The West Indies and the Spanish Main

by Anthony Trollope

In the mean time the sight, as regards the white man, is a sad one to see; and almost the sadder in that the last three or four years have been in a slight degree prosperous to the Jamaica sugar-grower; so that this question of producing sugar in that island at a rate that will pay for itself is not quite answered. The drowning man still clings by a rope's end, though it be but by half an inch, and that held between his teeth. Let go, thou unhappy one, and drown thyself out of the way! Is it not thus that Great Britain, speaking to him from the high places in Exeter Hall, shouts to him in his death struggles?

Are Englishmen in general aware that half the sugar estates in Jamaica, and I believe more than half the coffee plantations, have gone back into a state of bush?—that all this land, rich with the richest produce only some thirty years since, has now fallen back into wilderness?—that the world has hereabouts so retrograded?—that chaos and darkness have reswallowed so vast an extent of the most bountiful land that civilization had ever mastered, and that too beneath the British government?

And of those who are now growing canes in Jamaica a great portion are gentlemen who have lately bought their estates for the value of the copper in the sugar-boilers, and of the metal in the rum-stills. If to this has been added anything like a fair value for wheels in the machinery, the estate has not been badly sold.

Some estates there are, and they are not many, which are still worked by the agents—attorneys is the proper word—of rich proprietors in England; of men so rich that they have been able to bear the continual drain of properties that for years have been always losing—of men who have had wealth and spirit to endure this. It is hardly necessary to say that they are few; and that many whose spirit has been high, but wealth insufficient, have gone grievously to the wall in the attempt.

And there are still some who, living on the spot, have hitherto pulled through it all; who have watched houses falling and the wilderness progressing, and have still stuck to their homes and their work; men whose properties for ten years, counting from the discontinuance of protection, have gradually grown less and less beneath their eyes, till utter want has been close to them. And yet they have held on. In the good times they may have made five hundred hogsheads of sugar every year. It has come to that with them that in some years they have made but thirty. But they have made that thirty and still held on. All honour at least to them! For their sake, if for that of no others, we would be tempted to pray that these few years of their prosperity may be prolonged and grow somewhat fatter.

The exported produce of Jamaica consists chiefly of sugar and rum. The article next in importance is coffee. Then they export also logwood, arrowroot, pimento, and ginger; but not in quantities to make them of much national value. Mahogany is also cut here, and fustic. But sugar and rum are still the staples of the island. Now all the world knows that rum and sugar are made from the same plant.

And yet every one will tell you that the cane can hardly be got to thrive in Jamaica without slave labour; will tell you, also, that the land of Jamaica is so generous that it will give forth many of the most wonderful fruits of the world, almost without labour. Putting these two things together, would not any simple man advise them to abandon sugar? Ah! he would be very simple if he were to do so with a voice that could make itself well heard, and should dare to do so in Jamaica.

Men there are generally tolerant of opinion on most matters, and submit to be talked to on their own shortcomings and colonial mismanagement with a decent grace. You may advise them to do this, and counsel them to do that, referring to their own immediate concerns, without receiving that rebuke which your interference might probably deserve. But do not try their complaisance too far. Do not advise them to give over making sugar. If you give such advice in a voice loud enough to be heard, the island will soon be too hot to hold you. Sugar is loved there, whether wisely loved or not. If not wisely, then too well.

When I hear a Jamaica planter talking of sugar, I cannot but think of Burns, and his muse that had made him poor and kept him so. And the planter is just as ready to give up his canes as the poet was to abandon his song.

The production of sugar and the necessary concomitant production of rum—for in Jamaica the two do necessarily go together—is not, one would say, an alluring occupation. I do not here intend to indulge my readers with a detailed description of the whole progress, from the planting or ratooning of the cane till the sugar and the rum are shipped. Books there are, no doubt, much wiser than mine in which the whole process is developed. But I would wish this much to be understood, that the sugar planter, as things at present are, must attend to and be master of, and practically carry out three several trades. He must be an agriculturist, and grow his cane; and like all agriculturists must take his crop from the ground and have it ready for use; as the wheat grower does in England, and the cotton grower in America. But then he must also be a manufacturer, and that in a branch of manufacture which requires complicated machinery. The wheat grower does not grind his wheat and make it into bread. Nor does the cotton grower fabricate calico. But the grower of canes must make sugar. He must have his boiling-houses and trash-houses; his water power and his steam power; he must dabble in machinery, and, in fact, be a Manchester manufacturer as well as a Kent farmer. And then, over and beyond this, he must be a distiller. The sugar leaves him fit for your puddings, and the rum fit for your punch—always excepting the slight article of adulteration which you are good enough to add afterwards yourselves. Such a complication of trades would not be thought very alluring to a gentleman farmer in England.