to reach and farm (Figure 4, 13). The image incarnates the comments of sugar planter Johan Carstens on St. Thomas, who claimed food plots were located at the plantation's outermost extremities.  
The enslaved rose to the challenge of growing food on distant, less desirable land by planting African dietary staples such as yams, plantain and taro. These were especially advantageous as they grew quickly and prolifically, required little labour to process for consumption and could be continuously harvested as needed. These crops were complemented with legumes, which restore soil fertility through nitrogen fixation while providing essential dietary protein. The African and Amerindian legumes that they planted for subsistence included Bambara groundnut, peanuts, sesame, blackeye and pigeon peas, lablab and Amerindian Phaseolus beans. Such an extraordinary range of food crops made these subsistence plots resemble, in the words of one eighteenthcentury resident of Santo Domingo, une petite Guinée ('a little Guinea') (Tomich, 1993, pp. 221-242). In these small and fragmented sites of food cultivation, enslaved people realized an agricultural vision alternative to the dehumanizing practices of export commodity production. Here, they organized food production for their own purposes, selecting plants of different tropical heritage that improved their diet and healed their bodies. Imagined as informal experimental stations, these sites of food cultivation became, in effect, the botanical gardens of the Atlantic world's dispossessed.
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figure 4. View from a sugar plantation, French Antilles, 1762.
Source: Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers . . . Recueil de Planches, sur les Sciences . . . (Paris, 1762), vol. 1, plate I. (Copy in Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library).