I have seen a field of thirty acres which two years ago produced nearly six tons of sugar to the acre. Four tons per acre is not a surprising crop; and, from all I can hear, I judge that two and a half tons per acre may be considered a fair yield. The soil, too, with proper treatment, appears to be inexhaustible. The common custom is to take off two crops, and then let the field lie fallow for two years; but where they irrigate even this is not always done. There is no danger of frost, as in Louisiana, and cane is planted in some part of the islands in almost every month of the year. In Lahaina it matures in from fourteen to sixteen months; in some districts it requires eighteen months; and at greater altitudes even two years.
But under all the varying circumstances, whether it is irrigated or not, whether it grows on bottoms or on hill slopes, in dry or in damp regions, everywhere the cane seems to thrive, and undoubtedly it is the one product of the islands which succeeds. A worm, which pierces the cane near the ground and eats out the pith, has of late, I am told, done some damage, and in some parts the rat has proved troublesome. But these evils do not anywhere endanger or ruin the crop, as the blight has ruined the coffee culture and discouraged other agricultural ventures. The sugar product of the islands has constantly increased. In 1860 they exported 1,444,271 pounds of sugar; in 1864, 10,414,441 pounds; in 1868, 18,312,926 pounds; and in 1871, 21,760,773 pounds of sugar.
What is remarkable is that, with this rapid increase in the production of sugar, you hear that the business is unprosperous; and if to this you reply that planters, like farmers, are hard to satisfy, they show you that the greater number of the plantations have at some time been sold by the sheriff, some of them more than once, and that, in fact, only six or seven are to-day in the hands of their founders.
I do not doubt that there has been bad management on many plantations, and that this accounts in part for these failures, by which many hundred thousand dollars have been lost. For the advantages of the sugar planter on these islands are very decided. He has not only, as I showed you above, a favorable climate and an extraordinarily fertile soil, but he has a laboring population, perhaps the best, the most easily managed, the kindliest, and—so far as habits affect the steadiness and usefulness of the laborer—the least vicious in the world. He does not have to pay exorbitant wages; he is not embarrassed to feed or house them, for food is so abundant and cheap that economy in its distribution is of no moment; and the Hawaiian is very cheaply housed.
But bad management by no means accounts for all the non-success. There are some natural disadvantages serious enough to be taken into the account. In the first place, you must understand that the rain-fall varies extraordinarily. The trade-wind brings rain; the islands are bits of mountain ranges; the side of the mountain which lies toward the rain-wind gets rain; the lee side gets scarcely any. At Hilo it rains almost constantly; at Lahaina they get hardly a shower a year. At Captain Makee's, one of the most successful plantations on Maui, water is stored in cisterns; at Mr. Spencer's, not a dozen miles distant, also one of the successful plantations, which lies on the other side of Mount Haleakala, they never have to irrigate. Near Hilo the long rains make cultivation costly and difficult; but the water is so abundant that they run their fire-wood from the mountains and their cane from the fields into the sugar-houses in flumes, at a very great saving of labor. Near Lahaina every acre must be irrigated, and this work proceeds day and night in order that no water may run to waste.
Then there is the matter of shipping sugar. There are no good ports except Honolulu. Kaului on Maui, Hanalei and Nawiliwili on Kauai, and one or two plantations on Oahu, have tolerable landings. But almost everywhere the sugar is sent over vile roads to a more or less difficult landing, whence it is taken in launches to the schooners which carry it to Honolulu, where it is stored, coopered, and finally reshipped to its market. Many landings are made through the surf, and I remember one which, last spring, was unapproachable by vessel or boat for nearly four weeks.
Each sugar planter has, therefore, problems of his own to solve. He can not pattern on his neighbors. He can not base his estimate on theirs. He can not be certain even, until he has tried, which of the ten or a dozen varieties of cane will do best on his soil. He must look out for wood, which is by no means abundant, and is often costly to bring down from the mountain; he must look out for his landing; must see that taro grows near at hand; must secure pasture for his draught cattle: in short, he must consider carefully and independently many different questions before he can be even reasonably sure of success. And if, with all this uncertainty, he embarks with insufficient capital, and must pay one per cent. a month interest, and turn his crop over to an agent in Honolulu, who is his creditor, and who charges him five per cent. for handling it, it will not be wonderful to any business man if he fails to grow rich, or if even he by-and-by becomes bankrupt. Many have failed. Of thirty-four plantations, the number worked in all the islands at this time, only six or seven are in the hands of their founders. Some, which cost one hundred thousand dollars, were sold by the sheriff for fifteen or eighteen thousand; some, which cost a quarter of a million, were sold for less than a hundred thousand.
If you speak with the planters, they will tell you that their great difficulty is to get a favorable market; that the duty on their sugar imported into San Francisco eats up their profits; and that the only cure—the cure-all, I should say, for all the ills they suffer—is a treaty with the United States, which shall admit their product duty free. Of course any one can see that if the sugar duty were remitted to them, the planters would make more money, or would lose less. An ingenuous planter summed up for me one day the whole of that side of the case, by saying, "If we had plenty of labor and a free market for our sugar, we should be thoroughly satisfied."