Sugar, Molasses, and Rum

The sugarcane, native to Southeast Asia, saccharum officinarium L, is a stout, tall perennial grass averaging 10 to 12 feet. The plant was developed in Neolithic times and was dispersed to the Middle East and Mediterranean regions before it made its greatest impact in the New World in an island-hopping trail.

The Portuguese implemented the spread of the sugar industry beyond Europe. Sugar was produced profitably in Algarve, and Portugal's interest in the wealth derived from Morocco's sugar plantations was likely the driving force for invasion and expansion into Africa. Their islands in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa became important centers in the fifteenth century. Decline in production in Madeira influenced planters to move to the Canary Islands, where they established sugarcane husbandry on Gran Canaria, Tenerife, La Palma, and Gomera. Both Madeira and the Canary Islands played roles in its transfer to Cape Verde and São Tomé. The sugar structure was developed on São Tomé, and eventually passed to the other side of the Atlantic.

On the Canaries, producers consisted of mill owners and cane farmers (colonos, in nineteenth-century Cuba). Similarly, labor on plantations was provided by renters or sharecroppers, and enslaved Africans, who formed the main labor force in the development of Atlantic sugar industry.

Columbus introduced sugarcane into Española in the Caribbean region in 1493. The sugar economy did not take off, but the foundations of the Atlantic plantation system were firmly laid there. The industry passed to Cuba as the Spanish settlers in Española moved to the mainland in search of mineral wealth. In the second half of the sixteenth century Cubans initiated a sugar industry whose high-quality product formed the basis for its entrenchment in the nineteenth century.

In about 1515 the Portuguese carried sugarcane from São Tomé to Brazil, where production began in the 1530s along the coast, where the climate and topography combined to produce several of the finest conditions for a sugar economy. The Sephardic Jews and "New Christians" combined to help to finance the establishment of the industry; their coreligionists and familial linkages in various ports in the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, their predominant position in the Dutch economy and the Portuguese colonial trades, and their involvement in the industry itself allowed them to fill positions in all areas of sugar production. Although sugar existed in Mexico as early as 1524, Brazil was the most prolific sugar economy until the Caribbean Islands surpassed it.

On Barbados in the 1630s settlers busily searched for a replacement for cotton and tobacco, which, along with honey and ginger, had reached their zenith. They had stiff competition in the English markets, and the quality of tobacco was poor. With the help of the Dutch and Jews, canes were planted on Barbados in 1641. Early attempts at production met with poor results. Therefore, in 1649, the planters revolutionized their method of husbandry from planting canes obliquely in holes to planting cane cuttings in trenches and allowing the canes to mature for roughly fifteen months. This change improved the sugar produced. Cane holes, which allowed extensive rattooning, became the preferred method of husbandry in the Caribbean. From Barbados, sugar production spread to the British Lesser Antilles and Jamaica towards the latter half of the seventeenth century. The industry expanded significantly during the nineteenth century in the territories belonging to the United States, including Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Similarly, it was reintroduced into Cuba and Santo Domingo in the nineteenth century, and flourished in twentieth-century Cuba, but the sugar economy that made the greatest advancement was India's.

Sugar also has been produced from beets since as early as the eighteenth century. In 1747 a Prussian chemist, Andreas Sigismund Marggraf (1709–1782), discovered the process of isolating and crystallizing sucroseed from beet roots. With the destruction of Haiti, Napoleon Bonaparte encouraged the production of beet sugar. This has become a major crop in Europe and North America.

Until the eighteenth century there were two principal mill structures: animal and water. The trapiche was an industrial mechanism drawn by draft animals with rollers for grinding canes that were probably originally horizontal. (In later mills, the rollers were constructed vertically, allowing for more effective extraction of the cane's juice.) Gonzalo de Vellosa is credited with having built it around 1516. The ingenios (engenhos in Portuguese) were larger and water-operated, and were more productive than trapiches. Both mills had the basic systems of wheels, gears, and presses. Windmills existed mainly in Barbados. There were various innovations introduced to both types of mill, but no significant changes were made until the adoption of steam engines at the end of the eighteenth century.

The major fuel for running grinding mills and distilling operations was firewood, which contributed heavily to the deforestation of the islands. Mill owners eventually adapted their furnaces to burn megasse/bagasse (the peel of the sugarcane). Also, mill owners experimented with new containers to save energy. The most innovative use of energy was the arrangement of the kettles to allow a single furnace or fire to heat the syrup in all: the largest kettle containing fresh cane syrup was furthest from the heat, allowing for better evaporation, and then the size of the kettles decreased as they got closer to the furnace. A five-kettle arrangement was known as the Jamaica train in the British West Indies; it was widely imitated by producers in others nations such as France. As the sugar factory developed, the trains contained up to nine kettles. The factory was usually centrally located and cooperatively owned. Subsequently, it was outfitted with steam engines that used coal for fuel. The invention of the vacuum pan in the 1830s revolutionized the manufacture of sugar and made it possible for the liquid in the sugar to evaporate at much lower temperatures than previously. Its general adoption in the British Caribbean materialized slowly because of the economic decline of the sugar industry and the impending end of slavery.

In the older system of processing, or wash, during its conversion cane juice produces a scum known as molasses. This is removed and stored in special containers to be used in rum production. Rum making was probably the only manufacturing activity in which planters were engaged without opposition from imperial rulers. Molasses is taken from the holding tank to very large oak vats, where it is added to water in the ratio of about 1:8, depending on the level of alcohol desired. Yeast is added and consumes the sugar, producing alcohol and carbonic acid. The wash is transported to the still via pipes. There it is boiled and converted into steam, which passes through a coil called a worm pipe. At the end it is cooled, condenses into rum, and held in specially prepared tanks. The rum exceeds 140 proof (70% percent alcohol), which is too strong for consumption, so it is diluted with special water, colored, and placed into red-oak casks (which also color the rum) for aging. The processed rum is then carried to special tanks which are checked daily by the country's custom officers.

SEE ALSO Agriculture; Brazil; Empire, British; Empire, Dutch; Empire, French; Empire, Portuguese; Jamaica;Laborers, Coerced;Labor, Types of;Slavery and the African Slave Trade;Wine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Deerr, Noel. The History of Sugar. London: Chapman and Hall, 1949–1950.

Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

Galloway, J. H. The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Moreno Fraginals, Manuel. The Sugarmill: The Socioeconomic Complex of Sugar in Cuba, 1760–1860, tr. Cedric Belfrage. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976.

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Schwartz, Stuart, ed. Tropical Babylon: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Sitterson, Joseph Carlyle. Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753–1950. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1953.

Taylor, Kit Sims. Sugar and the Underdevelopment of Northeastern Brazil, 1500–1970. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978.

Selwyn H. H. Carrington