Bittersweet

by Peter Macinnis

  The main advantage of foreign labourers anywhere seems to have been the language barrier that tied them to a workplace, but the excuse for bringing them in from other places was usually that ‘the natives won’t do the work’—ironically, at the same time that Fijians were being recruited to work on other islands, Indians were being recruited for Fiji. The first Indian indentured labourers arrived in Fiji in 1879, and by 1916 a total of 68 515 had arrived. A number of these Indians were repatriated, found no place for themselves in India, and so re-emigrated to Fiji, where their descendants remain today.

  Ralph Shlomowitz, an Australian academic, points out that the Natal and Fiji experiences allow us to assess the death rates reported from the various sugar plantation areas in a more balanced way:

  More generally, the importance of epidemiological factors is also shown in a consideration of the variation in the average death rate of Indian indentured workers at home and abroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Highest death rates occurred in the epidemiologically hostile tea estates of Assam, with its endemic malaria and cholera, and the sugar cane plantations of Malaya, with its endemic malaria; lowest death rates occurred in the relatively epidemiologically benign sugar cane plantations of Natal and Fiji, generally free of malaria and cholera. Death rates on Caribbean sugar cane plantations were higher than in Natal and Fiji as malaria was endemic in the Caribbean; the death rates in the Caribbean were lower than those in Assam and Malaya because the malaria strains in the Caribbean were much less lethal than those in Assam and Malaya.

  AUSTRALIA AND THE KANAKAS

  For the most part, the Exeter Hall faction did little about the recruitment of indentured labour in Asia (as opposed to its use in various places), perhaps because they felt it was better supervised in India and China. However, the London Missionary Society and various Presbyterian missionaries on South Sea islands were outspoken in their complaints about the ‘blackbirders’, the ships’ captains who recruited labour from the islands to work in the sugar plantations of Queensland and New Caledonia (people referred to at first as ‘Polynesians’ and then as ‘Kanakas’). It was, they asserted, no better than a slave trade. This claim is maintained today by the descendants of the Kanakas who still live in Australia and by many other Australians, but the evidence is less than clear.

  Anthony Trollope had visited Demerara and Trinidad before travelling to Australia, where he saw some of the first Kanakas working on the plantations:

  Then as now there was a fear in England that these foreigners in a new country would become slaves under new bonds, and that a state of things would be produced,—less horrible indeed than the slavery of the negroes who were brought into the West Indies by the Spaniards,— but equally unjust and equally opposed to the rights and interests of the men concerned . . .

  Let us have no slavery in God’s name. Be careful. Guard the approaches. Defend the defenceless. Protect the poor ignorant dusky foreigner from the possible rapacity of the sugar planter. But . . . be not led away by a rampant enthusiasm to do evil to all parties. Remember the bear who knocked out his friend’s brains with a brickbat when he strove to save him from the fly. An ill-conducted enthusiasm may not only debar Queensland from the labour she requires, but debar also these poor savages from their best and nearest civilisation.

  Trollope outlined the diet of the Kanakas; under the standard contract the daily ration was 1 lb of beef or mutton (he missed the alternative of 2 lb of fish) and another 1 lb of bread or flour, 5 oz sugar or molasses, 2 lb of vegetables which might be substituted by 4 oz of rice or 8 oz of maize, with a weekly issue of 11/2 oz of tobacco, 2 oz of salt and 4 oz of soap. Commenting on this, he observes that their ‘dietary is one which an English rural labourer may well envy’.

  Trollope quoted figures to show that the total cost of hiring a Kanaka over a three-year contract was £75, at a time when a white labourer on weekly wages of 11s. would cost about £86 over three years. Against that, he admits that in Queensland, 15s. was the usual minimum, with sugar establishments paying white workers between 15s. and 20s. a week. He also quoted a figure of 25s. a week, including rations, for white labourers, and added: ‘I was told by more than one sugar-grower that two islanders were worth three white men among the canes.’

  In short, it would appear that Trollope’s evidence shows that the Kanakas were underpaid, but this related mainly to the first three years, when some degree of training was needed. Kanakas seeking a second contract were generally reported to be paid rather better rates, though actual figures are hard to find. Trollope, having discussed the nature of the contract signed by the Kanakas, and the extent to which they understood it, observed in relation to some of the criticisms:

  There is not a word said here that might not be said with equal force as to the emigration of Irishmen under government surveillance from the British Isles to the British colonies,—except in this, that in regard to the poor Irishman there is seldom any contract insuring him work and food and wages immediately on his arrival. Were there any such contract he would not understand it a bit better than the islander,— who does in fact know very well what the contract ensures him.

  The main claim of the missionaries was that the labourers were kidnapped by the blackbirders. Those ‘engaging in the Queensland labour trade’ (the same parties by their own preferred description) answered that it was a blatant lie, that the missionaries were objecting because they knew that a ‘boy’ would be much less amenable to their demands and strictures once he had seen something of the world. William Wawn, one of the recruiters (if we may use that as a neutral term), explained it like this:

  The returned islander, however, is a very different personage for the missionary to operate on. He has seen the world. He does not believe in offerings to the church in the shape of pigs, fowls, yams and breadfruit. He knows how clergymen are regarded by the white workmen with whom he has come in contact . . . the missionary finds him a terrible stumbling-block in his path.

  Certainly some of the indentured labourers in other parts of the world had been kidnapped. A commission which travelled to Cuba from China found that of about 40 000 Chinese who had been shipped there, around 80 per cent had been kidnapped or decoyed. This was not the case in the South Sea, according to William Wawn.

  Whatever the reliability of Wawn’s other comments, his points about Pidgin English are certainly valid:

  This custom of making presents to recruits’ friends has been eagerly seized upon by our opponents as proof that we really bought the recruits—that the latter were slaves, probably captured in war; which is simply absurd. New Hebrideans never spare their enemies in battle, or make prisoners of the men. Slavery is unknown to them; they are not yet sufficiently advanced to appreciate it . . .

  Owing to their limited knowledge of the English language, such terms as ‘buy,’ ‘sell,’ and ‘steal,’ have a wide and comprehensive meaning. ‘You buy boy?’ is often the first question asked of a recruiter when he arrives at a landing-place. This simply means ‘Do you wish to engage boys?’ ‘Boys,’ as elsewhere, signifies men of any age. The term ‘steal’ is also frequently misunderstood. If you take away a recruit from his home without ‘buying’ or ‘paying’ for him,—that is, without making presents to his friends to compensate them for losing him,— they will say you ‘steal’ him.

  From his detailed defence of the ‘labour trade’, it is hard to tell whether Wawn is a plausible rogue, or a knockabout ruffian telling a (perhaps somewhat shaded) version of the truth. He admitted that certain traders were guilty of infringements of the rights of some of their recruits, but that in general it was only those recruiting for the French colonies who did such things. He argued that if the ‘recruiters’ had indeed kidnapped recruits from the islands they would never be able to go back there again, that they would be destroying their future markets, or putting their lives at risk.

  Wawn also applied a kind of logic to the situation, arguing that many of the workers signed up for a s
econd contract, and that many of those signing up for their first contract were from villages where former labourers lived. He drew attention to the presence of a government official on each boat, charged with the task of ensuring total fairness, reminding his readers that the recruiter needed to sign a £500 bond that he would not engage in kidnapping.

  In all probability, both sides in the debate were somewhat at fault. There must have been times when desperate traders, faced with financial ruin, seized some unfortunates, or where a bribe encouraged the government supervisor to look the other way. It is certainly the case that many of the missionaries sent out to the islands were totally unsuited to the positions they held, and entirely untrained. The same could be said of the recruiters, and each party was very happy to blame all of their woes on the other. Against that even-handed consideration, there is a weight of tradition, among both whites and Kanakas, that the labour trade was a form of slavery. So we find The Worker in 1911 saying that ‘Australians are not likely to submit without a protest against being treated like the Kanakas of slavery days’.

  We can see from the records that large numbers of workers died periodically, a fact popularly held to be have been due to harsh treatment. However, blaming the excessive mortality on harsh treatment does not explain why the mortality was highest soon after the arrival of the islanders in Queensland. Ralph Shlomowitz has shown that the death rates declined by the year of residence, and this suggests that people who understand the germ theory and epidemiology have no need to blame harsh treatment to explain what happened.

  White planters began by saying that only coloured races could work the sugar cane, but later they wondered, with cheerful racism, if Mediterranean Europeans might also be up to the task. The first 180 Portuguese arrived in Hawaii in 1878, and 30 000 had followed by 1913. Between 1907 and 1913, Hawaii saw the arrival of 6588 Spaniards, mainly from Malaga, a depressed sugar district. Australia began admitting Italian migrants to work the cane fields and other nationalities followed, coming, however illogically, even from countries like Finland. Where Australia had been a stolidly, solidly British place, we might wish to trace the eventual breakdown of the unofficial White Australia Policy to the entry of the sugar workers. It was certainly a first step in making Australia less exclusively British.

  All over the world, history’s greatest human mass migrations were taking place. Between 1887 and 1924, for example, Argentina had a net gain of 800 000 Italians and 1 million Spaniards, many working in the sugar industry. Many more had returned home richer than when they left.

  ANZAC BISCUITS

  For 48 biscuits, you will need 125 g butter, 1 tbsp golden syrup, 2 tbsp boiling water, 11/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda, 1 cup rolled oats, 3/4 cup desiccated coconut, 1 cup plain flour, 1 cup sugar. Melt the butter and golden syrup over a gentle heat, add mixed boiling water and bicarbonate of soda. Pour the liquid into mixed dry ingredients and blend well. Then drop teaspoonsfuls of the mixture onto a greased tray and bake in a slow oven [150°C] for 20 mins. Allow the biscuits to cool on trays for a few minutes and then remove them. The biscuits should be stored in airtight containers when cool.

  The standard modern recipe of a treat for First World War soldiers from Australia and New Zealand

  12 SUGAR IN THE

  TWENTIETH

  CENTURY

  By the start of the twentieth century, sugar was a major source of energy, a major food component and a major source of agitation. Sugar proved to be an excellent source of energy for conspiracy theories, though alternative sweeteners proved to have much the same power. Where pamphleteers once wrote mainly of the evils of sugar taxes or slavery, the new pamphleteers wrote books, proclaiming the insidious nature of various sweeteners, or the promise of the new wonder fuel.

  The truth was a little different.

  RUNNING ON ALCOHOL

  Many people are firmly convinced that the future of the internal combustion engine lies in alcohol made from sugar. This is, they argue, a clean fuel, a green fuel, a modern fuel, because while it produces carbon dioxide when it is burned, this has been taken out of the atmosphere by the sugar cane in the first place, so there is no net increase in greenhouse emissions. There is just one small problem, which becomes apparent in auditing the fuel and greenhouse costs of clearing the land (you lose the original productivity of the land), planting and cultivating the crop, making and adding fertiliser, spraying the crop, cutting and transporting the cane, crushing the cane and refining the sugar, distilling and transporting the alcohol.

  Such an audit does not give quite such a rosy picture of clean, green, sugar-based alcohol fuels. Corn is slightly less efficient than sugar at providing feedstock for ethanol, but on American figures, eleven acres of corn, enough to feed seven people, would be needed to produce the fuel to take one car 10 000 miles—and the 852 gallons required would cost US$1.74 per gallon, against US$0.95 per gallon for fuel based on crude oil. To power all of the cars in the United States would use up 97 per cent of all the land area of that nation.

  The first authentic internal combustion engine in America, developed by Samuel Morey around 1826, ran on ethanol and turpentine. In 1860, Nikolaus August Otto in Germany used ethanol to power an early engine—it was widely available throughout Europe as a fuel for spirit lamps. He devised a carburettor which, like Morey’s, heated the alcohol to help it vaporise as the engine was being started. A January 1861 patent application on the carburettor in the Kingdom of Prussia was turned down, probably because heated alcohol carburetion was already being widely used in spirit lamps. Otto’s initial financing came from Eugen Langen, who owned a sugar-refining company that probably had links to the alcohol markets of Europe.

  The French—even though their grape growers were protective of the brandy market—recognised a good thing when they saw one, and French fuel-alcohol production rose from 2.7 million gallons in 1900 to 5.7 million in 1903 and 8.3 million in 1905. In a 1901 rally sponsored by the Automobile Club of Paris, 50 vehicles ranging from light quadricycles to heavy trucks made the 167-mile trek from Paris to Roubaix. After the next rally, the consumption of fuels (varying from pure alcohol to 50 per cent alcohol and 50 per cent gasoline) were measured for each vehicle. Most drivers apparently preferred the 50–50 blend.

  In 1902 there was a Paris exhibition entirely devoted to alcohol-powered automobiles and farm machinery, as well as a wide variety of lamps, stoves, heaters, laundry irons, hair curlers, coffee roasters and every conceivable household appliance and agricultural engine that could be powered by alcohol. These were not experimental models but reflected a well-established industry.

  Ten per cent of the engines being produced in 1906 by the Otto Gas Engine Works in Germany were designed to run on pure ethanol, while a third of the heavy locomotives produced at the Deutz Gas Engine Works ran on pure ethanol. In 1915, when oil shortages seemed likely to paralyse Germany’s transportation system, thousands more engines were quickly modified to run on ethanol. In retrospect, it seems possible that Germany could have been beaten by 1917 if the production of alcohol from beet sugar had not formed an important part of the agricultural economy.

  Perhaps the Kaiser gave time to thank that Prussian ancestor who had encouraged Marggraf to work with beet sugars, but perhaps those whose menfolk died in the mud and blood of Flanders would have been less appreciative of the part sugar played in prolonging a war that nobody could really win. But then again, sugar had long been killing human beings.

  SUGAR AND HEALTH

  Buddha said it was no sin for the sick to ask for gur, and from the time of the Romans through to the Middle Ages sugar was more a medical treatment than a treat. Thomas Aquinas approved of sugar being administered during Lent, but there were others with different views. By 1606 the French physician Joseph Du Chesne had already stated that sugar was essentially dangerous, that its whiteness was hiding dark perils.

  On the other hand, the British physician Tobias Venner wrote in 1620 that ‘sugar by how much the whiter it is, by so
much the purer and wholesomer it is . . .’. Venner also argued that tobacco was health-giving, so he may not be a reliable source. In 1647 another doubtful commentator, the French-born British author Theophilus Garencières, accused sugar of being the cause of Tabes Anglica, later known as consumption and which we now call tuberculosis. The same author was also rather keen on ‘tincture of coral’ as a general cure, and used the prophecies of Nostradamus to show that King Charles II would have a son. Sadly for both prophets’ reputations, Charles died childless.

  According to Garencières, sugar was ‘not only injurious to the lungs in its temperament and composition, but also in its entire property’, a view that found support from Dr Thomas Willis, commonly credited with the discovery of glycosuria in 1674, who not only quoted Garencières favourably, but expressed the opinion that in addition to tuberculosis, sugar was responsible for scurvy.

  In France too, sugar was under attack. Philippe Hecquet, at one time physician to Louis XIV, was associated with the Jansenists, an influential ‘puritan’ sect within Catholicism. He was adamant that sugar was an essentially treacherous substance, a poison that used pleasure as a lure. In fact, the theme of sugar as lure continues right up to the present day. In a similar way, the different materials used in sugar making have also come under attack. When Joseph Banks discussed the poor state of the teeth of the betel-nut chewers of Savu in 1770, he blamed the lime used in refining sugar:

  This loss of the teeth is . . . in my opinion is much easier accounted for by the well known corrosive quality of the lime, which is a necessary ingredient in every mouthfull and that too in no very insignificant quantity . . . Possibly the ill effects which sugar is beleivd by us Europeans to have upon the teeth may proceed from the same cause as it is well known that refin’d or loaf sugar contains in it a large quantity of lime.