gratifying to the Anti-Slavery Society, as another mode may now be adopted to supersede the necessity for negro labour altogether. An American sea-captain, in a letter to the Editor of the "African Repository,” stated, that whilst he was at Liberia, (the American philanthropic settlement near Cape Coast,) he was informed by the Kroomen, that the ourang outang had been repeatedly seen on the banks of the Junk river, crabbing with a crab stick and rude basket of his own construction. "If this bé a fact," sagely adds the captain, "I think the Colonists might profit by it, by employing these animals in their corn and rice fields; for I see no THE LAST PARROQUET. 55 reason why they should not be made to work as well as a horse or an ox." This savours a little of the sea serpent, but is most important, if true. Three of our passengers were Guatimalians, two white and one brown young man; they were proceeding up the Mississippi and Ohio, and then across the Allighanies to Philadelphia, from thence to embark for Europe. They had brought with them a zoological garden of birds and beasts, splendid blue and scarlet macaws, green and yellow parrots, tiny parroquets, and a monkey or two. One of the female passengers was a strapping dark-haired French creole, whom we christened the Grenadier; she rocked in her armchair, and played with the parrots the livelong day. "Mon cher, do give me this," said she to one of the central Americans, holding up a curious little old-fashioned parroquet, that nibbled her finger with its crooked bill; "I want it so much for my petite." "Ave Maria purissima!" answered the Guatimalian, "I would give it to you, Señora, most willingly, but it is the only one of the kind I have left." However, the parroquet was destined to change owners; the handsome brunette regularly laid siege to the youth, won his heart, and moulded him to her will, and when we stopped opposite to her plantation, I observed that she went ashore with the parroquet on her thumb. Oh! crafty woman, what slaves do you not make of us! verily, we are as Persian Teduko, or led horses before you, and you turn us round and round your little fingers. 56 DECK-PASSENGERS. Our deck-passengers were principally backwoodsmen, who had dropped down the river in summer in their square and flat-bottomed arks, laden with various commodities; and having disposed of their cargo, and their uncouth vessel being broken up for fire-wood, they were returning to their homes. They were a wild and fierce-looking set; their hair was long and uncombed, and a coarse striped shirt and trowsers composed their attire. I used to go forward among them to hear their conversation, and remark how they spent their time; but they spoke little to one another, and when they did, it was in a mumbling under-tone; and the most of them were continually drinking whisky, playing at cards on the head of a flour-barrel, or sleeping on the shady side of the deck. Several had been desperately wounded with knives, and one, who had his arm tied up, held it out to me and said, " Come, mister, you can doctor this, I reckon." It was an uglylooking sore, from a stab with a rusty knife perhaps. As an hospitaller, I ought to have some little knowledge of medicine, so I directed him, in the first instance, to leave off whisky. "Oh! h-1,” said he, "if my arm should drop off, I must have my corn, I tell ye." "They say 'tis pleasant on the lip, And merry on the brain ; ENCROACHMENTS OF THE SEA. 57 In all parts of the world, it is interesting to note the encroachments of the sea on the coasts, or to mark its recessions. In Number 25 of the "Journal of the Royal Institution," old series, page 230, it is stated that an old house in Cape May, at the entrance of the Delaware, marks a loss of one hundred and fifty-four feet from 1804 to 1820. This is prodigious, and the intelligent Secretary to the Royal Geographical Society requested me to inquire if this was progressive; I did so, but could obtain no very satisfactory answer. However, it appears that the coast of Jersey, about Cape May, is shifting sand, and is influenced by storms, which at one time heap up mounds of sand, and at another, sweep them away. The changes on the coast of Jersey have very little to do with the Mississippi, on which we are now navigating; yet the above is a curious subject of inquiry, but much more so is the following. In an old Spanish account of an expedition which proceeded from the Havannah in the sixteenth century, to search for the waters of youth, (for these were the days of the Eldorado, the Philosopher's Stone, the Panacea or Elixir Vitæ,) it appears to have landed in Florida, travelled to the north-west, and sailed down the Mississippi, the mouth of which the narrator describes to be forty-five miles in breadth, and terminated by two bluffs, the water between them very shallow. Now Baton Rouge and Opoulou |