The West Indies and the Spanish Main

by Anthony Trollope

"Our clearances, sir! The clearances, sir, are the thing," said A.

"The year's income," said B.

"A hogshead to the acre," said I; "and that only got from guano."

This was my last shot at them. They both came at me open-mouthed together, and I confess that I retired, vanquished, from the field.

It is certainly the fact that they do make their sugar in a very old-fashioned way in Barbados, using wind-mills instead of steam, and that you see less here of the improved machinery for the manufacture than in Demerara, or Cuba, or Trinidad, or even in Jamaica. The great answer given to objections is that the old system pays best. It may perhaps do so for the present moment, though I should doubt even that. But I am certain that it cannot continue to do so. No trade, and no agriculture can afford to dispense with the improvements of science.

I found some here who acknowledged that the mere produce of the cane from the land had been pressed too far by means of guano. A great crop is thus procured, but it appears that the soil is injured, and that the sugar is injured also. The canes, moreover, will not ratoon as they used to do, and as they still do in other parts of the West Indies. The cane is planted, and when ripe is cut. If allowed, another cane will grow from the same plant, and that is a ratoon; and again a third will grow, giving a third crop from the same plant; and in many soils a fourth; and in some few many more; and one hears of canes ratooning for twenty years.

If the same amount and quality of sugar be produced, of course the system of ratooning must be by far the cheapest and most profitable. In I believe most of our colonies the second crop is as good as the first, and I understand that it used to be so in Barbados. But it is not so now. The ratoon almost always looks poor, and the second ratoons appear to be hardly worth cutting. I believe that this is so much the case that many Barbados planters now look to get but one crop only from each planting. This falling off in the real fertility of the soil is I think owing to the use of artificial manure, such as guano.

There is a system all through these sugar-growing countries of burning the magass, or trash; this is the stalk of the cane, or remnant of the stalk after it comes through the mill. What would be said of an English agriculturist who burnt his straw? It is I believe one of the soundest laws of agriculture that the refuse of the crop should return to the ground which gave it.

To this it will be answered that the English agriculturist is not called on by the necessity of his position to burn his straw. He has not to boil his wheat, nor yet his beef and mutton; whereas the Barbados farmer is obliged to boil his crop. At the present moment the Barbados farmer is under this obligation; but he is not obliged to do it with the refuse produce of his fields. He cannot perhaps use coals immediately under his boilers, but he can heat them with steam which comes pretty much to the same thing.

All this applies not to Barbados only, but to Guiana, Jamaica, and the other islands also. At all of them the magass or trash is burnt. But at none of them is manure so much needed as at Barbados. They cannot there take into cultivation new fresh virgin soil when they wish it, as they can in Guiana.