Bittersweet

by Peter Macinnis

  In the peace after Waterloo, the British sugar growers on Jamaica and the smaller islands found themselves faced with plummetting sugar prices. They also knew the slaves had a role model to look to on Haiti, a promise of freedom that might one day be seized, for even if the hated slave trade had been stopped, slavers were still sailing the oceans under the flags of other nations, and the slaves were still slaves. England needed the profits, and everybody needed their sugar, just as Ralph Clark did.

  SUGAR, COFFY AND RALPH CLARK

  Ralph Clark comes into our view first as a marine who sailed for Sydney on the convict transport Friendship when Arthur Phillip’s First Fleet set out to create a settlement at Botany Bay. He, and the rest of the fleet, faced uncertain prospects on the other side of the world from ‘home’, and he quickly realised that some things would have to change. He wrote in his journal, in his idiosyncratic spelling:

  . . . to day for the first time in my life drinked my tea without Sugar which I intend to doe all the Voyage as my Sugar begins to grou Short therfor will only drink tea and Sugar now and after we get on Shore on certaind days . . .

  Clearly, the fleet carried some sugar, but this seemed to be mainly as a form of medicine, because it is mainly the surgeons who seem to have mentioned it in surviving records. Surgeon John White complained that his first hospital in Sydney had no sugar, sago, barley, rice or oatmeal, all essential hospital supplies, but Arthur Bowes Smyth, surgeon on the Lady Penrhyn, records how, on the journey out, he gave ‘a quantity of Sagoe & soft sugar to every Birth [berth] of the Women as an indulgence, as I had plenty of both by me’. In fact, it was not until Lady Penrhyn was almost to China, on the journey back to Europe, that he recorded running out of sugar, just days before dropping anchor at Macao, where he was able to replenish his stocks.

  Clark, though, was less fortunate. The commander of the First Fleet, and Governor, Arthur Phillip, had collected some sugar cane at the Cape of Good Hope, and while some seems to have been tried unsuccessfully in Sydney, most of it was sent on to Norfolk Island, to the north-east of Sydney. Supposedly, the sugar cane did well, or so Lieutenant King said. In a surviving letter, Clark notes darkly that Lieutenant King had written to Sir Joseph Banks about how he had made both sugar and rum, but the marines saw none of it, and Mr King, said Clark, ‘would not make his dispatches Public, because he knew they did not agree with the Private Accounts’.

  There is a whiff of scandal here, but there was to be no whiff of sugar, molasses or rum for the poor marine lieutenant. In early 1791, Clark wrote in his journal that he yearned for tea and sugar, adding that he had not had tea or wine for six months. There was no coffee, either:

  . . . our Breakfast is dry bread and Coffy made from burnt wheat and we are glad even to be able to get that—God help use I hope we will Soon See better days Soon for the[y] cannot well be Worse.

  A week later, with hope that a ship was about to arrive, he repeated his hope for tea and sugar, but it seems he had to wait until May for any sugar. As early as 1788, Clark had written to a brother officer at Plymouth, asking for

  Viz: 6 or 8 lb of Tea, about 40 or 50 lb of Sugar, 6 lb of Pepper, 2 pices of printed Cotton at about 3 or 4 dollars a pice for window Curtains and a dozen the Same Kind of plates as You gave me and let me know what the cost and I will Send you ane order for the Same—be So good as to make my best and tendrest wishes to Mrs. Clark and inform her I have wrote her by this opportunity . . .

  While Clark was roughing it in the sugar-free wilds of Australia and Norfolk Island, where he had a daughter by a convict girl named Mary Branham, his wife Betsy was at home in England, caring for his young son, also called Ralph.

  Clark returned to England in 1792, and left a pregnant Betsy in England when he sailed off to fight in Haiti in May 1793, taking young Ralph with him to the sugar islands of the Caribbean. There, Clark senior died in a naval action against the French, while his son died, apparently on the same day as his father, of yellow fever; a little earlier, Betsy had died after giving birth to a stillborn child.

  Perhaps he died happy though, because in June 1794 he wrote a letter describing how they had taken ‘45 Ships, 36 of them are large Ships, deeply loaded with Sugar, Coffy, Cotten and Indigo’. We can only hope that he got his fill of the captured Coffy and Sugar before he was cut down, leaving behind his incomplete papers, his name on a small island in Sydney Harbour where he once had a garden, and possibly his daughter by Mary Branham, of whom we know nothing more.

  SUGAR BECOMES A COMMONPLACE

  By the time Ralph Clark died, most Europeans knew and hungered after sugar. The percolation of sugar down the social scale had been slow but steady. In 1513 the King of Portugal sent sugar effigies of the Pope and twelve cardinals to Rome as a mark of his esteem, and in 1515 sugar was taken to King Ferdinand on his deathbed. In 1539 Platine recorded the French proverb: Jamais sucre ne gâta viande (‘adding sugar never hurt any food’)— which only referred to the food of the rich, but that was changing fast. At the end of the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers may have rotted their teeth, but sugar had already extended beyond the Court circle. In England in the mid-1800s, when Dickens was writing his novels, sugar in one’s tea was a commonplace throughout British society.

  The price of sugar probably tells the story of its filtering down through the classes better than anything else. In modern terms, a kilogram of sugar cost about US$24 in 1350–1400, $16 in 1400–50, $12 in 1450–1500, and $6 in 1500–50, when the first Brazilian sugar reached Europe, and now it was cheap enough for ordinary people to aspire to enjoy it. Warfare, cane disease and weather might cause small fluctuations, but the price continued to fall. The fall in price was more than matched by the increased demand, and that demand was matched by a continued growth in the area under cultivation with sugar cane.

  The sack of Antwerp in what is now Belgium, by Spanish forces opposing Dutch independence, led to the destruction of the refineries there and by 1600 the English, French and Dutch were all in the sugar refining business. The Antwerp workers dispersed, taking their knowledge with them to London, Amsterdam, Hamburg and Rouen, resulting in increased competition for raw sugar to feed the new refineries. All the same, the English were slow to begin growing sugar in their colonies. As Richard Ligon tells us, most of them started as growers of tobacco, cotton, indigo and ginger, along with cassava, plantains, beans and corn. This was the usual island pattern, with sugar only coming in later.

  Barbados, for example, only started planting sugar in about 1640, and had a number of poor years, until the arrival of Dutch and Jewish refugees ejected from Pernambuco in northern Brazil. They provided the technical knowledge to make more and better sugar. The disruption in Brazil had also reduced the amount of sugar available in Europe, making this an excellent time for Barbados to adopt the new crop.

  A simultaneous plus and minus was that Barbados had many smallholdings already cleared. This made it easy to plant cane, but as the best results financially came with a mill for every 40 hectares (100 acres) of cane, small farmers could not get capital, and their farms were quickly swallowed up by their larger neighbours. Many landless people joined the 1655 British invasion of Jamaica, and gained land there, but the surviving Barbadian planters were now rich and powerful, thanks to sugar.

  Between 1663 and 1775, English consumption of sugar increased twentyfold, and almost all of it came from the Americas. Sugar was big business, and led to the first Molasses Act being passed in Parliament in 1733. It was set to last for five years, but it was regularly renewed, consolidated in the Sugar Act of 1764, and only repealed in 1792. This Act, in its various forms, set a duty of 5s. per hundredweight on sugar, 9d. per gallon on rum and 6d. per gallon on molasses brought into a British colony from a foreign source, while the importation of French produce into Ireland was forbidden. The result of the tax was to encourage wholesale smuggling of sugar and molasses into the thirteen British colonies in North America (and their eventual revolt). It seem
s not to have been worth the effort to smuggle sugar into England, however. In 1852, Captain Landman, late of the Royal Engineers, recalled an incident at Plymouth in 1796:

  [We walked] towards the harbour, and on our way met an immense number of thin women proceeding with the utmost expedition, whilst all those we overtook, about equal in number, were large stout females, evidently waddling along with difficulty. On seeing these, Phillip explained that the latter were all wadded with bladders filled with Hollands gin, which they manage to smuggle under these dresses, whilst the others were thin and light, having delivered their cargoes at the waterside . . . everybody knew the trade they were engaged in.

  Perhaps sugar was just too hard to carry, but more probably it was too bulky to repay the time, risks and effort, so people in Europe consumed taxed sugar and put up with it. Even with taxes, everybody had to have their sugar.

  By 1675, England was seeing 400 vessels, each carrying an average of 150 tons of sugar, arriving from the colonies each year. France was exporting equally large amounts of sugar from its colonies. All sorts of arguments were proposed against the tax on sugar, from the suffering of the planters and their slaves to the welfare of Britain, but the French and British governments kept on taxing.

  The hunger for sugar was by no means an English phenomenon. When Tobias Smollett travelled in France and Italy in 1766, he described tea at Boulogne: ‘It is sweetened all together with coarse sugar, and drank with an equal quantity of boiled milk.’ He recorded better Marseilles sugar at Nice, but complained that the liqueurs there were so sweetened with sugar as to have lost all other taste. He complained also of the flies, which apart from anything else, ‘croud into your milk, tea, chocolate, soup, wine, and water: they soil your sugar’. Later, Smollett referred to buying sugar and coffee in Marseilles, giving us the trinity of the sugar promoters: tea, coffee and chocolate, all needing to be sweetened.

  Doctor Johnson also had something to say on the subject of the French way with sugar according to Boswell:

  At Madame ——’s, a literary lady of rank, the footman took the sugar in his fingers, and threw it into my coffee. I was going to put it aside; but hearing it was made on purpose for me, I e’en tasted Tom’s fingers.

  Although it has been recorded as replacing honey in recipes for chardequynce, a sort of jam or compote, as early as 1440, sugar only began to appear regularly in recipes about the mid-1700s. Mrs Hannah Glasse published her The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy in 1747, and the book revealed sugar as a standard item in the kitchen—one cake recipe calls for ‘three quarters of a pound of the best moist sugar’.

  When Thackeray wrote of the England of the early nineteenth century in Vanity Fair, he used sugar grades to distinguish social classes. Here he describes Mr Chopper:

  The clerk slept a great deal sounder than his principal that night; and, cuddling his children after breakfast (of which he partook with a very hearty appetite, though his modest cup of life was only sweetened with brown sugar), he set off in his best Sunday suit and frilled shirt for business, promising his admiring wife not to punish Captain D.’s port too severely that evening.

  The purer white sugar that would satisfy others was out of the reach of a clerk, but tea and sugar had become essentials of life. Charles Dickens mentioned sugar 102 times, on thirteen of those occasions in the phrase ‘tea and sugar’, while rum rated almost 150 mentions. Dickens makes it clear in a scene in Nicholas Nickleby that it was not uncommon for a cook to expect tea and sugar to be provided in the terms of employment.

  The habit of drinking tea was a key factor in saving lives when cholera reached Britain in the nineteenth century, because boiling water to make tea killed the germs in the water. The infamous Broad Street pump in London’s Soho, drawing water from a well lying beside a cesspit, killed most of the non-tea drinkers in the area before Dr John Snow made the link between the pump and cholera, and called for the removal of the handle on the pump.

  Wherever the English went, whether aristocrat or commoner, tea and sugar went with them. In 1826, convicts in Australia had a weekly ration of 7 lb. meat, 14 lb. wheat and 1 lb. sugar; in 1830, shepherds and other farm employees were allowed 10 lb. meat, 10 lb. flour, 2 lb. sugar, and 4 oz. tea each week. In 1833 a teenager called Edward John Eyre set off to make his fortune in the Australian bush, with a quart pot, a little tea and sugar, and some salt.

  On his first night, Eyre and his dray driver shared a glass of rum before settling down to sleep for the night under the stars. Within a decade Eyre would be winning fame as an explorer, a finder of paths across the trackless Australian landscape; within three decades he would be reviled by much of England and most of Jamaica as the man who hanged more than 400 former sugar slaves on Jamaica. In 1833 the teenage boy was an ordinary person, but sugar and rum were staples of life for an Englishman in the colonies.

  SUGAR

  Hazardous Properties: It is well known that sugar refiners face an industrial hazard which consists of an irritation to the skin; it may be a form of dermatitis. Bakers also experience a dermatitis due to sugar. Storage and Handling: Personnel who must work with this material continually and who are sensitive to it should wear protective clothing to avoid skin contact.

  N. Irving Sax, Handbook of Dangerous Materials, New York, 1951

  6

  A SCIENCE OF SUGAR

  Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau, the French agricultural encyclopaedist, recorded that the ‘Jamaica Train’ was probably invented about 1700, but like all other advances in the art of making sugar, it was slow to spread. The Portuguese and the Spanish knew about simple sugar making because they had long been involved in making it on the Atlantic islands; it had given them a head start in the sugar industry in the Americas, but they seem to have given little thought to advancing their skills.

  English planters were using the Jamaica Train around 1700. By 1725, the French were using what they called the English Train, the Cubans adopted the French Train in 1780, and the Brazilians brought it into use about 1800. The early forms of the Jamaica Train had four large pans, each 4 feet (120 cm) in diameter with a flat bottom, set into masonry so the flames hit only the base. This meant that as long as there was a small amount of liquid in the pan there would be no charring of sugar up the sides, as happened with the old conical pans. Later forms had five pans of decreasing size, but in each case a single fire heated all the pans, with the draught being carried along beneath them.

  The pans were all heated with stone coal, not charcoal, du Monceau explained, before diving into the complexities. The sugar was treated with lime water, then a clearing medium of egg white or bullock’s blood was added (the English called this ‘spice’). The ratio was about 80 eggs or 2 gallons of blood to 4 tons of sugar. He noted that isinglass (a form of gelatin obtained from fish) did not work as well as blood to clarify the solution. When the scum rose to the surface, he wrote, the fire was drawn (reduced or damped down), and after fifteen minutes the scum was scraped off. This would be repeated, until a clear bright liquor was obtained and strained through a blanket.

  The materials used to clarify sugar at various times have included wood ash, milk, egg white, blood, charcoal, lime, sulfurous acid, phosphoric acid, carbon dioxide, alum and as we have seen, lead acetate. Marco Polo referred to the use of wood ash, lime and alum as an Egyptian practice.

  Du Monceau tells us that the juice was put into a boiling vessel called either a clarifier or a racking copper, usually holding 500 gallons (more than 2000 litres), where the temperature was raised to about 175 degrees on de Réaumur’s scale (in our terms, 285°F or 140°C). At this point, milk of lime was added to coagulate impurities, which would rise to the top as a scum. When the scum ‘cracked’, a cock in the bottom was opened to drain the cleared liquid, leaving the ‘mud’ behind to be used in the making of rum.

  Getting the amount of lime right was always a challenge to the sugar masters. If the liquid was not tempered properly, the sugar would not crystallise, but if too muc
h lime was added, the liquor would turn green as chlorophyll entered the solution, and would later form a dark sugar with a great deal of molasses and an unpleasant smell. The answer was to turn to science, and Dr John Shier in British Guiana introduced the use of Robert Boyle’s litmus test. When the litmus just turned from red to blue, enough lime had been added.

  Later, Francis Watts on Antigua replaced litmus with phenolphthalein (hopefully in small amounts or later removed, as phenolphthalein is a laxative), and by 1870 phosphoric acid was being used to remove the excess lime, producing a calcium phosphate precipitate. Reflecting a higher than usual awareness of the needs of the soil, an early Australian refinery began soon after to convert this precipitate to superphosphate and return it to Madagascar in the ships that had brought the raw sugar across the Indian Ocean.

  In the 1760s butter was added to the boiling pan (in place of Ligon’s Sallet Oyle), and the mixture was boiled to the strike point. This strike point is a matter of judgment and testing: a small amount of the liquid is drawn out between finger and thumb, revealing its state to the sugar master. If the thread breaks near the top, the liquid needs more heat, but if it breaks near the bottom it is ready.

  When it had reached the strike point, the liquid went first to a cooling vessel, and then was poured into a number of conical earthenware pots with holes in their pointy tops and open at the base. These were allowed to stand upside down for about six days while the mother liquor ran off, after which the sugar was usually ‘clayed’ until it was a satisfactory colour. The loaves of sugar were then stood in a hot room to dry. Claying was preferred, because this added value to the crop in the colony, and gave a better return to the plantation owner.

  There is a pretty legend that claying was discovered when a chicken wandered through a curing house and stepped across some muscovado sugar, leaving a trail of white footprints behind, thus inspiring people to clay sugar to make it white. This tale is widely told but improbable, because it has little to do with the claying process. When the cone full of muscovado was turned over and allowed to drain, it reached a point where most of the viscous part had drained from the pot, and the rest clung tenaciously to the crystals. Claying involves tapping the upside-down cone gently to settle the sugar, covering the open base with clay and then adding water so that it drips slowly down and out the hole, leaching out the remaining molasses so that it can be collected and sent to the rum makers, or boiled again to obtain more sugar.