1852  (1923)  Some twenty or thirty little fires were burning briskly in different parts of the blackened field, and the old fellow was watching the slow progress of his silent "niggers," and replacing them from time to time as they smouldered away.
1899  It was a Zorra man who wrote . . . to . . . Scotland, declaring that he had a hundred "niggers" working for him. He meant the fire used on the tree. . . .
1963  To save the work of chopping the trees into lengths small fires, in some districts called niggers, were placed on top of the trunks at intervals . . . and kept burning until they had burned their way through.