re: #79 Jay C

Not to mention the other disease factor: Africans had developed a considerable amount of genetic resistance to a lot of tropical-region diseases that were deadly to Europeans (mortality rates for White colonizers were often as high as the Natives’), and obtaining a labor force that didn’t all die off in a few years was a great incentive….

and again, blacks being total strangers to the region, they were less likely to run off into the wilderness, although some still risked it