Stone Age people may use a different tool kit, but they come with the same brain kit as agricultural and industrial peoples, and somebody, seeing unexpected sugar canes growing near a shelter, might have been tempted to pull them out of the ground. Seeing the cut section of cane that the shoots were springing from, an ingenious mind might then have made the world’s first experiment by planting some cane lengths deliberately.
The fine detail of how it came about matters little. What counts is that, around 400 generations in the past, New Guineans were the first to discover a crop that was destined to change much of the world. Without the combination of blades of volcanic stone, rich soil and ferocious rain, the discovery might have taken longer—but it is enough that somebody found that small pieces of cane poked into the ground would sprout and grow more sugar cane—and it would be easy enough to learn this in the wet season, in a land of rich and sticky volcanic soil.
New Guinea is identified as the place where sugar cane was first cultivated because one of the original species found in later hybrid canes is still growing there. The other components of the hybrid cane appear to have come from India, and botanists assume that the New Guinea cane was carried and traded all the way to India, where the first hybrid canes came into being. The rest of the argument is complex botany, but suffice it to say that for half a century, botanists have regarded sugar cultivation as a New Guinean invention.
So why did the cane travel so far in early times? Even when they lack a common language, humans develop ways of communicating, of synthesising what linguists call creole languages and lingua francas, capable of transmitting complex ideas—and traders will happily transmit the idea that this sort of stick is nice to chew on, and so worth trading. Even in New Guinea, where people in neighbouring valleys often speak entirely different tongues, marrying-out occurs—this is a polite way of saying that women are ‘traded’, married off into other clans and tribes—and so methods and ideas travel from village to village.
A few men travelled more widely as traders of feathers, stone blades or other essentials of life. As they went, they would also help to spread new ideas about the sweet stick that grew when bits were poked into the ground. And that, of course, might have been the trigger to make other New Guineans start poking sticks in the ground, to see if they grew in the same way. Soon everywhere that sugar cane was found, people would have known the trick of putting bits in the ground. More importantly, sugar was being found in new places, as some of the extra bits were traded further afield, along with the key knowledge. And down in the lowlands, longer trading trips along the coast were possible using a creole language that has since blossomed as Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia, from Malaysia to the western half of New Guinea.
The word ‘creole’ appears many times in the story of sugar. A creole language has a mixed but brief set of words which must often carry multiple meanings, and a recognisable syntax. These tongues arise whenever different racial groups come together. The Pidgin English of New Guinea uses words from many languages, but clearly has an Austronesian syntax, like Bahasa Indonesia. Creole languages also developed in Hawaii and many other sugar-growing regions. The wealthy planters of the Caribbean were called Creoles; the sugar cane that came to the Caribbean from the Mediterranean, the variety widely used across the world until the late 1700s, was called ‘Creole’; and so were some of the mixed-race groups which arose in sugar-growing areas.
Somewhere, sometime later, perhaps in India, perhaps somewhere else, somebody found that if you boiled cane juice in a metal pan, added some ash or other alkali, scooped off the skin on the surface and boiled the juice some more, sweet crystals formed. The art of making sugar had been discovered, and a new industry was invented.
THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SLAVE LINE
Just a teenager, I stood on a slight rise, watching the labour lines trudging across undulating ground. They were planting teak roots in a cleared patch of jungle on the coastal plain of Papua, setting the trees out in close rows. The procedure was simple and labour-intensive: lines of five men walked between stakes placed eight feet apart at each end of the ground they were filling that day. The stakes marked the rows where the trees were to go.
Each leader measured eight feet from the previous point, using his precisely cut pole, made a scratch and moved on to measure the next pole-length. Walking behind, the second man swung a pick to make a small hole and the next man, carrying a sack of teak roots cut early that morning, dropped a root beside the hole for the fourth man to poke into the ground. At the tail of the line, the last man jumped and landed, one bare foot to each side of the root, to firm the loose soil around the root.
It was a hot day at the start of the wet season, the perfect time to plant trees. The sun was almost overhead, and the clouds for the daily downpour were starting to mass up. The temperature was hovering around the century mark on the Fahrenheit scale, and the humidity was close to 100 per cent, but the labourers kept up a steady pace, back and forth, filling the cleared ground with future trees. As they went they chatted and laughed, but they never slowed their pace, except when they returned to the road. Then they stopped briefly to drink water or to cut a small piece of sugar cane from the lengths on the back of the truck, before the root-carriers took a new load of roots, and they set off again.
These were convict labourers, planting an export crop for a nation that did not yet exist, a crop that would one day provide the emerging nation of Papua New Guinea with foreign exchange. In Pidgin English, the creole language of the area, these were kalabus slaves. They had all committed violent crimes in the highlands and had been sent to serve their sentences on the coast in a gaol, which had somehow acquired the name ‘calaboose’, though with a local spelling—and a far cry from the original Spanish calabozo, which is a dungeon. Creole languages have few rules, and words mean whatever you like, so these were kalabus slaves.
The forestry officer standing with me explained that just one old man supervised the kalabus slaves, but they accepted that they were in the kalabus for a reason, they knew they would have good food and shelter that night, and the work was less boring than sitting in Boumana gaol. They knew they were a long way from home, and they had little idea of how to get there, so they were content to work out their sentences.
Soon the daily rains would come, just after midday, and the men would all scramble onto the back of the truck and return to their nominal prison. When the rain stopped they would tend the sugar cane, bananas and other plants in the small prison garden. While they called themselves kalabus slaves, it was an example of how an adopted word had mutated when it was taken into Pidgin, he said.
‘But they really are slaves, aren’t they?’ I asked. ‘I mean, they’re made to work, and they get no pay . . .’
‘Not really,’ said the man. ‘They get a bit of money, more than they’d get in gaol, but that’s beside the point. By the time these trees are thinned, this’ll be an independent nation, so when the thinnings are made into veneer, they and their kids will reap the profits, not us. Besides, you’ll see convicts planting trees in Australia as well—it’s the normal thing.’
Then he gave me a piece of advice that older men have been giving younger men for as long as humans have used forced labour. ‘Watch how you go,’ he said. ‘You’re very new here, and you’re full of noble thoughts, but this is what we do and how we do it, so don’t go saying too much, because some people won’t like it. Now the rain’s coming, so let’s go.’
I turned my back on one of the last slave lines in the world, and walked back to the truck, with the sweat pouring off me. As I walked, I chewed on a piece of thick sweet sugar cane, a traditional New Guinea garden delicacy that one of the convicts had cut for me with the heavy, razor-sharp machetes they used. At the back of my mouth, the sweet juices commenced an attack that 40 years later would demolish a left molar tooth and leave me in a dentist’s chair, musing about Shakespeare.
IN THE DENTIST’S CHAIR
&n
bsp; Twenty years later, half the teak trees were thinned to make second-rate veneer, giving the other trees more room to grow. Another 20 years, and the mature logs were coming out of the plantation. At the same time, after half a lifetime’s neglect, sugar cane and bad care had finally done for my molar tooth, so in early 2001 it was coming out as well. Abscesses, root canal therapy, bad dentistry and capping had left just a remnant that must be removed, slowly and in very small pieces, so an implant could be inserted in its place.
I am, let me admit it, a total coward around needles and dentists. Many years ago, I found that lying back and doing a complex calculation, like the cube root of seventeen, took my mind off sharp things being introduced to my mouth. There was a problem on this day, however, because after an hour or so, having got my answer to three decimal places, I found I was losing track of the numbers, and while the dentist had lost count of the tooth pieces he was by no means finished. So I cast around for something else to occupy my mind.
I am also, let me admit it, a total slob around research, falling back on the methodology of New Electronic Brutalism whenever possible, using electronic assistants to find what I want. A few weeks earlier, I had been looking into the ways in which we use the word ‘pie’. I knew Shakespeare called a magpie a Maggot Pie, and while I was relieved to find that Maggot was an old form of Margaret (so Mag Pie was just the sister to Jack Daw), my curiosity had been aroused about pies in general.
I had turned to one of my brutal tools, a monster text file of all of Shakespeare’s plays, to search out how the Bard used ‘pie’ at different times. That led me to The Winter’s Tale, and the plans the Clown lays to make a warden pie, for which he lists his needs:
Let me see: what am I to buy for our sheep-shearing feast? Three pound of sugar, five pound of currants, rice—what will this sister of mine do with rice? But my father hath made her mistress of the feast, and she lays it on.
As I lay back in the chair, having my mouth beaten into submission, trying to plan a light essay on the pies of various sorts, the Clown’s sugar came back to me. Sugar was the main source of my present dental predicament, but there was something odd about the Clown’s list. As I understood it, sugar came to England from the West Indies, and Britain colonised the islands after Shakespeare was dead. So how could there have been any sugar around in Shakespeare’s time? Didn’t they use honey?
That set me wondering, and that was how this book came to be, because once I was out of the chair I went data-digging, and found that Shakespeare uses the word ‘sugar’ seventeen times in the plays and sonnets to mean sweetness, so his audiences must have understood the term. Still, sugar did not dominate, and ‘honey’ appears 52 times in his works in a similar role.
In time I learned that by 1600, sugar from the Mediterranean, from Africa and from islands in the Atlantic was being traded all over Europe. Sugar had travelled a long way from a clearing in New Guinea, through Indonesia, into India, Persia, Egypt and Palestine. On its travels, people had learned how to work with it, even though they had no idea of where it originated, but sugar was by no means yet the maker and breaker of fortunes and empires that it would become.
By Shakespeare’s time, people had learned that making sweet tastes is a marvellous way to gather the money that gives power. Ever since, the story of sweetness has been the story of money and power, and the special kinds of corruption that follow from money and power in large amounts. Here follows the story of sugar, what it made, and what was made of it.
ANTI-GONORRHOEAL MIXTURE
Take of copaibe 1/2 oz., spirits of nitric ether 1/2 oz., powdered acacia 1 drm., powered white sugar 1 drm., compound spts. of lavender 2 drms., tinc. of opium 1 drm., distilled water 4 oz.; mix. Dose, a tablespoonful three times a-day. Shake before using.
Daniel Young, Young’s Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets, Toronto, 1861
1
THE
BEGINNINGS
Sugar cane is a member of the grass family. In botanical language it is Saccharum officinarum, a name given to it by Linnaeus himself—Carl von Linné, the inventor of our modern classification system. This, and five related Saccharum species, are placed in the Andropogoneae tribe, along with sorghum and maize. Like other grasses, sugar cane has jointed stems and sheathing leaf bases, with the leaves, shoots and roots all coming from the stem joints.
The world’s scriptures have few references to sugar. Sugar rates no mention in the Quran (which, as we will see later, is significant), and while both Isaiah 43:24 and Jeremiah 6:20 refer to ‘sweet cane’, which some people think might mean sugar cane, there are a number of other candidates. If we assume that sugar was intended where the Bible’s translators wrote of ‘sweet cane’, then the line in Jeremiah, ‘To what purpose cometh there to me incense from Sheba, and the sweet cane from a far country?’, tells us that sugar cane did not grow around Palestine in Old Testament times. The problem here, as ever, is that we are in the hands of translators who interpreted the Old Testament in terms of their own understandings and assumptions about the past.
The only world religious leader who makes any specific reference to sugar is Gautama Buddha. His words were written down some time after his death, so there may have been some interpolations, but he was probably familiar with at least some form of sugar cane. Buddha was, after all, born about 568 BC, at a time when the sugar cane was probably known and grown in India.
The set of instructions known collectively as the Buddhist rule of life, the Pratimoksha, defines pakittiya or self-indulgence as seeking delicacies such as ghee, butter, oil, honey, fish, flesh, milk curds or gur (a form of sugar) when one is not sick. As this particular rule was laid down by Buddha himself, it suggests he was at least aware of sugar. As well, when Buddha was asked to allow women to enter an order of nuns, he likened women in religion to the disease manjitthika (literally, ‘madder-colour’, after the red dye called madder) which destroys ripe cane fields, and which is caused by Colletotrichum falcatum. This fungal disease of cane still exists, going by the common name red rot.
There are other Indian references to sugar from this period, but the exact sort of sugar meant is never clear. Still, it seems there were cane crops large enough to suffer disease in Buddha’s time, around 550 BC, and a Persian military expedition in 510 BC certainly saw sugar cane growing in India. The army of Alexander the Great reached India around 325 BC, and Nearchus, one of Alexander’s generals, wrote later of how ‘a reed in India brings forth honey without the help of bees, from which an intoxicating drink is made though the plant bears no fruit’. We now take this to mean that he saw sugar cane and sugar juice, but not sugar itself. This comment has often been used to argue that sugar cane was taken to Egypt by Alexander at about this time, but there is no evidence for that.
The spread of sugar before it reached the Europeans.
Around 320 BC, a government official in India recorded five distinct kinds of sugar, including three significant names: guda, khanda (which is the origin of today’s ‘candy’) and sarkara. If the date is correct, this would appear to be evidence that sugar was being converted into solids in some way before 300 BC, so perhaps Nearchus did see sugar after all. Remember the guda and sarkara, because we will meet them again.
By about 200 BC sugar cane was well known in China, although it is possible that it was only chewed as cane. There is a record from AD 286 of the Kingdom of Funan (probably Cambodia) sending sugar cane as a tribute to China. Some 500 years earlier, in the late part of the Chou dynasty, it was recorded that sugar cane was widespread in Indochina. It is also possible that sugar cane was being grown at Beijing around 100 BC, though it is hard to tell how successful this would have been, 40 degrees north of the equator. We do know that sugar cane was already on the move, and could have reached Africa at about this time, and perhaps Oman and Arabia. The important move of sugar (as opposed to sugar cane) onto the world stage seems not to have come until around AD 600, when the cultivation of sugar cane and the art of sugar
making was definitely known in Persia, at least to the Nestorian Christians who lived there.
Sugar cane was an important crop in India long before this, and nobody seems to know quite why it took so long to reach Persia (modern Iran). Perhaps it has to do with the irrigation that the cane needs in dry areas. In AD 262, Shapur I, a Sassanid king, made a dam at Tuster on the Karun (Little Tigris) River in Persia to irrigate surrounding areas by gravity feed relying on the height of the waters behind the dam. The water was eventually used to irrigate cane, and the ruins of the irrigation works are still there.
The centralised system of authority that was the Persian empire would have allowed the development of large-scale irrigation schemes. Major irrigation schemes anywhere, like the terraced rice fields of Java and Bali, the fields along the Nile and Australia’s irrigation areas, all rely on a central authority to provide organisation and an imposed peace.
A community of Nestorian Christians was certainly making good sugar in Persia around AD 600. If the art of sugar making had now been perfected, this could explain why sugar suddenly took off. The crop and its product had only spread slowly up until then, so clearly something happened: either there was a change in the method of growing cane or in the methods of extracting sugar, or maybe there was a change in the nature of the cane. Then again, as many writers have suggested in the past, perhaps sugar just followed the spread of Islam, once Islamic forces had defeated the Sassanid dynasty of Persia.
Bittersweet Page 2
