Bittersweet (6 page)

The first Atlantic islands were discovered about 40 BC. The date of an expedition to the Canaries is fixed by a description from the learned Juba II, King of Numidia (roughly equivalent to modern Algeria). Later, this visit was also recorded by Pliny. In 1334 a French ship was driven to the Canaries in bad weather, and later returned. By about 1352, Catalan and Mallorcan missionaries are believed to have visited the Canaries. After that, the Canary Islands and their population came under Spanish rule.

When the Portuguese arrived on Madeira in 1421 they found no inhabitants, but excellent timber, and land for all. Portuguese settlers poured in and by 1432 the first sugar was being refined there. Serious exports really only began somewhere between 1450 and 1460, when Madeiran sugar was first carried to England and Flanders. By 1500, Madeiran sugar was available all over Europe. Prince Henry (‘the Navigator') granted a licence for a water mill on Madeira in 1452, in exchange for one-third of the sugar produced there, but water-powered sugar mills remained rare.

It was at this point that slavery, the fourth curse of sugar, came into play. Slavery might have been stopped when the Papal Bull of 1454,
Romanus Pontilex
, allowed the conversion of native populations to Christianity. Unfortunately, that same bull gave Portugal a monopoly over the lucrative African slave trade. The Vatican said it was opposed to slavery in principle, but while Pope Pius II banned the enslavement of baptised Africans in 1462, and three other fifteenth-century popes condemned slavery in various terms, no practical measures were taken, and the slave trade began its exponential growth.

By 1470 sugar refineries had been established in Venice, Bologna and Antwerp to process imported raw sugar, setting the pattern that would hold through into the nineteenth century of cheap raw sugar being sent to metropolitan centres where expensive refined sugar would be made. The later restrictions on colonial refining were mainly to retain as much of the profit as possible in the ‘home' countries, while the role of the colonies was to supply cheap sugar. Sadly, cheap sugar required cheap labour, and that meant slaves.

There was another side to the question of where refining should take place. With the rather limited forms of refining in use until the twentieth century, and with long, slow sea voyages, the sticky crystals would lock together into a solid mass under the humid conditions at sea. This made refinement near the final market a necessity in order to get the best quality sugar. Until the steamship became common, sugar had to be refined close to the point where it was consumed. This is why Australia had a sugar refinery to process imported raw sugar 20 years before it grew successful sugar cane crops.

Toward the end of the fifteenth century, sea traffic on the Atlantic was increasing. Christopher Columbus was sailing the ocean, taking sugar cane to Madeira, where his wife's mother grew it. Around 1480 the first sugar cane was planted in the Canary Islands and, further south, the Portuguese settled the island of São Tomé in 1486. Originally using the children of

Sugar in the Atlantic from AD 1500 onwards.

Jews expelled from Spain as slaves on São Tomé, they soon afterwards brought in black slaves, and planted sugar cane there. As these and other new centres came into operation, using more efficient production methods, sugar became a bigger and bigger player in the world's politics.

By 1496 Madeira was shipping 1700 tons of sugar to Venice, Genoa, Flanders and England, and there were about 80 mills on the island. A few years later, an attack of ‘worm' reduced sugar production, and by 1600 grape vines had largely taken over until, in 1852, an attack of mildew blighted the vines, and led people back to sugar. Less than 20 years later, Madeira's sugar production was back to a third of what it had been in 1496, but in another reversal it was found possible to re-establish the grape vines. Only a small sugar production survived, but by now sugar cane had reached the New World, where it would become a crop of world importance.

A number of factors boosted the slowly developing sugar industry in the Americas. One was the division of the world between Portugal and Spain under the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1493, which kept the Spanish out of Africa, at the same time allowing the Portuguese into the coastal areas of Brazil. Having once gained a toehold, the Portuguese were able to penetrate well beyond the line set down under the treaty, with the Spaniards safely on the other side of the Andes.

The result of the treaty was to give Portugal—and other European countries who ignored the Portuguese ‘monopoly' and moved in on the slave trade that Portugal claimed—rights in Africa to obtain and transport slaves to the Spanish dominions. While trade with foreign ships was not officially allowed in the Spanish colonies, once the slave ships were actually at anchor in the Spanish colonial ports, commercial transactions took place, and so other countries became more aware of prospects in the West Indies. It also led to the establishment of a string of English, French and Portuguese forts in western Africa that became the seeds of the African colonial possessions that would leave permanent traces on the African map.

Events in the eastern Mediterranean also helped boost sugar in the New World. For instance, when the Turks took Syria in 1516, the Syrian sugar industry collapsed. Between 1520 and 1570 the Turks conquered Cyprus, Crete, Egypt, the Aegean and much of the north African coastal belt. Sugar prices rose as those industries crumbled, and that made it easier for adventurers to get the money they needed to grow sugar elsewhere. The Mediterranean sugar industry may also have been influenced by climatic change, with the ‘Little Ice Age' of 1550–1700 taking perhaps 1–2°C off temperatures as well as reducing rainfall. Brazil, on the other hand, had plenty of rain, all the fuel it needed close at hand, and an excellent labour supply.

By the time Syria fell, Brazilian sugar was already being taxed when it arrived at Lisbon. King Manuel had ordered that a sugar master be sent to Brazil, and the first
trapiche
, an animal-or human-powered mill, had been built on San Domingo. The slaves on São Tomé had been growing sugar for around 30 years, but most of the New World slaves were used in the search for gold. That proportion would soon change as it became apparent that gold was easier to win by cultivating the sugar cane than by digging mines. By 1550 the pattern of slavery and sugar had been set.

FOR THE SMALL POX . . . AND BITING OF A MADD DOGG

Take of sage and Rhue of each a handfull, one spoonfull of Pewter scrapt very small, 3 heads of garlick halfe a pd: of running treacle, put all into a quart of strong Ale and put all into a pipkin with a liner and past it up very close. Let it stand in a gentle fire until half be consumed. If the smallpox fall suddenly flat and turne blew then give it to a man 5 or 6 spoonfulls at a time, to a child 2 or 3. If the party be in grave danger give this in 2 or 3 hours. The treacle here meant runy like syrup and is not above 8 pence a pound.

Bradford ms, no date

3
SUGAR IN THE
NEW WORLD

H
ow should we remember Christopher Columbus? Others had sailed the Atlantic Ocean before him, settling islands and meeting the locals. St Brendan, the Irish monk, crossed the Atlantic in a leather cockleshell, and Leif Eiriksson reached North America as well. When the English cod fishers reached the cod-rich banks of Newfoundland in 1480, the secretive Basques of southern France and northern Spain were already there, twelve years before Columbus reached the West Indies.

THE ITALIAN NAVIGATOR

Columbus cannot claim to have worked out that the world is a globe, because the Greeks knew all about the spherical Earth 2000 years before he set sail. They used evidence including the Earth's shadow appearing as a circle on the moon in a lunar eclipse; the way a ship's hull disappears before the masts as the ship stands out to sea; and even the relative time of day or night an eclipse of the sun or the moon was seen in different parts of the Mediterranean.

Some time before 200 BC, Eratosthenes measured the globe's size using noonday sightings of the sun at Aswan and Alexandria to estimate the circumference of the Earth. We know that he was within about 4 per cent of the true size, though scholars made a botch of it for many years. But Eratosthenes had more to say, and he said it plainly: ‘If the extent of the Atlantic Ocean were not an obstacle, we might easily pass by sea from Iberia to India, keeping in the same parallel.' People had always travelled east by land to the Indies and China. On foot it was a long way, and their estimates always set the Indies a greater distance to the east than they were. The other problem was that Eratosthenes had measured the world in a unit called a stadion, and nobody knew quite how big a stadion was, so they had to guess as well as they could. Sadly, their ‘modern' stadion was too small by one part in four, and that made the Earth smaller than it is. That led them to think the Indies even closer to Europe, barely over the horizon from the Atlantic islands.

It was only logical that somebody would try sailing to the Indies, just across the Atlantic to the west. All Columbus did was to try what Eratosthenes had suggested. Of course Columbus made a small mistake, that scholars' botch I mentioned before. Knowing roughly how big the planet was thought to be, and that all the best spices and gold and sugar came from the Indies, Columbus worked out how far it would be if he went west instead of east.

Perhaps we should recall Columbus for the deed that would change the West Indies forever—taking sugar cane from La Gomera in the Canary Islands to Hispaniola on his second trip in 1493. By that simple act, he probably did more than anybody else to shape the Americas of today. Many of the events that moulded the New World had their roots in the cane fields, one way or another.

The conquistadors who came after Columbus thought the cane was a native of the West Indies, since it could be seen growing in Indian villages visited by Europeans for the first time. Then Spanish priests reported that sugar cane grew also in the Philippines, and made up complicated stories of traders carrying it across the Pacific. The simpler explanation was that when people saw and tasted the marvellous cane, it didn't take them long to grow their own. Nor did it take others long to trade bits of the cane to villages further afield, and in this way sugar cane swept through the West Indies faster than the conquistadors could expand. Sadly for the Indians, though, the conquistadors were spreading fast.

GOD'S FIRST PRIEST IN THE INDIES

Bartolomé de Las Casas was a Dominican missionary on Cuba in 1514, the first priest ordained in the Indies. He had a grant of land to help him do God's work, with a hundred local Caribs attached to the land as serfs. Within three years, this gentle and decent man was horrified to see how the Caribs sickened and died when they were forced to work, and how they were slaughtered by the Spanish colonists when they revolted. It would be better, he told the Court in Spain, to bring in Africans who were inured to such labour. He believed the choice to be the lesser of two evils, but he thought the lesser evil to be hardly an evil at all, for the African slaves in Spain seemed happy enough, and they were clearly better able to carry out hard work in the mines. In any case, the mines would soon be worked out, and the slaves could then be freed to a life of agriculture.

Instead, the trade grew ever larger, and African slaves soon began to outnumber their white masters. In 1530 there were 3000 slaves on San Domingo, and just 327 Spaniards. By 1547, de Las Casas was Bishop of Chiapa in Mexico, but he resigned his bishopric to return to Spain to campaign against the slave trade—the lesser evil he himself had suggested for the benefit of the Caribs and their peaceful neighbours, the Arawaks. It took three and a half centuries, five normal full spans of three-score years and ten, to abolish what he thought he could end as quickly as he had started. That same five life spans would be some 35 working lives of the African slaves, who never lived as long as free men, because slavery was cruel and brutal in the extreme.

At one stage, de Las Casas had great hopes that the King would listen to what he had to say, but early in 1555 that chance slipped away as Charles V began to fear for his own soul. He abdicated the throne and devoted the rest of his life to prayer in a little house next to the monastery of Yste, seeking salvation through prayer rather than by doing good deeds. If the king had struck against slavery then, perhaps half of all those who would eventually be hauled across the seas and worked to death might have been spared. Bartolomé de Las Casas gave the rest of his days to the fight, but he never again got close to winning.

His countrymen were not necessarily cruel to slaves
per se
. Like the English and most other nationalities at the time, they were just cruel to other humans in their power, making no particular discrimination between free men and slaves. It was normal to treat other human beings badly. People were still being burnt at the stake, and public executions, hangings, drawings and quarterings were a common enough ending for many a free man, and even a few women. Horrible things were done to the slaves, but mostly because they outnumbered the whites, and needed to be terrorised to remind them they had no rights. After all, no rational man would beat, murder or maim a slave, any more than he would beat a cart horse beyond what was needed to make it work, for slaves and horses were property, and both cost money to replace.