Bittersweet

by Peter Macinnis

  However, things change. By 1581 Abraham Ortelius, a Flemish cartographer, would comment that ‘what used to be kept by apothecaries for sick people only is now commonly devoured out of gluttony’. Even so, the French kept the expression ‘like an apothecary without sugar’ to indicate a state of utter desperation or helplessness. We still use sugar in medicines today, but in the Mary Poppins mode of improving the taste rather than as a cure. The sugar market has changed vastly from what it was around 1100, when the Crusaders first came across sugar as they travelled to a holy war of looting and pillaging.

  THE FOUR CURSES OF SUGAR

  Notwithstanding Mr Conrad’s concerns about the dreariness of sugar-refining treatises, we need at least a basic understanding of the process that reduces sugar cane to a commodity which can be sold. We also need some insight into the fact that sugar is a special crop with special problems. These problems are the four curses of sugar.

  From the sett, the short length of cane planted in the ground, to refined sugar is a costly process. The ground must be cleared, the setts have to be planted, and the field kept free of weeds until the cane is high enough not to be shaded out. After the first cane is cut, some fifteen months later, the root stock will produce several more ratoon crops at yearly intervals, but after several years the ratoons need to be replaced.

  The cut cane is hauled to a crushing mill, where the juice is squeezed out. In early forms of refining, the sticky sap would be collected in containers before being boiled down, while a worker skimmed the scum off the top, until crystals formed: sugar crystals which were lifted off with a wooden spatula, leaving a rich brown molasses behind. This sugar was brown and sticky, not unlike the Indian gur, and far from the white, free-running crystals we know today.

  This simple technology was known in Islamic society from the Umayyad period, which ended in AD 750. When the Crusaders arrived in Palestine they were happy to cash in, expanding production for export to Europe. The remnants of the sugar mills of Tawahin Al Sukkar may still be seen in Jericho, along with the remains of the aqueduct which brought the water from Ain Duyuk to power the mill.

  Workers squashed the cane in a water-driven mill, and then pressed the flattened cane to extract the juice, which was boiled down in copper vessels, presumably with the addition of some ash. The product was placed in wicker baskets or earthenware containers to dry and harden. With the Crusaders in charge of the operation, people from all over Europe now had access to the technology, and to the cane.

  Growing sugar as a commercial crop was rather different from growing a small garden or household supply. In its simplest form, the crushed-out juice is a mixture of water, sugar and a number of impurities, mainly suspended materials, fats, waxes and proteins, some of which need to be destroyed as soon as possible by boiling. The nuisance proteins are enzymes in the cane which convert the sucrose, or cane sugar, to ‘invert sugar’, a mix of glucose and fructose, once it is cut. Sucrose is a disaccharide, a molecule made of these two simple sugars or monosaccharides. Both glucose and fructose also taste sweet, but they lack some of the properties that sucrose offers when foods are being made.

  In some parts of the world, high-fructose corn syrup may be used in foods, but bakers, confectionery and cereal manufacturers overwhelmingly prefer sucrose because of its bulking, texture and browning characteristics, so it is a disaster if the sucrose inverts in the cane before it is processed. As a rule, the juice needs to be boiled within 16 to 24 hours of cutting, in order to destroy the enzymes and so save the sucrose. Adding an alkali— either ash or lime—brings the impurities out of the solution as a precipitate called filter mud, while some of the other material forms a layer on the surface that needs to be skimmed off. Further boiling then leads to sugar crystals.

  Once sugar growing became a larger-scale activity, a system of powered rollers was needed to crush the cane, as well as a channel to deliver the juice to the first of a series of metal boiling pans, and a suitable alkali for addition to the first pan of juice. Fuel was needed to heat the juice, land to grow the cane, and reserves to keep the growers going for fifteen months until the first crop matured. They needed transport to get the cane to where it would be crushed, iron hoops and timber staves for barrels, coopers and carpenters, a blacksmith to make or repair tools, animals and animal drivers, people to gather feed for the animals and to grow food for the workers, and much more. This is the first curse of sugar: it is capital intensive. To make a profit from a mill, once it was established, there is a certain minimum size of crop.

  Where a number of people tried to share a central mill, however, tensions could arise when different farmers had cane ready for processing at the same time. Because the enzymes in the cane juice begin to do their work as soon as the cane is cut, immediate treatment is required. The need for speed in processing the crop is the second curse of sugar.

  The mature sugar cane stem is about 75 per cent water and 15 per cent sucrose, while the rest is mainly fibre. To obtain a ton of sugar, more than seven tons of cane must be cut and hauled to the mill to be crushed, and five tons of water evaporated. This is the third curse of sugar, that it is hungry for fuel. All too often, sugar planters would destroy the forests around their plantations to obtain fuel.

  Sugar making in the past was labour intensive. The fourth curse of sugar arose when slavery became a cheap solution to the labour problem.

  A CROP BECOMES AN INDUSTRY

  The Crusaders’ Palestinian sugar operations produced only small amounts. (These days it would be called a boutique industry.) Sugar production for the European market did not become commercial until Crete came under Venetian control in 1204. Sugar was initially so valuable that the household records of England’s King Henry III refer to the procurement of three pounds of sugar in 1226 as a special item, yet less than 400 years later Shakespeare’s Clown regarded that same amount as a normal purchase. Still, the Clown was about to be robbed, so perhaps Shakespeare was signalling that a fair amount of money was involved.

  In 1280 a cargo of sugar on 600 camels, bound from Egypt to Baghdad, was captured by Mongols under Hulagu, the grandson of Genghis Khan. The Middle Eastern sugar trade had become a major item after sugar production in Persia was largely wiped out following the death of Mostasim, the last Abassid Caliph, killed by Hulagu’s Mongols in 1258. From the end of the thirteenth century, the sugar sold to Europe and the Middle East came from the Mediterranean area, which was just a single ship voyage away from the ports of northern Europe.

  This was a situation the seafaring Venetians were gradually able to exploit. Just as the great Muslim traders had done before them, the Venetians travelled, explored and reported on what they saw. Some historians doubt that Marco Polo (1254–1324) really made it to China, but if he did not, then he was careful to gather intelligence from those who had been there, and so we should trust him when he writes of Fu-ju (Fukien):

  They have an enormous quantity of sugar. From this city the Great Khan gets all the sugar that is used at Court, enough to represent a considerable sum in value. You must know that in these parts before the Great Khan subjected it to his overlordship, the people did not know how to prepare and refine sugar as is done in Egypt. They did not let it congeal and solidify in moulds, but merely boiled and skimmed it, so that it hardened to a kind of paste, and was black in colour. But after the country had been conquered by the Great Khan, there came into the regions men of Egypt who had been at the Court of the Great Khan, and who taught them to refine it with the ashes of certain trees.

  Around 1285 Polo reported that sugar was being made in China, India and east Africa, but he noted only the production of palm wine in Java. Around this time, Muslims captured the rest of Palestine, largely closing European access to its sugar. This stimulated production in other parts of the Mediterranean.

  The first recorded commercial importation of sugar into England was in 1319, but during the fourteenth century sugar remained rare and expensive at two shillings a pound. As a measure of
its rarity, Geoffrey Chaucer, a wealthy courtier and diplomat as well as a writer, makes only five references to sugar in his Canterbury Tales, written in about 1387. It would never be so costly again.

  Production in Palestine, Egypt and Syria declined in the fourteenth century as Cyprus, Crete and the western Mediterranean took over as the main centres. The fall-off in Egypt may have been due to Mameluke misrule, as some writers claim. It may also have been due to population losses in the middle of the century from the Black Death, which disrupted both labour-intensive sugar growing and the maintenance of Nile irrigation systems, since Nile sugar needed 28 separate irrigations, all managed by hand. This drop in production gave Venice and Genoa the opening they needed.

  THE NAVIGATORS, SUGAR AND SLAVERY

  We can often see patterns in history that suggest inevitability. Before Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island, children’s books almost always had stern morals attached, but new worlds of fiction opened up after that book appeared, including the adult adventure fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle and others, catering for the Treasure Island generation as they came of age. It seems as though all the small bits gradually added together, like raindrops in a failing dam, until eventually there was a monstrous outpouring.

  In retrospect, Renaissance navigation looks like a similar outburst. The factors that came together included better materials for sails and cordage, a better understanding of timbers, new ways of rigging boats so they could sail into the wind, better compasses—and a need to sail into new areas. That need came about in part because of Islamic sea power and piracy in the Mediterranean, and in part because there were good trading reasons for venturing into the Atlantic. It was known that there were islands out there, some inhabited by people who could be conquered, and some free of humans, ready for the taking. So whatever the cause, the fifteenth century saw ships sailing off in all directions.

  The first Atlantic islands were discovered about 40 BC. The date of an expedition to the Canaries is fixed by a description from the learned Juba II, King of Numidia (roughly equivalent to modern Algeria). Later, this visit was also recorded by Pliny. In 1334 a French ship was driven to the Canaries in bad weather, and later returned. By about 1352, Catalan and Mallorcan missionaries are believed to have visited the Canaries. After that, the Canary Islands and their population came under Spanish rule.

  When the Portuguese arrived on Madeira in 1421 they found no inhabitants, but excellent timber, and land for all. Portuguese settlers poured in and by 1432 the first sugar was being refined there. Serious exports really only began somewhere between 1450 and 1460, when Madeiran sugar was first carried to England and Flanders. By 1500, Madeiran sugar was available all over Europe. Prince Henry (‘the Navigator’) granted a licence for a water mill on Madeira in 1452, in exchange for one-third of the sugar produced there, but water-powered sugar mills remained rare.

  It was at this point that slavery, the fourth curse of sugar, came into play. Slavery might have been stopped when the Papal Bull of 1454, Romanus Pontilex, allowed the conversion of native populations to Christianity. Unfortunately, that same bull gave Portugal a monopoly over the lucrative African slave trade. The Vatican said it was opposed to slavery in principle, but while Pope Pius II banned the enslavement of baptised Africans in 1462, and three other fifteenth-century popes condemned slavery in various terms, no practical measures were taken, and the slave trade began its exponential growth.

  By 1470 sugar refineries had been established in Venice, Bologna and Antwerp to process imported raw sugar, setting the pattern that would hold through into the nineteenth century of cheap raw sugar being sent to metropolitan centres where expensive refined sugar would be made. The later restrictions on colonial refining were mainly to retain as much of the profit as possible in the ‘home’ countries, while the role of the colonies was to supply cheap sugar. Sadly, cheap sugar required cheap labour, and that meant slaves.

  There was another side to the question of where refining should take place. With the rather limited forms of refining in use until the twentieth century, and with long, slow sea voyages, the sticky crystals would lock together into a solid mass under the humid conditions at sea. This made refinement near the final market a necessity in order to get the best quality sugar. Until the steamship became common, sugar had to be refined close to the point where it was consumed. This is why Australia had a sugar refinery to process imported raw sugar 20 years before it grew successful sugar cane crops.

  Toward the end of the fifteenth century, sea traffic on the Atlantic was increasing. Christopher Columbus was sailing the ocean, taking sugar cane to Madeira, where his wife’s mother grew it. Around 1480 the first sugar cane was planted in the Canary Islands and, further south, the Portuguese settled the island of São Tomé in 1486. Originally using the children of

  Sugar in the Atlantic from AD 1500 onwards.

  Jews expelled from Spain as slaves on São Tomé, they soon afterwards brought in black slaves, and planted sugar cane there. As these and other new centres came into operation, using more efficient production methods, sugar became a bigger and bigger player in the world’s politics.

  By 1496 Madeira was shipping 1700 tons of sugar to Venice, Genoa, Flanders and England, and there were about 80 mills on the island. A few years later, an attack of ‘worm’ reduced sugar production, and by 1600 grape vines had largely taken over until, in 1852, an attack of mildew blighted the vines, and led people back to sugar. Less than 20 years later, Madeira’s sugar production was back to a third of what it had been in 1496, but in another reversal it was found possible to re-establish the grape vines. Only a small sugar production survived, but by now sugar cane had reached the New World, where it would become a crop of world importance.

  A number of factors boosted the slowly developing sugar industry in the Americas. One was the division of the world between Portugal and Spain under the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1493, which kept the Spanish out of Africa, at the same time allowing the Portuguese into the coastal areas of Brazil. Having once gained a toehold, the Portuguese were able to penetrate well beyond the line set down under the treaty, with the Spaniards safely on the other side of the Andes.

  The result of the treaty was to give Portugal—and other European countries who ignored the Portuguese ‘monopoly’ and moved in on the slave trade that Portugal claimed—rights in Africa to obtain and transport slaves to the Spanish dominions. While trade with foreign ships was not officially allowed in the Spanish colonies, once the slave ships were actually at anchor in the Spanish colonial ports, commercial transactions took place, and so other countries became more aware of prospects in the West Indies. It also led to the establishment of a string of English, French and Portuguese forts in western Africa that became the seeds of the African colonial possessions that would leave permanent traces on the African map.

  Events in the eastern Mediterranean also helped boost sugar in the New World. For instance, when the Turks took Syria in 1516, the Syrian sugar industry collapsed. Between 1520 and 1570 the Turks conquered Cyprus, Crete, Egypt, the Aegean and much of the north African coastal belt. Sugar prices rose as those industries crumbled, and that made it easier for adventurers to get the money they needed to grow sugar elsewhere. The Mediterranean sugar industry may also have been influenced by climatic change, with the ‘Little Ice Age’ of 1550–1700 taking perhaps 1–2°C off temperatures as well as reducing rainfall. Brazil, on the other hand, had plenty of rain, all the fuel it needed close at hand, and an excellent labour supply.

  By the time Syria fell, Brazilian sugar was already being taxed when it arrived at Lisbon. King Manuel had ordered that a sugar master be sent to Brazil, and the first trapiche, an animal-or human-powered mill, had been built on San Domingo. The slaves on São Tomé had been growing sugar for around 30 years, but most of the New World slaves were used in the search for gold. That proportion would soon change as it became apparent that gold was easier to win by cultivating the sugar cane than by digging mines
. By 1550 the pattern of slavery and sugar had been set.

  FOR THE SMALL POX . . . AND BITING OF A MADD DOGG

  Take of sage and Rhue of each a handfull, one spoonfull of Pewter scrapt very small, 3 heads of garlick halfe a pd: of running treacle, put all into a quart of strong Ale and put all into a pipkin with a liner and past it up very close. Let it stand in a gentle fire until half be consumed. If the smallpox fall suddenly flat and turne blew then give it to a man 5 or 6 spoonfulls at a time, to a child 2 or 3. If the party be in grave danger give this in 2 or 3 hours. The treacle here meant runy like syrup and is not above 8 pence a pound.

  Bradford ms, no date

  3

  SUGAR IN THE

  NEW WORLD

  How should we remember Christopher Columbus? Others had sailed the Atlantic Ocean before him, settling islands and meeting the locals. St Brendan, the Irish monk, crossed the Atlantic in a leather cockleshell, and Leif Eiriksson reached North America as well. When the English cod fishers reached the cod-rich banks of Newfoundland in 1480, the secretive Basques of southern France and northern Spain were already there, twelve years before Columbus reached the West Indies.

  THE ITALIAN NAVIGATOR

  Columbus cannot claim to have worked out that the world is a globe, because the Greeks knew all about the spherical Earth 2000 years before he set sail. They used evidence including the Earth’s shadow appearing as a circle on the moon in a lunar eclipse; the way a ship’s hull disappears before the masts as the ship stands out to sea; and even the relative time of day or night an eclipse of the sun or the moon was seen in different parts of the Mediterranean.