Bittersweet

by Peter Macinnis

  The sterile cane, a dark slender form known as ‘Creole’, was the only one grown until Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the French sailor and explorer and equal of James Cook, found the ‘Otaheite’ cane in Tahiti in 1768. This was the cane which Cook used to make beer soon afterwards. Bougainville took samples to Mauritius (then called Ile de Bourbon) in 1768, where the cane was named ‘Bourbon’. Around 1780, someone named Cossigny (probably Joseph-François Charpentier de Cossigny de Palma) brought more of this cane to Mauritius and Réunion, and cane from Java reached these islands at about the same time. By 1789, the new canes had reached the French West Indies.

  The ‘Bourbon’ cane was carried to St Vincent in the West Indies with William Bligh in 1793, after a delay caused by a certain Fletcher Christian. A single plant reached Jamaica in 1795, and more specimens arrived in 1796. ‘Batavian’ cane reached Martinique in 1797, and from there reached Louisiana in 1818, where it was the dominant variety to about 1900.

  From the 1790s until the 1890s ‘Bourbon’ was the principal cane variety grown in the West Indies. It was dropped only when there was an outbreak of the red rot disease that Buddha had referred to as manjitthika, and it was replaced by resistant strains of lower yield. These ‘native canes’ were variants collected from various parts of the world, often of uncertain provenance, going by names such as ‘Transparent’, ‘Tanna’ and ‘Cheribon’, and identified mainly by their rind colours.

  Cane ranges in diameter from 12.5 mm to 50 mm (1/2 inch to 2 inches); it has regular nodes along its length, and is covered in a tough rind that surrounds an inner fleshy pith where the sugar is stored, though the ‘Bourbon’ or ‘Otaheite’ cane has a softer rind, making it better for chewing. The original cane taken to the Mediterranean and then to the New World appears to have been a hybrid of Saccharum barberi and S. officinarum, as we now understand it. The Saccharum officinarum described by Linnaeus in 1753 was probably the ‘Creole’ cane.

  The ‘Tanna’ cane was first seen by James Cook at the Pacific island of Tanna in the southern New Hebrides in 1774, in a garden he described in his journal as ‘laid out by line, abounding with plantains, sugar-canes, yams, and other roots, and stocked with fruit-trees’. This cane was taken to Mauritius in 1870, and soon afterwards, to nearby Fiji and Hawaii. Around the world, there were now a number of varieties and the obvious next step would be to hybridise them, but it was accepted wisdom that sugar cane did not grow from seedlings.

  Genetics textbooks often tell us that before Gregor Mendel’s work was discovered lurking in obscure journals on library shelves in 1903, people knew nothing of breeding plants. In fact, Mendel’s own work of the 1860s belies this, and William Farrer was crossing wheat strains in Australia in the 1890s, using Mendelian assumptions, quite independently of Mendel’s work, which was still hidden in the libraries. Sugar growers were no different in their sophistication, and Cossigny had suggested, as early as 1780, that strains of sugar cane might be crossed to combine useful features of different varieties.

  By 1790 a researcher called Tussac in Saint Domingue had described the structure of the ‘Creole’ sugar cane flower, but as that variety is sterile there were no seedlings to work on. In 1858 Iran Aeus saw and recognised cane seedlings growing in a field of ratoon cane on Barbados. This discovery was reported by the plantation owner in a letter to the Barbados Liberal in 1859 and the report was copied into the Australian press. A number of other accounts of sugar seedlings appeared in the 1860s and 1870s.

  Cook’s ‘Tanna’ cane had gone to Hawaii as ‘Yellow Caledonia’. In 1888 a Dutch researcher on Java announced that he had produced seedlings from a variety known there as ‘Yellow Hawaii’, probably a close relative. Soon scientists in Indonesia and India were hard at work, with others following. Cane seed would never be a practical way to plant a crop, but to get characteristics from two strains into one plant, seeds were a boon.

  The lesson of manuring to maintain and improve soil quality had been learned by 1900, though it was mainly added now as artificial fertiliser: A study showed that around 1900, Hawaii used £8 worth of fertiliser per acre and returned 9 tons of cane per acre; Barbados used £3 10s. worth per acre for a return of two to three tons, while the rest of the West Indies used about £1 10s. worth of fertiliser per acre for a yield of just 1.75 tons.

  The lesson was clear, and the twentieth century saw serious-minded agriculturists applying serious science to sugar growing, and getting serious increases. And that was just as well, because the price of sugar kept falling.

  CUBA HONEY

  Good brown sugar 11 lbs., water 1 quart, old bee honey in the comb 2 lbs., cream of tartar 50 grains, gum arabic 1 oz., oil of peppermint 5 drops, oil of rose 2 drops. Mix and boil two or three minutes and remove from the fire, have ready strained one quart of water, in which a tablespoonful of pulverized slippery elm bark has stood sufficiently long to make it ropy and thick like honey, mix this into the kettle with egg well beat up, skim well in a few minutes, and when a little cool, add two pounds of nice strained bees’ honey, and then strain the whole, and you will have not only an article which looks and tastes like honey, but which possesses all its medicinal properties. It has been shipped in large quantities under the name of Cuba honey. It will keep fresh and nice for any length of time if properly covered.

  Daniel Young, Young’s Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets, Toronto, 1861

  11

  LABOUR

  PROBLEMS

  As sugar prices continued to fall, the sugar planters needed cheap labour as well as better methods and machinery, and in the end, the surviving sugar planters were those who sought both. Cheap labour is still used in the developing world to harvest cane, but in the industrial countries, cane setts are planted in furrows by machine; cultivation, spraying, harvesting and every other process is done by machine.

  With the end of slavery, growers still needed access to a poor peasant class who would grow their sugar for them, and as new areas of sugar growing developed, so it became necessary to bring peasants to those areas. The polite name given to this was ‘indentured labour’, but where this had once meant bringing out Celtic peasants from Britain to serve English masters, it now meant bringing ‘coolies’, as the Asian peasants were dismissively called, from some other part of the world.

  To put matters in perspective, the conditions for travel at sea were always appalling in the age of sail. Of the 775 convicts who set out in 1787 from England for Botany Bay, 40 died before they reached Australia in early 1788, and others died soon after. Even free travellers had a hard time of it, as Janet Schaw reported after seeing a Scottish family who were heading for Jamaica on her ship in 1774 (and interestingly, paying for their passage by the husband signing indentures). Miss Schaw thought it a bad bargain when she saw what they had to eat:

  It is hardly possible to believe that human nature could be so depraved, as to treat fellow creatures in such a manner for a little sordid gain. They have only for a grown person per week, one pound neck beef, or spoilt pork, two pounds oatmeal, with a small quantity of bisket, not only mouldy, but absolutely crumbled down with damp, wet and rottenness. The half is only allowed a child, so that if they had not potatoes, it is impossible they could live out the Voyage.

  THE RETURN OF INDENTURED LABOUR

  The rate of slave mortality for Barbados was regarded as normal on sugar plantations, but the figures for white indentured servants were almost as bad, and in the nineteenth century, indentured labourers who came from India suffered death at the same levels. The missionaries, deprived of slaves to emancipate, suddenly found a new cause to fight: that of people who were slaves in everything but name. The big stick they had was the level of mortality that the indentured sugar workers suffered.

  A small number of Indians had arrived in Mauritius from Pondicherry in 1735. The next example of indentured labour comes in a report from 1800 of about 80 Chinese working on sugar plantations in Bengal and Bombay! Peter Cunningham, a surgeon who vis
ited Australia several times on convict ships and owned a property in Australia, visited Port Macquarie, north of Sydney, where he saw sugar cane growing. He recommended the use of convicts and later, Chinese workers:

  With good superintendence, convicts may be made to do quite as much as ever I saw accomplished by slaves, their labour being furnished free from any primary outlay of capital, while that of the slaves must be previously purchased, the interest upon the original price of the slave amounting to at least ten pounds annually . . . But perhaps as good a plan as any would be to establish a colony of Chinese on our shores, these being the principal sugar-growers in the Indian islands, and always ready to emigrate to any place where money is to be made.

  By ‘Indian islands’ Cunningham meant Indonesia, where Chinese sugar growers had long been a major force. A wealthy Chinese community was established on Java by about 1400, and at some stage soon afterwards started growing sugar. Certainly the Dutch found sugar manufacture under Chinese control in the East Indies, when they began arriving in the area in 1596.

  We can get an idea of the size of the East Indies industry when we consider the so-called Chinese Rebellion that took place in 1740. The Governor-General, Adriaan Valckenier, realising that the sugar industry of Java was all in Chinese hands, set out to round up and sell all of those Chinese without regular employment as slaves to Ceylon. A number of wealthy Chinese were arrested in short order. The other Chinese took up arms, and as many as 10 000 were killed before peace was restored. Around 1759, we find the first record of Chinese sugar workers at Penang off the coast of the the Malay Peninsula.

  Some of the Chinese were independent travellers. One entrepreneur set up a stone mill and started to make sugar in Hawaii, on Lanai in 1802, but he left the next year. In 1832 William French put up the first lasting Hawaiian mill, operated by Chinese labour. In 1836 the mill sent the first 4 tons of sugar to the United States, and about 30 tons of molasses. The importation of workers here was minor, compared with what would soon happen.

  John Gladstone, father to the later British Prime Minister, W. E. Gladstone, realised soon after emancipation that Indians could be successfully introduced into the West Indies. He retained the Calcutta firm of Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co., which had been recruiting labour for Mauritius, to obtain workers. In January 1838 the first 414 recruits left on a five-week voyage to the Caribbean. Eighteen died on board, the other 396 arrived safely. Later, Lord Brougham (a Whig politician) would claim that 20 per cent had died on the voyage, with another 30 per cent dying in the next five weeks.

  Five years later, another 98 of the survivors had died, 238 had returned to India, 60 had elected to stay, and two had disappeared from view; this gave a death rate of more than 27 per cent. Those figures caused concern in those more enlightened days, and the British government would not agree to any extension of what could be represented in some quarters as ‘slavery in disguise’ until the returnees reached India and had been examined. In 1844 the authorities were satisfied and ‘emigration’ was again allowed.

  John Gladstone’s Indians were described as ‘hill coolies’, but they were in fact Dhangars, a non-Aryan caste of nomadic agricultural labourers from Chota Nagpur. Unfortunately, later selections were far less discriminating, and members of warrior castes, untouchables and others were all mixed together.

  In 1845 Lord Harris, Governor of Trinidad, set up a code of regulations for the management of the Indian workers, but the BFASS had this code disallowed. Instead of the immigrants being managed, a policy of laissez aller prevailed and the Indians were told they were free to move on if they wished. At the end of the first year many declined to re-engage, flocking to the towns as beggars and vagrants. From this point on, Exeter Hall in its various guises tended to be an active opponent of indentured labour, claiming that it was a form of slavery, while remaining blind to the abuses visited upon working folk at the heart of the British Empire.

  THE WHITE SLAVES OF ENGLAND

  Robert Sherard, the great-grandson of William Wordsworth, was a journalist and social campaigner. He could see the plight of the unfortunate as clearly as the BFASS, but he was concerned about those closer to home. The main criticism that Carlyle and others in the mid-nineteenth century had offered of Exeter Hall was that the English campaigners for social justice for slaves, like the union-crushing William Wilberforce, were oblivious of the pain and suffering under their own noses. All over England, people were working in hideous conditions, as Sherard explained in his crusading work The White Slaves of England.

  His set of essays first appeared in Pearson’s Magazine, informing his readers about trades that few of them would ever have heard of, like the stone nobblers, old men who broke stones in an alkali works, so that sulfur could be extracted. They were paid at eightpence the ton, and a king among stone nobblers could earn thirteen shillings a week; few earned more than eight shillings. As one stone nobbler told him, ‘This is the last stage before the workhouse.’

  Like Queen Elizabeth in the late sixteenth century, many of the workers in chemical factories of the late nineteenth century lost their teeth, though rather less pleasantly, as they were eaten away by the fumes and dust that they breathed and swallowed. Sherard found that a ‘salt-cake man’ could be recognised anywhere. His teeth, if not entirely destroyed, were but black stumps, and the effect made itself seen in less than twelve months. But it was not only the old and the infirm who were treated like this, well after most of the world’s slaves had been freed. Consider another girl he saw in a factory at Cradley:

  She was fourteen by the Factory Act, by paternity she was ten. I never saw such little arms, and her hands were made to cradle dolls, yet she was making links for chain-harrows . . . Next to her was a female wisp, forging dog-chains, for which she received three farthings a piece. It was the chain which sells currently for eighteenpence. She worked ten hours a day and could ‘manage six chains in the day’.

  The grinding poverty we meet in the novels of Charles Dickens and the works of Gustave Doré was still a grim reality even at the close of the nineteenth century. Many had no choice: it was either work in those conditions, or perish in the workhouse, which held power over the English (and even poor foreigners) who fell into its clutches right into the twentieth century.

  Grace Elizabeth (‘Betsy’) Jennings Carmichael was an Australian poet of considerable promise, who wrote as Jennings Carmichael. Her husband, Francis Mullis, deserted her and her three sons while they were travelling in Britain and she was forced into the Leyton workhouse in 1904, where she died. Her three sons survived in another workhouse, and outraged Australians raised a public subscription to bring them back to Australia, where they unsurprisingly changed their name to Carmichael. Two generations earlier, though, the workhouses were far worse, so perhaps things were improving slowly.

  Thomas Austin was a resident of the Hendon workhouse when he fell into the laundry copper and was scalded to death in 1839, soon after Britain freed all its slaves in a welter of self-congratulation at the country’s humanity. The workhouse authorities quietly buried the body, but the coroner, Dr Wakley, heard of the matter. He asked for the body to be exhumed, and declared the man had died of scalding, adding a rider to the effect that the master of the workhouse had been guilty of contributory negligence in not providing a protective railing round the copper. This was too much for the workhouse master, and he observed forcefully that the jury might have found a verdict, but had not identified the body, provoking Wakley to gain instant fame when he asked, ‘If this is not the body of the man who was killed in your vat, pray, Sir, how many paupers have you boiled?’

  THE MASS MIGRATIONS

  During the nineteenth century, many more people travelled the seas as ‘free labourers’ than did so in any comparable period when the slave traders operated, or even when the Spirits stole folk away from the ports of Britain. The profits may have been less, but many ships plied a trade that was, by all accounts, out of control. The need for control can be seen
in the figures for Chinese coolies travelling to Cuba—between 1847 and 1880 some 140 000 were shipped around Cape Horn. About 12 per cent died on the trip, less than 25 per cent survived Cuba, and fewer than 1 per cent ever returned to China.

  Jamaica was little better: of the 4551 Indians who arrived there in 1845–47, and 507 destitute Chinese who had come from Panama at the same time, just 1491 were still working in agricultural employment by 1854, with 1762 repatriated and a further 1805 dead or disappeared. (In fairness, though, it must be mentioned that a major cholera epidemic in 1850 killed 50 000 people across the island.)

  Hawaii was another but rather less damaging user of indentured labour. The brig Thetis brought 253 Chinese to Hawaii in 1852, and by 1898 some 37 000 had landed. The 1910 census showed 21 674 Chinese still there. A group of 148 Japanese arrived on the Scioto in 1868, five more following in 1882 and another 1959 in 1885. This was the start of a flood, with 176 432 Japanese arriving between 1882 and 1907, when the flow was restricted by agreement. After that, emigration exceeded immigration, but there were still 45 000 Japanese in the Hawaiian islands in 1936.

  There was clearly money to be made from transporting indentured labour, and more and more people started doing it. Attempts were made to start the import of Indians to Natal in 1858 and 1859; the bill approving the practice was passed in 1860. Soon afterwards, sugar workers began to flood in from India. One of the Indians who went to Natal, but as a lawyer, not a sugar worker, was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. In 1893, the 24-year-old Gandhi left a lucrative law practice in Bombay to work for the rights of the Indian sugar workers in South Africa, where they were made to feel that they were remarkably second rate, and needed a firm and knowledgeable representative. Clearly, Gandhi already had a strong conscience, but the man we know as Mahatma Gandhi strengthened himself for his struggle to free India while tending to the needs of the Indian sugar workers in Natal. Once again, sugar policies had an unexpected result.