Sugar Changed the World: Part Two

The overseer prowls nearby, mounted on horseback, a rawhide whip fastened to his saddle.

The painstaking work had just one aim: to plant a crop that would end up taking the life of every worker who touched it.

Their huts, which ought to be well covered, and the place dry where they take their little repose, are often open sheds, built in damp places; so that when the poor creatures return tired from the toils of the field, they contract many disorders, from being exposed to the damp air in this uncomfortable state.

As a weeder, your job was to carefully pick away the undergrowth that could choke the cane stalks and stop them from growing tall enough, or that might attract vermin.

The tangle of unwanted plants was set alight, but fire is not easy to control, and there was always the chance that high winds — or the anger of brutalized slaves — might whip up the flames, and soon a roaring blaze would engulf the fields.

Slaves were given long, sharp machetes, which would be their equipment — but for some also their weapons — until the harvest was done.

The liquid rushed down a wooden gutter directly into the boiling house, a building of massive furnaces and cauldrons, where the syrup was heated and strained and turned into crystals.

The boiling house was as perilous as the mills, for if a person nodded off for a second, he or she could slip into a bubbling vat.

In Brazil, the crystals sat out for a month to dry, watched over by the “mothers of the platform”—enslaved women who knew how to tend the grains carefully, separating out the purest, whitest sugar from less valuable brown granules.

The lives of sugar workers were ruled by the cane, and by the relentless pace of work.

These overseers are indeed for the most part persons of the worst character of any denomination of men in the West Indies.

The master is pale and bloodless, as if he were more a wraith or vampire than a person.

But on the sugar islands, while more than two million people were brought over from Africa, there were only 670,000 at emancipation.

And when, in 1662, England’s Charles II married Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess, she brought Bombay as part of her dowry, and a taste for tea to the English court.

Tea is generally served warm and can have any one of many pleasant or enticing scents.