Sugar in the Blood (26 page)

The daily life of the plantation had a distinct rhythm in which the slaves played their part and the planter his. Plantation dwellers tended to be early risers, but Robert Cooper was woken by his body slave, who, after rousing him, padded around the room opening the jalousied windows that overlooked the manicured grounds of the great house. Then the slave ferried vat after vat of boiling water upstairs from the kitchen fire to fill a bath, where he washed Robert Cooper’s hair and soaped his back. He dried him meticulously, helped him dress and finally arranged his hair.

Breakfast followed. This was usually a prodigious affair, particularly if guests were staying. One such visitor declared that it was “
as if they had never eaten before.” And no wonder, as the meal that she was treated to comprised “a dish of tea, another of coffee, a bumper of claret, another large one of hock negus; then Madeira, sangaree, hot and cold meat, stews and fries, hot and cold fish, pickled and plain, peppers, ginger sweetmeats, acid fruit, sweet jellies—in short it was all as astounding as it was disgusting.”

The majority of Robert Cooper’s black charges had an altogether more rude entry to the day. Woken before sun-up by the clamorous sound of the bell atop the mill, the first gang hauled themselves off the floors of their fetid huts and quickly splashed their faces with cold water, before being led to the cane fields by the overseer. When they arrived a register was called and the absentees were noted, to be punished later. Then the slaves, armed with their hoes and machetes, fork and baskets, were set to work until nine o’clock, when they were allowed half an hour to consume their starchy breakfast of food such as boiled yams and plantains, a diet which had not changed much since the time of George Ashby.

After breakfast, the slaves returned to the fields until midday, when they were allowed a two-hour break for lunch, which was yet another starchy meal enlivened with salt fish or pig’s tail, which they received as part of their weekly rations. Desperate to up productivity, some planters gave their charges less time to recuperate, but this was almost always counterproductive as exhausted slaves worked less effectively or fell ill. Then the slaves returned to work under the blazing sun, tormented by rats, snakes and scorpions. Meanwhile Robert Cooper, after his daily tour around the plantation to check on his assets, retired to his study to pore over his ledgers. Then there was usually a substantial cooked lunch and perhaps a rejuvenating post-prandial nap.

Arising refreshed, Robert Cooper returned to his study while his slaves toiled until sunset, when they were dismissed by the sound of the bell, having worked for a minimum of ten hours. The slaves returned to their quarters often worn to distraction, but knowing that their day was not over: there were children to attend to, homes to be cleaned, allotments to be tended and food to be cooked.

It was a point of honour in plantation society that no menial activity was undertaken by anyone but a slave, so Robert Cooper and his contemporaries would do as little for themselves as was humanly possible. Slaves were called to swat flies and lift balls of wool that had fallen to the ground. This “learned helplessness” provoked frequent comment from visitors to the island. One army officer related this tale:

After a generous dinner and a couple of hours either with his family or in the solitude of his study, Robert Cooper climbed the stairs to his room, where his body servant pulled off his boots, helped him out of his clothes, and held the chamber pot for him to piss in. As he clambered
into bed, the slave extinguished the oil lamps and said good night. Then the slave slipped out of the room and returned to the slave quarters, or lay down on his pallet on the bedroom floor, hoping that his master would not need him in the night.

Despite his power at the head of this vast organization, Robert Cooper himself served a hard master: sugar. The demands of that crop shaped his hours, days and months, as it did everyone’s at Burkes. In Barbados the climate was sympathetic enough to allow the canes to be planted at almost any season, but a pattern emerged around the harvest, which began roughly at the end of January and continued to the end of July. Since the sugar was simultaneously harvested and processed during these months, this was easily the busiest period, during which the overseer shouted louder, the slave-drivers pushed the workers harder, the drivers resorted to the whip more frequently, and the slaves worked their fingers to the bone, while the master fretted himself to the point of sleeplessness. Frequently the field hands worked all through the night cutting cane in order to get it to the mill on time. If the harvest went well it would finance Burkes for another year; if it went badly the whole plantation might be in jeopardy.

The day before cutting, the fields were burned to destroy vermin and the top leaves that slowed down the reapers. These conflagrations were astonishing visual spectacles but also made conditions on the plantation uncomfortable for everyone: the sound of the roaring flames was hellish, and the heat made such a furnace out of the fields that it was like breathing in steam, while the ashes that floated down on the crop irritated the skin and the sickly scent of burnt sugar hovered in the air. Then the harvest began in earnest. It was a two-stage process: first the reaping of the cane and then the complex factory process which transformed its syrup into those delectable brown or white crystals that had titillated the taste buds of the world. Robert Cooper would have overseen both these activities, riding up and down the cane breaks surveying his “shock troops” as they worked and liaising anxiously with the overseer about their progress.

Despite the West Indian planters’ rather euphemistic representation of cane cutting as an ancient art—as exotic as pearl diving in Japan or
grape picking in Italy—harvesting sugar is both arduous and dangerous. Historian Adam Hochschild claimed that:

Cane cutting has its own technique: the cutter steps forward, wraps his arms around a bundle of stalks and raises the blade up over the shoulder, bringing it down vigorously at the base, then he shaves the leaves off with a quick flick of the machete and piles the canes neatly. The discomfort of this motion means that the field hand has to learn quickly how to swing his blade with the least resistance. Cane cutters, both male and female, tend to have a unique physique, taut-muscled and broad-shouldered like a dancer or professional athlete. The sheer physical exertion associated with the task is such that an otherwise fit person is reduced to a standstill within twenty minutes, bent double and soaked with sweat. For those fuelled by an inadequate diet, as so many slaves were, the work was unimaginably exhausting.

But the physical dangers of cane cutting do not end with fatigue. There is also the ever-present danger of the wrenched back, the twisted ankle, rat and insect bites, pierced eardrums or the eye stabbed by a sharp cane leaf. But most gory of all is the slip of the blade, which is so common that cane cutters across the globe were—and still are—identifiable by the terrible scars on their lower legs. The monotony of the work is also debilitating, and the labourers must find that delicate balance between being attentive lest they injure themselves, and allowing their mind to drift away lest they go mad with boredom. Trapped within a prison of green and brown stalks, where sound is distorted and distances are impossible to calculate, the slaves must sometimes have been overwhelmed by claustrophobia, which could only be escaped if they kept on cutting.

The only work harder than cane cutting was cane holing. This task, which was usually undertaken in the August heat, first required the
slaves to prepare the land for planting by slashing and burning grass, shrubs and old cane; and then, working in pairs and equipped with hoes, they dug holes around eight inches deep and three feet long at very tight intervals. Cane tops were then inserted into the holes and packed with manure. In the French Antilles workers were expected to plant twenty-eight holes per hour, otherwise they were flogged. The work was so arduous that many planters, like Matthew Lewis in Jamaica, hired in jobbing slave gangs rather than use their own people. These slaves usually had a working life expectancy of only seven years before dying, according to one observer, like “overwrought or over-driven horses.”

The cane was transported from the fields to the factory either by mules or on the heads of the labourers. Then slaves fed the lengths of cane through the vertical rollers of the mills, while others cleared away the desiccated trash. Meanwhile, the sweet greyish liquid poured through the gutters straight into the boiling house. In this humid inferno the cane juice was crystallized by evaporation. After being allowed to stand in several large receivers, the juice was initially heated in shallow pans called clarifiers where it was tempered with lime. The calcium carbonate acted as a catalyst, prompting the sediment to sink to the bottom and the impurities to rise to the surface. Slaves continuously skimmed this “crust” off the liquid until it was tempered. Then the juice was boiled in a series of progressively smaller “coppers” until it was ready to enter the “tache” in which it was finally crystallized or “struck.”

The “striking” of the sugar was a delicate and crucial task which was left to one of the most valuable workers on the plantation: the boiler man. It was his job to test the bubbling brown liquid between thumb and forefinger until it could form a strand of a certain length. If his judgement was wrong an entire batch of sugar could be ruined, so a good boiler man was worth his weight in gold. Once this critical moment arrived, the sugar was ready to granulate, and was transferred to “coolers,” pans around which water was constantly pumped. Then the raw sugar was “potted”: that is, ladled into 1,800-pound hogsheads. These were placed on stone troughs in the curing house for two days, and then they were tapped and left to drain and mature for several weeks before being weighed, transported and shipped. Meanwhile the dark molasses that was drained from the hogsheads burbled further down into the distillery or “still house,” where it was either siphoned into containers
and exported raw, or processed into rum. (This was another extremely lucrative by-product of cane, since every man in Britain’s navy was guaranteed a ration of rum each day.)

More than one observer compared the scenes in the sugar mills to Dante’s inferno. Here near-naked slaves laboured in the glow of the flames and the roaring noise and the ferocious heat of the boiler room. Since cane juice ferments swiftly after it is pressed from the canes, this entire process of “civilizing sugar” is a brisk and brutal one. Slaves worked up to eighteen hours a day during the harvest, first to cut and transport the canes and then to extract the juice and manufacture the raw sugar. Inevitably they were exhausted and accidents were commonplace; and so an axe was kept handy to sever the limbs that got trapped in the machinery. The range of potential perils for workers in the factory was intimidating: as one contemporary noted, “
If a stiller slips into a rum cistern, it is sudden death: for it stiffes in a moment. If a mill-feeder be catch’d by the finger, his whole body is drawn in, and he is squeezed to pieces. If a boyler get any part into the scalding sugar, it sticks like glue or birdlime, and ’tis hard to save either limb or life.” The danger of this work explains the oft-repeated tale of two Barbadian female mill feeders. Chained together as a punishment, when one caught her arm in the roller, despite the fact that “every effort was used to stop the mill,” wrote Joseph Senhouse, the other “female negro, was dragged so close to those cylinders, that her head was severed from her body.”

Settling the sugar islands took one kind of man; exploiting them took another. Frontiersmen like George Ashby had stolen most of the dramatic roles: taming a wilderness, battling indigenous populations, resisting pirates. The work left to planters like Robert Cooper was altogether more quotidian. His goal was to maintain the plantation and increase its turnover, which required him to be a farmer, a factory manager and an accountant, all rolled into one. He also had to be a good businessman, adroit at negotiating the best price for his sugar and constantly mindful of the bottom line. Most importantly, he had to know how to inspire and intimidate his charges so that he got the best out of them. As Trevor Burnard concluded: “
Managing a sugar estate was hard work and required a hard man.”

For most of the year, Robert Cooper would have spent more time in his study than in the fields. He was responsible for ordering all the essentials for the estate, right down to the smallest detail. A sugar planter had to order at least five different kinds of ropes, including one for the mill, one for the cattle, another for the trees. For the great house, there were candles, furniture and food; for the field there were cutlasses, hoes and spades; whips, shackles and chains. For the factory, there were ladles and skimmers as well as harnesses for the cattle that transported the cane. The carpenters on the property needed a constant supply of nails, boards and hammers; the masons needed bricks and stones; the shoemakers needed leather and blades; the blacksmith needed bellows and irons. There were horses to be purchased, vegetable gardens to be restocked and poultry to be replaced.