Bittersweet (19 page)

GUNPOWDER

Take pulverized saltpetre, moisten it, and subject it to the action of a slow fire until completely dried and granulated, of this take 75 parts, purified sugar 12 and a-half parts, moisten and grind together till completely blended, which will require several hours, pulverize on heaters till dried.

Daniel Young,
Young's Demonstrative Translation
of Scientific Secrets
, Toronto, 1861

10
THE RISE OF
TECHNOLOGY

M
any problems faced the sugar cane planters of the Americas in the nineteenth century. They were beset by the loss of their slaves, by competition from new sugar-producing areas (both tropical cane and temperate beet) reducing the local demand and even competing for the export markets, and by irrational taxes and duties, all combining to reduce their profits.

They were left with no choice but to improve their performance. That meant applying the lessons of the Industrial Revolution and improving their crops by finding better canes and better ways to grow the canes. In the process, some people lost fortunes, others were thrown out of work and into grinding poverty, while a few made vast fortunes. The first step was to improve the technology—and that meant the end of the Jamaica Train, just as Brazilian growers were beginning to adopt it.

Sugar syrup boils at temperatures far higher than water boils, and one of the problems that Richard Ligon had noted around 1650 was that the great heat tended to burn out the copper pans in which the syrup was heated, especially as the level became lower. The last of the syrup would often ‘catch', leaving a flavour and colour in the next batch of sugar. The cost of replacing burnt-out copper pans was high, but replacing them with cheaper iron pans increased the amount of ‘catching', thus reducing the quality of the sugar, which was judged largely by colour.

Today, we would solve that by turning down the flame, but in those days, in the places where the sugar cane grew, gas was unavailable. The only real answer was to reduce the heat that was required, and that needed a vacuum pan, a sealed vessel under low pressure where syrup would boil at a sufficiently low temperature to stop the sugar catching.

An Englishman, the Hon. Edward Charles Howard, took out the first patent for a vacuum-pan method of evaporation in 1813, but it was a patent for a process, not a device. By 1827 there were just six of the systems in operation. The main aim was to concentrate the sugar solution while keeping inversion, the change to simple sugars, to a minimum. With its reduced temperature, the vacuum pan was a wonder, but it was largely an unused wonder.

Part of the problem was the taxation system then in place and the continuing attitude of the British government to sugar being refined in the colonies. The first vacuum-pan sugar arrived in England in 1833, and was deemed to be above the level of muscovado sugar, and so liable to a duty of £8 8s. per hundredweight. By 1845 it was accepted that this sugar should come in at 16s. 4d. per cwt, against 14s. for other sugars, the two classes being called ‘equal to white clayed by any process' or ‘yellow muscovado', and ‘not equal to white clayed or muscovado'— though this lesser product was then paradoxically called ‘brown muscovado'.

In 1837, the ‘centrifugal' was invented in France. There called an
essoreuse
and designed originally to dry textiles, this device inspired an English patent directed at sugar in 1843, which had an immediate effect. The centrifugal produced a drier sugar, allowing it to be transported in bags for the first time rather than in the more expensive barrels. In simple terms it was a spin-dryer—using the same principle as today's washing machines—and it led to yet another leap in the quality of the sugar produced in the sugar colonies. Bags also packed together tighter, allowing steamships to carry more in their holds.

In the same year of the English patent on a sugar centrifugal, Norbert Rillieux in Louisiana introduced, if he did not originate, multiple-effect evaporation, which was more efficient than other vacuum systems. There are other claimants to the invention, including Degrand and Derosne, but Rillieux had multiple-effect evaporation systems operating in Louisiana in 1848, three years before the rival patents, and he clearly deserves a major share in the credit. Delicately termed a ‘man of colour', he had trained in France, and his technique revolutionised sugar production.

While the planting, cultivation and harvesting of cane remained manual, after about 1820, even as world sugar prices plunged, steam engines began to appear, just here and there, as power sources for the mills. In 1845 the first railway in Cuba, or Latin America for that matter, was opened. From Havana to Güines, a distance of 70 kilometres, the railway could be used to transport cane much faster than horses, donkeys or cattle could haul it; this opened up the possibility of central mills servicing a number of owner-growers, a model previously discarded in a number of growing areas. The problem with a centralised mill had been that too much sugar might arrive in a short period, over-taxing the workers—but now mills could be made big enough to absorb the peaks of cane supply. More importantly, they could be powered by machines and required fewer workers.

In 1847 Earl Grey recommended that the British colonies use more central factories. The problem was commitment: most plantations were already set up with individual mills and, with capital hard to raise, nothing came of it. In 1871, when Antigua suffered hurricane damage, there was a chance for reform, but although a committee recommended a central factory system, there was no follow-up. Properties were selling so cheaply after the storm that people were able to make a profit still, even after rebuilding the small and inefficient mills.

By 1850 the vacuum pan was in wide use in other parts of the world, but Sir Henry Barkly, Governor of British Guiana, pointed out that the differential duties applied to vacuum-pan sugar by the home government had the effect of hindering the introduction of this method in the British colonies. On Java, where there were no restrictions on refining methods, 54 of the 95 contract factories used the vacuum pan in 1856, and after about 1865 it became the normal equipment in all new mills.

DEPRESSION AND BEET SUGAR

The war between beet and cane was far from over. In 1836 the best beet sugar yield was about 5.5 per cent by weight; by 1936 it was 16.7 per cent. Part of this increase came from improved plants, but more came from better methods of extraction. In 1866 Jules Robert developed a diffusion process for extracting sugar from beet, in which thin slices are treated to systematic extraction by circulating dilute juice at 90°C, leaving most of the albuminoids behind in the unruptured cells while extracting the sugar. Albuminoids carry large amounts of protein into the syrup, which must be removed. With Robert's new method, beet sugar could now be produced more cheaply. By 1880 beet sugar began to threaten cane sugar in price and volume; in 1884 the price of sugar plunged, and in 1885 the world produced more beet sugar than cane sugar. And after about the 1850s, sugar beet was growing in places like Utah, where it gained a benefit from the high cost of freighting cane sugar from anywhere else.

The problems of cane sugar did not stop there. Beet sugar could be produced as white granules, and lost no weight in transit, something the wholesalers appreciated. Beachey reports that one prominent confectioner said in 1889:

No self-respecting confectioner will be bothered with the huge dirty casks and syrupy bags in which cane sugar is imported now; he may buy some of it for special work (as for gingersnaps) but can rarely use it without special examination.

In one market though, the whiteness of beet sugar was a drawback. In the 1890s an estimated 1500 tons of dyed beet sugar with a strong chemical smell sold as ‘Yellow Demerara' every week in London. The sugar crystals were doctored to look like Demerara by adding a small amount of sulfuric acid to the clarified beet juice: the cost was only a few shillings a ton, but provided a premium of £1 or £2 a ton.

The name ‘Demerara Crystals' was in fact a trade name for brownish yellow sugar coming from Demerara, later part of British Guiana, but in November 1913 a High Court appeal in London upheld the decision of a Metropolitan Police Magistrate that the name applied to a
type
of sugar, and not to its origin. One of the appeals judges argued that the prepared sugar in question was Demerara in every respect other than its origin, and that if people were offered natural sugar from Demerara, in its natural state and colour, they would probably refuse it.

As well as competition of this sort, sugar makers everywhere had to deal with taxes and bounties written to win votes and gain favours. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, and in the early twentieth century, there was a continuing international brawl over sugar bounties, especially those paid by France and Germany, which were mainly paid for exported sugar. In October 1900 the Sugar Bounties Conference met once more and France, Germany and Austria agreed to end direct bounties, with France ending some of the indirect bounties. This was encouraged in part by India having placed a countervailing duty on subsidised sugar to help the Indians on Mauritius. It was also aided by the revelation that Germany's sugar cartel had been making huge profits. The French voters were now incensed that the British paid less than half of what they paid in France for the same sugar—to the benefit of the beet-growers and the refiners.

Many foreign governments, but especially America, revelled in the idea of countervailing duties, which involved placing a tax equal to the subsidy on any sugar coming from the nation subsidising their sugar. In simple terms, the nation applying the countervailing duty was able to milk a nice little cash cow at the expense of a foreign government and its taxpayers. What could be sweeter?

The sugar prices were down because there was just too much sugar around. One solution, of course, was to turn the excess into alcohol; but the European rum made from the white crystals of beet sugar lacked flavour. This did not faze the German rum makers, who sent commercial agents to scour the Caribbean for strong-flavoured rums that could be diluted as much as 7:1 with German spirits. The German rum industry prospered, and by 1914 Germany had 6000 distilleries producing 66 million gallons of alcohol per year. The First World War put an end to German ships carrying flavoursome rum from the West Indies, but that mattered little, because Germany had a greater need for all that unflavoured alcohol. It would be used to fuel the German war machine.

IMPROVING THE CANE

Sugar cane is a grass and, like other grasses, it reproduces by setting seed, while fragments that are placed in the ground will also take root. Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not, the only variety of cane that came out of Persia into the Mediterranean lands, and then into and across the Atlantic, was a sterile form.

Over time, with growers habitually using cuttings to plant new crops and start new areas, the sugar cane had become a giant sterile clone that never produced flowers or set seed. This did not matter for production, since the cane grew so well from setts. The crop had no genetic diversity, however, and any pest that became established had a clear run, especially as sugar cane tended to be planted as almost the only crop, with fields lasting three or four years before they were retired and replanted in rotation. It was an ideal situation for wandering pests, and may explain why sugar production died out in many places.

The sterile cane, a dark slender form known as ‘Creole', was the only one grown until Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the French sailor and explorer and equal of James Cook, found the ‘Otaheite' cane in Tahiti in 1768. This was the cane which Cook used to make beer soon afterwards. Bougainville took samples to Mauritius (then called Ile de Bourbon) in 1768, where the cane was named ‘Bourbon'. Around 1780, someone named Cossigny (probably Joseph-François Charpentier de Cossigny de Palma) brought more of this cane to Mauritius and Réunion, and cane from Java reached these islands at about the same time. By 1789, the new canes had reached the French West Indies.

The ‘Bourbon' cane was carried to St Vincent in the West Indies with William Bligh in 1793, after a delay caused by a certain Fletcher Christian. A single plant reached Jamaica in 1795, and more specimens arrived in 1796. ‘Batavian' cane reached Martinique in 1797, and from there reached Louisiana in 1818, where it was the dominant variety to about 1900.

From the 1790s until the 1890s ‘Bourbon' was the principal cane variety grown in the West Indies. It was dropped only when there was an outbreak of the red rot disease that Buddha had referred to as
manjitthika
, and it was replaced by resistant strains of lower yield. These ‘native canes' were variants collected from various parts of the world, often of uncertain provenance, going by names such as ‘Transparent', ‘Tanna' and ‘Cheribon', and identified mainly by their rind colours.

Cane ranges in diameter from 12.5 mm to 50 mm (1/2 inch to 2 inches); it has regular nodes along its length, and is covered in a tough rind that surrounds an inner fleshy pith where the sugar is stored, though the ‘Bourbon' or ‘Otaheite' cane has a softer rind, making it better for chewing. The original cane taken to the Mediterranean and then to the New World appears to have been a hybrid of
Saccharum barberi
and
S. officinarum
, as we now understand it. The
Saccharum officinarum
described by Linnaeus in 1753 was probably the ‘Creole' cane.

The ‘Tanna' cane was first seen by James Cook at the Pacific island of Tanna in the southern New Hebrides in 1774, in a garden he described in his journal as ‘laid out by line, abounding with plantains, sugar-canes, yams, and other roots, and stocked with fruit-trees'. This cane was taken to Mauritius in 1870, and soon afterwards, to nearby Fiji and Hawaii. Around the world, there were now a number of varieties and the obvious next step would be to hybridise them, but it was accepted wisdom that sugar cane did not grow from seedlings.