Bittersweet (13 page)

N. Irving Sax,
Handbook of Dangerous Materials,
New York, 1951

6
A SCIENCE OF SUGAR

H
enri Louis Duhamel du Monceau, the French agricultural encyclopaedist, recorded that the ‘Jamaica Train' was probably invented about 1700, but like all other advances in the art of making sugar, it was slow to spread. The Portuguese and the Spanish knew about simple sugar making because they had long been involved in making it on the Atlantic islands; it had given them a head start in the sugar industry in the Americas, but they seem to have given little thought to advancing their skills.

English planters were using the Jamaica Train around 1700. By 1725, the French were using what they called the English Train, the Cubans adopted the French Train in 1780, and the Brazilians brought it into use about 1800. The early forms of the Jamaica Train had four large pans, each 4 feet (120 cm) in diameter with a flat bottom, set into masonry so the flames hit only the base. This meant that as long as there was a small amount of liquid in the pan there would be no charring of sugar up the sides, as happened with the old conical pans. Later forms had five pans of decreasing size, but in each case a single fire heated all the pans, with the draught being carried along beneath them.

The pans were all heated with stone coal, not charcoal, du Monceau explained, before diving into the complexities. The sugar was treated with lime water, then a clearing medium of egg white or bullock's blood was added (the English called this ‘spice'). The ratio was about 80 eggs or 2 gallons of blood to 4 tons of sugar. He noted that isinglass (a form of gelatin obtained from fish) did not work as well as blood to clarify the solution. When the scum rose to the surface, he wrote, the fire was drawn (reduced or damped down), and after fifteen minutes the scum was scraped off. This would be repeated, until a clear bright liquor was obtained and strained through a blanket.

The materials used to clarify sugar at various times have included wood ash, milk, egg white, blood, charcoal, lime, sulfurous acid, phosphoric acid, carbon dioxide, alum and as we have seen, lead acetate. Marco Polo referred to the use of wood ash, lime and alum as an Egyptian practice.

Du Monceau tells us that the juice was put into a boiling vessel called either a clarifier or a racking copper, usually holding 500 gallons (more than 2000 litres), where the temperature was raised to about 175 degrees on de Réaumur's scale (in our terms, 285°F or 140°C). At this point, milk of lime was added to coagulate impurities, which would rise to the top as a scum. When the scum ‘cracked', a cock in the bottom was opened to drain the cleared liquid, leaving the ‘mud' behind to be used in the making of rum.

Getting the amount of lime right was always a challenge to the sugar masters. If the liquid was not tempered properly, the sugar would not crystallise, but if too much lime was added, the liquor would turn green as chlorophyll entered the solution, and would later form a dark sugar with a great deal of molasses and an unpleasant smell. The answer was to turn to science, and Dr John Shier in British Guiana introduced the use of Robert Boyle's litmus test. When the litmus just turned from red to blue, enough lime had been added.

Later, Francis Watts on Antigua replaced litmus with phenolphthalein (hopefully in small amounts or later removed, as phenolphthalein is a laxative), and by 1870 phosphoric acid was being used to remove the excess lime, producing a calcium phosphate precipitate. Reflecting a higher than usual awareness of the needs of the soil, an early Australian refinery began soon after to convert this precipitate to superphosphate and return it to Madagascar in the ships that had brought the raw sugar across the Indian Ocean.

In the 1760s butter was added to the boiling pan (in place of Ligon's Sallet Oyle), and the mixture was boiled to the strike point. This strike point is a matter of judgment and testing: a small amount of the liquid is drawn out between finger and thumb, revealing its state to the sugar master. If the thread breaks near the top, the liquid needs more heat, but if it breaks near the bottom it is ready.

When it had reached the strike point, the liquid went first to a cooling vessel, and then was poured into a number of conical earthenware pots with holes in their pointy tops and open at the base. These were allowed to stand upside down for about six days while the mother liquor ran off, after which the sugar was usually ‘clayed' until it was a satisfactory colour. The loaves of sugar were then stood in a hot room to dry. Claying was preferred, because this added value to the crop in the colony, and gave a better return to the plantation owner.

There is a pretty legend that claying was discovered when a chicken wandered through a curing house and stepped across some muscovado sugar, leaving a trail of white footprints behind, thus inspiring people to clay sugar to make it white. This tale is widely told but improbable, because it has little to do with the claying process. When the cone full of muscovado was turned over and allowed to drain, it reached a point where most of the viscous part had drained from the pot, and the rest clung tenaciously to the crystals. Claying involves tapping the upside-down cone gently to settle the sugar, covering the open base with clay and then adding water so that it drips slowly down and out the hole, leaching out the remaining molasses so that it can be collected and sent to the rum makers, or boiled again to obtain more sugar.

When the cone was turned back up and bumped gently, the result was a sugar loaf sitting on a clay base: a cone of sugar whitest at the bottom, and brownest at the top. The problem was that the home governments, always seeing the colonies solely as a source of delivering raw materials and potential profit to the home country, placed taxes on clayed sugar, which effectively reduced the profit to the plantation.

Detailed as they were, du Monceau's descriptions of the intricacies of sugar making, so urgently needed by the sugar growers, were nowhere near as memorable as the educational efforts to be found in the strange poetic outpourings of Dr James Grainger.

THE GEORGIC DOCTOR

James Grainger, poet, author, physician and educator of sugar planters, began his career as a surgeon in the 13th Foot during the Jacobite rising of 1745. He later set up practice as a doctor in London, and was a contributor to different literary journals.

Perhaps to develop an image as a Renaissance man, he published a study of army diseases, but John Pringle's study was superior, and came out the year before Grainger's. That, and the fact that Grainger wrote in Latin, while Pringle had published in English, meant Grainger's book lost by comparison. Still, he mingled with and was admired by the best literary people in London—the likes of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell and Thomas Percy—and he had a famous battle with Smollett over his translation of the poems of Tibullus, among other things.

In 1759 Grainger set sail with his patron, John Bourryau, to visit Bourryau's sugar plantation on the island of St Kitts. There was a war going on with France at the time, so the ship sailed in convoy, and on the way out Grainger was transferred to another ship to treat a woman stricken with smallpox. So it was that he met the lady's daughter, who went by the improbable name of Daniel Mathew Burt. Her name indicated nothing of her gender, but did serve to remind other Kittitians that she was connected to both the Daniel and Mathew families, both prominent on the island of St Kitts.

Shortly afterwards, James Grainger, MD and literary lion, married to the former Daniel Burt, was practising medicine on St Kitts and looking for some activity suited to his talents, whereby to make his reputation and his fortune. It was clear that the planters needed instruction in the arts of sugar making, so this became his project. Rather than straightforward prose, however, he found a model in the
Georgics
of Virgil, which describe agricultural practices in Rome in the first century BC, including the keeping of bees.

This style, common enough at the time, was shortly to go out of fashion (though Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandfather, became famous when he used it to write about nature, classification and his views about the evolution of new species). Erasmus was highly rated as a poet, and influenced many of the poets of early nineteenth-century England, but he made it foolishly obvious that when writing Georgics, one does not call a spade a spade. Instead, it must be called the:

Metallic Blade, wedded to ligneous Rod
Wherewith the rustic Swain upturns the sod.

After his squabble with Smollett, Grainger should have been more wary of giving people an easy chance to make fun of his style, but he appears to have learned only slowly.
Sugar-Cane: A
poem in four books
, published in London in 1764, was a massive blank verse presentation on all aspects of cultivating the sugar cane, caring for slaves, making sugar and much more. Sad to say, the planters did not care for the elegant language, while many Londoners could not see the need to address in careful detail such important issues as the rats that destroyed the cane, the diseases that affected slaves, or manure. People like Dr Johnson got many a belly laugh at Grainger's expense, according to Boswell:

He spoke slightingly of Dyer's
Fleece
.—‘The subject, Sir, cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically of serges and druggets? Yet you will hear many people talk to you gravely of that excellent poem,
The Fleece
.' Having talked of Grainger's
Sugar-Cane
, I mentioned to him Mr. Langton's having told me, that this poem, when read in manuscript at Sir Joshua Reynolds's, had made all the assembled wits burst into a laugh, when, after much blank-verse pomp, the poet began a new paragraph thus:—

‘Now, Muse, let's sing of rats.'

And what increased the ridicule was, that one of the company, who slily overlooked the reader, perceived that the word had been originally MICE, and had been altered to RATS, as more dignified.

That was almost certainly untrue. As Richard Ligon had made clear, rats have always been a problem in the cane fields, both because they damage the canes and because they spread a nasty disease called leptospirosis. Still, by twisting things a little, Johnson also had his fun with the work, as Boswell tells it:

Johnson said, that Dr. Grainger was an agreeable man; a man who would do any good that was in his power. His translation of Tibullus, he thought, was very well done; but
The Sugar-Cane, a poem
, did not please him; for, he exclaimed, ‘What could he make of a sugar-cane? One might as well write the “Parsley-bed, a Poem”; or “The Cabbage-garden, a Poem”.'

Grainger may have hoped that this work would make his literary reputation and earn him enough money to retire ‘home' to enjoy his riches. On St Kitts he doctored slaves, attended to the plan-tocracy—the ‘Creoles', as they were known locally—and sold medicines as well. He also travelled to nearby islands when called upon to treat the sick. His poem had a serious message, however—it was intended to enrich the new planter by teaching him all the necessary arts such as:

What soil the Cane affects; what care demands;
Beneath what signs to plant: what ills await;
How the hot nectar best to christallize;
And Afric's sable progeny to treat:
A Muse, that long hath wander'd in the groves
Of myrtle-indolence, attempts to sing.

Most amusement seemed to be aroused by his paean of praise to the marvels of good compost (which still finds favour with gardeners today):

Of composts shall the Muse descend to sing,
Nor soil her heavenly plumes? The sacred Muse
Naught sordid deems, but what is base; nought fair
Unless true Virtue stamp it with her seal.
Then, Planter, wouldst thou double thine estate;
Never, ah never, be asham'd to tread
Thy dung-heaps, where the refuse of thy mills,
With all the ashes, all thy coppers yield,
With weeds, mould, dung, and stale, a compost form,
Of force to fertilize the poorest soil.

While compost and manure might have been important to the farmer and his plantation readership, they were unlikely to appeal to his potential London audience, and the sales of his work were poor. But there was more:

Whether the fattening compost, in each hole,
'Tis best to throw; or, on the surface spread;
Is undetermin'd: Trials must decide
Unless kind rains and fostering dews descend,
To melt the compost's fertilising salts;
A stinted plant, deceitful of thy hopes,
Will from those beds slow spring where hot dung lies:
But, if 'tis scatter'd generously o'er all,
The Cane will better bear the solar blaze;
Less rain demand; and, by repeated crops,
Thy land improv'd, its gratitude will show.

If compost was important, the slaves could not have been too enthusiastic about it. To prevent sheet erosion on the cleared ground, cane was planted in ‘holes', squares about 1.5 metres across and 15 cm deep, which made it difficult or impossible to get carts in when the manure was needed, as the young cane shoots began to appear. The manure had to be carried in on the slaves' heads in baskets, as Miss Schaw described it in her journal in 1774, a few years after Grainger died:

Every ten negroes have a driver, who walks behind them, carrying in his hand a short whip and a long one . . . When they are regularly ranged, each has a little basket, which he carries up the hill filled with the manure and returns with a load of canes to the Mill. They go up at a trot and return at a gallop . . .

The ‘little basket' with its contents probably weighed 35 kilograms (75 pounds or more), and its soggy contents would have been dripping down on the carrier the whole time. It was certainly the task most resented by the slaves who were interviewed after emancipation, so a nervous manager might be tempted, for fear of poison in his food, to forget about the manuring of the fields.

It did not help the cause of scientific farming when, around 1816, Lord Dundonald wrote a ‘treatise on Chymistry as applied to agriculture' which recommended peat as the best manure for cane. As Thomas Spalding commented, ‘He does nothing but what a mind heated to excess would have thought of, when he recommends that peat should be prepared in Scotland and sent to Jamaica for the purpose.'