Travels in the East Indian archipelago

by Albert S. Bickmore

These Javanese ponies go well on a level or down-hill, but when the road becomes steep they frequently stop altogether. In the hilly parts of Java, therefore, the natives are obliged to fasten their buffaloes to your carriage, and you must patiently wait for those sluggish animals to take you up to the crest of the elevation.

Our road that morning led over a low country, which was devoted wholly to rice and sugar-cane. Some of these rice-fields stretched away on either hand as far as the eye could see, and appeared as boundless as the ocean. Numbers of natives were scattered through these wide fields, selecting out the ripened blades, which their religion requires them to cut off one by one. It appears an endless task thus to gather in all the blades over a wide plain. These are clipped off near the top, and the rice in this state, with the hull still on, is called “paddy.” The remaining part of the stalks is left in the fields to enrich the soil. After each crop the ground is spaded or dug up with a large hoe, or ploughed with a buffalo, and afterward harrowed with a huge rake; and to aid in breaking up the clods, water to the depth of four or five inches is let in. This is retained by dikes which cross the fields at right angles, dividing them up into little beds from fifty to one hundred feet square. The seed is sown thickly in small plats at the beginning of the rainy monsoon. When the plants are four or five inches high they are transferred to the larger beds, which are still kept overflowed for some time. They come to maturity about this time (June 14th), the first part of the eastern monsoon, or dry season. Such low lands that can be thus flooded are called sawas. Although the Javanese have built magnificent temples, they have never invented or adopted any apparatus that has come into common use for raising water for their rice-fields, not even the simple means employed by the ancient Egyptians along the hill, and which the slabs from the palaces at Nineveh show us were also used along the Euphrates.

Only one crop is usually taken from the soil each year, unless the fields can be readily irrigated. Manure is rarely or never used, and yet the sawas appear as fertile as ever. The sugar-cane, however, quickly exhausts the soil. One cause of this probably is that the whole of every cane is taken from the field except the top and root, while only the upper part of the rice-stalks are carried away, and the rest is burned or allowed to decay on the ground. On this account only one-third of a plantation is devoted to its culture at any one time, the remaining two-thirds being planted with rice, for the sustenance of the natives that work on that plantation. These crops are kept rotating so that the same fields are liable to an extra drain from sugar-cane only once in three years. On each plantation is a village of Javanese, and several of these villages are under the immediate management of a controleur. It is his duty to see that a certain number of natives are at work every day, that they prepare the ground, and put in the seed at the proper season, and take due care of it till harvest-time.[6]

The name of the plantation we were to see was “Seroenie.” As we neared it, several long, low, white buildings came into view, and two or three high chimneys, pouring out dense volumes of black smoke. By the road was a dwelling-house, and the “fabrik” was in the rear. The canes are cut in the field and bound into bundles, each containing twenty-five. They are then hauled to the factory in clumsy, two-wheeled carts called pedatis, with a yoke of sapis. On this plantation alone there are two hundred such carts. The mode adopted here of obtaining the sugar from the cane is the same as in our country. It is partially clarified by pouring over it, while yet in the earthen pots in which it cools and crystallizes, a quantity of clay, mixed with water, to the consistency of cream. The water, filtering through, washes the crystals and makes the sugar, which up to this time is of a dark brown, almost as white as if it had been refined. This simple process is said to have been introduced by some one who noticed that wherever the birds stepped on the brown sugar with their muddy feet, in those places it became strangely white. After all the sugar has been obtained that is possible, the cheap and impure molasses that drains off is fermented with a small quantity of rice. Palm-wine is then added, and from this mixture is distilled the liquor known as “arrack,” which consequently differs little from rum. It is considered, and no doubt rightly, the most destructive stimulant that can be placed in the human stomach, in these hot regions. From Java large quantities are shipped to the cold regions of Sweden and Norway, where, if it is as injurious, its manufacturers are, at least, not obliged to witness its poisonous effects.

After the sugar has been dried in the sun it is packed in large cylindrical baskets of bamboo, and is ready to be taken to market and shipped abroad.[7]

Three species of the sugar-cane are recognized by botanists: the Saccharum sinensis of China; the Saccharum officinarum of India, which was introduced by the Arabs into Southern Europe, and thence transported to our own country[8] and the West Indies; and the Saccharum violaceum of Tahiti, of which the cane of the Malay Archipelago is probably only a variety. This view of the last species is strengthened by the similarity of the names for it in Malaysia and Polynesia. The Malays call it tabu; the inhabitants of the Philippines, tubu; the Kayans of Borneo, turo; the natives of Floris, between Java and Timur, and of Tongatabu, in Polynesia, tau; the people of Tahiti and the Marquesas, to; and the Sandwich Islanders, ko.

It is either a native of the archipelago or was introduced in the remotest times. The Malays used to cultivate it then as they do now, not for the purpose of making sugar, but for its sweet juice, and great quantities of it are seen at this time of year in all the markets, usually cut up into short pieces and the outer layers or rind removed. These people appear also to have been wholly ignorant of the mode of making sugar from it, and all the sugar, or more properly molasses, that was used, was obtained then as it is now in the Eastern islands, namely, by boiling down the sap of the gomuti-palm (Borassus gomuti).[9]

Sugar from cane was first brought to Europe by the Arabs, who, as we know from the Chinese annals, frequently visited Canpu, a port on Hanchow Bay, a short distance south of Shanghai. Dioscorides, who lived in the early part of the first century, appears to be the earliest writer in the West who has mentioned it. He calls it saccharon, and says that “in consistence it was like salt.” Pliny, who lived a little later in the same century, thus describes the article seen in the Roman markets in his day: “Saccharon is a honey which forms on reeds, white like gum, which crumbles under the teeth, and of which the largest pieces are of the size of a filbert.” (Book xii., chap. 8.)

This is a perfect description of the sugar or rock-candy that I found the Chinese manufacturing over the southern and central parts of China during my long journeyings through that empire, and at the same time it is not in the least applicable to the dark-brown, crushed sugar made in India.