Bittersweet (2 page)

INTRODUCTION

I
t was cold in much of tropical New Guinea, 9000 years ago, as the last Ice Age was dying. Even close to the equator, the mountain ranges held glaciers and snow frosted the peaks in white all year round. Still, it was warmer on the coastal plain, and there was plenty of food growing in the jungle. There were worse places to live back then, even if some of the warmth came from volcanic activity.

Volcanoes have been good for humans, right across the sweep of islands that almost links Australia to Asia. The Australian continental plate is too thick and tough to crack or wrinkle as it slides north at the speed of a growing fingernail, so New Guinea and Indonesia take all the force. The islands are Australia's crumple zone, and all over the area volcanic outpourings and earthquakes are normal. The high mountains of New Guinea, pushed up by the progress of the Australian plate, wring water from the passing tropical clouds to feed the many rivers, and the plant growth in the rich soil is luxurious. To the west of New Guinea, most of Indonesia's islands are volcanic as well.

Volcanic rocks make fertile soil. In tropical areas, the monsoon rains of the wet season leach out the minerals that plants need, but volcanoes replace the minerals just as quickly, covering worn-out soil with ash, or with lava that breaks down after a century or so into rich soil. It is an ideal place to farm, or to discover how to farm.

Volcanoes also provide raw materials that humans can use for tools. There is obsidian for blades to slice food, pumice for shaping wood, and thin basaltic flows and dykes that cool quickly to make sheets of a special stone that is almost like metal. In time, these sheets break up and the bits become cobbles in the rivers, ringing and rattling their way slowly down to the sea.

Picking these special stones out from the other cobbles is easy. The best blade-making stones are darker, with a glossier sheen, and when struck they ring like a bell. They also have holes in the surface, because the lava cooled fast, forming a glassy mass rather than crystals. As the pressure eased, gas bubbles expanded in the congealing rock, but they had no time to escape from the viscous lava before it cooled. Trapped in the rock, the bubbles pock the smooth surface of the rounded fragments and mark these fist-sized, rounded cobbles as special.

If they are struck hard enough on another boulder, at just the right angle, the stone will split to produce slivers of serrated blade, as sharp as razors. The cores that are left form choppers that make short work of trees and vines. Sometimes, a gas bubble made a hole right through the piece, and a leather thong could be threaded though the blade to hang around the neck. Polished and attached to timber handles, they made axes and adzes that were prized and traded over wide areas, being exchanged for pigs, shells, feathers, obsidian from far away, or even for brides. The volcanic stone blades made life easier, and gave neighbouring tribes more cohesion as they traded with each other.

Although the worst of the Ice Age was over 9000 years ago, it was still cold on the mountains, and so people lived close to the plain, hunting animals and gathering plants where they could be found. There was a pattern though, for the life of a hunter-gatherer is planned around the weather patterns that determine the food cycle.

In the tropics, where weather is driven by the monsoons, there is a wet season and a dry season, and in between there are different stages of drying out. Even in apparently steady conditions, migratory birds fly through on their way to or from Australia and so there are plenty of clues to judge the seasons by and, even near the equator, a wealth of micro-seasons. Even so, the wet season can't escape notice.

The term ‘wet season' is a limp description of what really happens over several months of the southern summer. Not long after noon each day, the clouds roll in from the sea and pile up, the only warning of what is to come. When the rain starts, it is no gentle pattering shower but a sudden drumming, mind-numbing onslaught that terrifies and confuses. There is no thunder in the sky, just thunder on the trees as the rain sweeps in, thunder on the ground as it pours off the trees, and thunder in the heads of those trapped in the open by the rain, which descends at the rate of an inch (25 millimetres) or more in a mere 20 minutes. When you are out in rain like this, you only have one thought, and that is to get out of the downpour. There is only room for that one thought, so shelter is essential, at least until the rain passes, as quickly as it arrived.

THE BIRTH OF CANE FARMING

There are, and were, many staple foods on the island of New Guinea, most of them rather bland to European tastes; but growing wild in the jungle was a giant member of the grass family, as thick as bamboo, but not hollow like a bamboo stem. The stem was filled with juicy pith, and it could be chewed, sucked gently, then crushed between strong back teeth to release the delicious sweet sap inside. This was sugar cane, destined to be one of the first crops domesticated by humans, perhaps even the first agricultural crop, somewhere low on a New Guinea mountainside.

The easy way for a hunter-gatherer to harvest wild cane is to chop some of the long stems off at the base with a stone axe, and carry a bundle of long canes home over the shoulder, where they can be cut into smaller pieces with a smaller hand-held chopper, and shared out to chew on under shelter as the wet season rains beat down.

All that was needed for shelter was a simple open hut of the sort still seen all over the tropical Pacific. It has corner posts of timber, a roof of leaves or grass thatch, a palm-leaf mat resting on a bamboo platform where you can sit comfortably with your feet out of the mud, and places to store food, tools and other items that would otherwise be buried in the mud when the daily torrent starts. Perhaps, one day in the wet season, nine millennia ago, a piece of cut cane fell from a platform and was trodden into the mud by somebody hurrying to outrun the rain as it roared up the hill, stripping leaves from the trees as it came.

Like all the grasses, sugar cane has a jointed stem, and its leaves and branches come from shoots at each joint. In lawn grasses the joints may be hard to see, because the leaves form a sheath around the stem, hiding the inner workings, but sugar farmers around the world know that you grow new sugar cane by cutting off lengths with two or three joints, and placing these in the ground. They know because somebody told them, just as somebody else told
them
, in a line that stretches all the way back to that first discovery, somewhere in New Guinea.

Stone Age people may use a different tool kit, but they come with the same brain kit as agricultural and industrial peoples, and somebody, seeing unexpected sugar canes growing near a shelter, might have been tempted to pull them out of the ground. Seeing the cut section of cane that the shoots were springing from, an ingenious mind might then have made the world's first experiment by planting some cane lengths deliberately.

The fine detail of how it came about matters little. What counts is that, around 400 generations in the past, New Guineans were the first to discover a crop that was destined to change much of the world. Without the combination of blades of volcanic stone, rich soil and ferocious rain, the discovery might have taken longer—but it is enough that somebody found that small pieces of cane poked into the ground would sprout and grow more sugar cane—and it would be easy enough to learn this in the wet season, in a land of rich and sticky volcanic soil.

New Guinea is identified as the place where sugar cane was first cultivated because one of the original species found in later hybrid canes is still growing there. The other components of the hybrid cane appear to have come from India, and botanists assume that the New Guinea cane was carried and traded all the way to India, where the first hybrid canes came into being. The rest of the argument is complex botany, but suffice it to say that for half a century, botanists have regarded sugar cultivation as a New Guinean invention.

So why did the cane travel so far in early times? Even when they lack a common language, humans develop ways of communicating, of synthesising what linguists call creole languages and lingua francas, capable of transmitting complex ideas—and traders will happily transmit the idea that this sort of stick is nice to chew on, and so worth trading. Even in New Guinea, where people in neighbouring valleys often speak entirely different tongues, marrying-out occurs—this is a polite way of saying that women are ‘traded', married off into other clans and tribes—and so methods and ideas travel from village to village.

A few men travelled more widely as traders of feathers, stone blades or other essentials of life. As they went, they would also help to spread new ideas about the sweet stick that grew when bits were poked into the ground. And that, of course, might have been the trigger to make other New Guineans start poking sticks in the ground, to see if they grew in the same way. Soon everywhere that sugar cane was found, people would have known the trick of putting bits in the ground. More importantly, sugar was being found in new places, as some of the extra bits were traded further afield, along with the key knowledge. And down in the lowlands, longer trading trips along the coast were possible using a creole language that has since blossomed as Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia, from Malaysia to the western half of New Guinea.

The word ‘creole' appears many times in the story of sugar. A creole language has a mixed but brief set of words which must often carry multiple meanings, and a recognisable syntax. These tongues arise whenever different racial groups come together. The Pidgin English of New Guinea uses words from many languages, but clearly has an Austronesian syntax, like Bahasa Indonesia. Creole languages also developed in Hawaii and many other sugar-growing regions. The wealthy planters of the Caribbean were called Creoles; the sugar cane that came to the Caribbean from the Mediterranean, the variety widely used across the world until the late 1700s, was called ‘Creole'; and so were some of the mixed-race groups which arose in sugar-growing areas.

Somewhere, sometime later, perhaps in India, perhaps somewhere else, somebody found that if you boiled cane juice in a metal pan, added some ash or other alkali, scooped off the skin on the surface and boiled the juice some more, sweet crystals formed. The art of making sugar had been discovered, and a new industry was invented.

THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SLAVE LINE

Just a teenager, I stood on a slight rise, watching the labour lines trudging across undulating ground. They were planting teak roots in a cleared patch of jungle on the coastal plain of Papua, setting the trees out in close rows. The procedure was simple and labour-intensive: lines of five men walked between stakes placed eight feet apart at each end of the ground they were filling that day. The stakes marked the rows where the trees were to go.

Each leader measured eight feet from the previous point, using his precisely cut pole, made a scratch and moved on to measure the next pole-length. Walking behind, the second man swung a pick to make a small hole and the next man, carrying a sack of teak roots cut early that morning, dropped a root beside the hole for the fourth man to poke into the ground. At the tail of the line, the last man jumped and landed, one bare foot to each side of the root, to firm the loose soil around the root.

It was a hot day at the start of the wet season, the perfect time to plant trees. The sun was almost overhead, and the clouds for the daily downpour were starting to mass up. The temperature was hovering around the century mark on the Fahrenheit scale, and the humidity was close to 100 per cent, but the labourers kept up a steady pace, back and forth, filling the cleared ground with future trees. As they went they chatted and laughed, but they never slowed their pace, except when they returned to the road. Then they stopped briefly to drink water or to cut a small piece of sugar cane from the lengths on the back of the truck, before the root-carriers took a new load of roots, and they set off again.

These were convict labourers, planting an export crop for a nation that did not yet exist, a crop that would one day provide the emerging nation of Papua New Guinea with foreign exchange. In Pidgin English, the creole language of the area, these were
kalabus
slaves
. They had all committed violent crimes in the highlands and had been sent to serve their sentences on the coast in a gaol, which had somehow acquired the name ‘calaboose', though with a local spelling—and a far cry from the original Spanish
calabozo
, which is a dungeon. Creole languages have few rules, and words mean whatever you like, so these were kalabus slaves.

The forestry officer standing with me explained that just one old man supervised the kalabus slaves, but they accepted that they were in the kalabus for a reason, they knew they would have good food and shelter that night, and the work was less boring than sitting in Boumana gaol. They knew they were a long way from home, and they had little idea of how to get there, so they were content to work out their sentences.

Soon the daily rains would come, just after midday, and the men would all scramble onto the back of the truck and return to their nominal prison. When the rain stopped they would tend the sugar cane, bananas and other plants in the small prison garden. While they called themselves kalabus slaves, it was an example of how an adopted word had mutated when it was taken into Pidgin, he said.

‘But they really
are
slaves, aren't they?' I asked. ‘I mean, they're made to work, and they get no pay . . .'

‘Not really,' said the man. ‘They get a bit of money, more than they'd get in gaol, but that's beside the point. By the time these trees are thinned, this'll be an independent nation, so when the thinnings are made into veneer, they and their kids will reap the profits, not us. Besides, you'll see convicts planting trees in Australia as well—it's the normal thing.'

Then he gave me a piece of advice that older men have been giving younger men for as long as humans have used forced labour. ‘Watch how you go,' he said. ‘You're very new here, and you're full of noble thoughts, but this is what we do and how we do it, so don't go saying too much, because some people won't like it. Now the rain's coming, so let's go.'