played cricket. Whites were outnumbered nine to one in Jamaica, and the imbalance affected everything on the island. During Thistlewood's first year in Jamaica, he lived in an almost exclusively black world, having no contact with other whites for weeks on end. Such disparity was even greater in rural western Jamaica, where Thistlewood eventually settled, with the proportion of slaves to whites being as high as 15 to one. Planters such as Thistlewood thus lived in a superficially black society maintained by white control using fear, inequality, and brutality. With almost no societal restraints, slave owners ruled their slaves with a degree of violence that left outside observers aghast. Historian Trevor Burnard calls Thistlewood "a brutal sociopath", but suggests that Thistlewood's treatment of his slaves was not unusual. Unlike other colonies where slavery was widespread (such as the Virginia Colony, where slave owners often developed a paternalistic (yet still cruel) attitude toward their slaves) most Jamaican slave owners were convinced that only the severe application of brute force could keep the more numerous African slaves under control. In 1753, Thistlewood wrote about the trial of several slaves for the theft of goods from the Salt River estate, who belonged to his employer, Dorrill. "Oliver's Quaw hanged; Fortune's Quaw both ears cropped, both nostrils slit, and marked on both cheeks' Cheddar's right ear cropped, right nostril slit, & marked on the left cheek." When a Salt River slave named Robin ran away with two boys from Egypt, Dorrill had Robin tried and executed, after which Thistlewood received Robin's head and "put it upon a pole and stuck it up just at the angle of the road in the home pasture." In 1771, another slave, Frazier's Beck, was tried for hosting a large number of slaves at a "supper", and punished by having "her ear slit, 39 lashes under the gallows, and 39 again against the Long Stores." Several other slaves received similar punishments as a result of the trial. Brutal punishment of slaves and Derby's dose Thistlewood routinely punished his slaves with fierce floggings and other cruel and gruesome punishments. In 1756, Hazat was recaptured after running away, and Thistlewood "put him in the bilboes both feet; gagged him; locked his hands together; rubbed him with molasses & exposed him naked to the flies all day, and to the mosquitoes all night, without fire." Thistlewood often had a slave beaten, after