More closely supervised by the planter elite, Kingston was too placid for the pirates. They moved to new havens in the Bahamas, conveniently close to the Florida Channel, which funneled Caribbean shipping into the Gulf Stream. Their departure diminished the common white population on Jamaica and completed the triumph of the planter elite. During the late 1670s and through the 1680s, the great planters consolidated most of the arable land into the largest sugar plantations in the English West Indies.
