Servants and negroes are chiefly employed in the culture of
tobacco, who are brought from other places to be sold to the
highest bidders, the servants for a term of years only, but the
negroes for ever, and may be sold by their masters to other
planters as many times as their masters choose, that is, the
servants until their term is fulfilled, and the negroes for life.
These men, one with another, each make, after they are able to
work, from 2,500 pounds to 3,000 pounds and even 3,500 pounds of
tobacco a year, and some of the masters and their wives who pass
their lives here in wretchedness, do the same. The servants and
negroes after they have worn themselves down the whole day, and
come home to rest, have yet to grind and pound the grain, which
is generally maize, for their masters and all their families as
well as themselves, and all the negroes, to eat. Tobacco is the
only production in which the planters employ themselves, as if
there were nothing else in the world to plant but that, and while
the land is capable of yielding all the productions that can be
raised any where, so far as the climate of the place allows. As
to articles of food, the only bread they have is that made of
Turkish wheat or maize, and that is miserable. They plant this
grain for that purpose everywhere. It yields well, not a hundred,
but five or six hundred for one; but it takes up much space, as
it is planted far apart like vines in France. This grain, when it
is to be used for men or for similar purposes, has to be first
soaked, before it is ground or pounded, because the grains being
large and very hard, can not be broken under the small stones of
their light hand-mills; and then it is left so coarse it must be
sifted. They take the finest for bread, and the other for
different kinds of groats, which, when it is cooked is called
sapaen or homina. The meal intended for bread is kneaded moist
without leaven or yeast, salt or grease, and generally comes out
of the oven so that it will hardly hold together, and so blue and
moist that it is as heavy as dough; yet the best of it when cut
and roasted, tastes almost like warm white bread, at least it
then seemed to us so. This corn is also the only provender for
all their animals, be it horses, oxen, cows, hogs, or fowls,
which generally run in the woods to get their food, but are fed
a little of this, mornings and evenings during the winter when
there is little to be had in the woods; though they are not fed
too much, for the wretchedness, if not cruelty, of such living,
affects both man and beast. This is said not without reason, for
a master having a sick servant, and there are many so, and
observing from his declining condition, he would finally die, and
that there was no probability of his enjoying any more service
from him, made him, sick and languishing as he was, dig his own
grave, in which he was to be laid a few days afterwards, in order
not to busy any of the others with it, they having their hands
full in attending to the tobacco.--Jasper Danckaerts' _Original
Narratives of Early American History_, 1679-1680, p. 133.