 Thistlewood had Strap flogged for his carelessness, and made Dick the slave driver once more instead.With mortality rates high and birth rates low among Jamaican slaves, white plantations depended on the continued importation of slaves from Africa; one-third of all slaves brought to the New World on British ships went to Jamaica.The death rate was so high that 500,000 slaves had to be imported to increase the island's slave population by just 250,000.