This meant that slaves would often work 48 hours straight during harvest time, working without sleep in the sweltering sugar press houses, where the cane would be crushed in hand rollers and then boiled. Slaves often caught their hands in the rollers, and their overseers kept a hatchet on hand for amputations. Ugh, I told you this wasn't going to be funny. Given these appalling conditions, it's little wonder that the average life expectancy for a Brazilian slave on a sugar plantation in the late 18th century was 23 years. Things were slightly better in British sugar colonies like Barbados, and in the U.S., living and working conditions were better still. So relatively good that in fact, slave populations began increasing naturally, meaning that more slaves were born than died. This may sound like a good thing, but it is of course its own kind of evil, because it meant that slave owners were calculating that if they kept their slaves healthy enough, they would reproduce, and then the slave owners could steal and sell their children.