Progress of the Sugar Cane throughout the Tropical Zone—The Tahitian Sugar Cane—The enemies of the Sugar Cane—The Sugar-harvest—The Coffee Tree—Its cultivation and enemies—The Cacao Tree and the Vanilla—The Coca Plant—Wonderful strengthening Effects of Coca, and fatal consequences of its Abuse.
Sugar is undoubtedly one of the most valuable products of the vegetable world, and may be said with truth to be only surpassed in importance by the nourishing meal of the cereals, or the textile fibres of the cotton-plant. Our garden fruit owes its agreeable taste to the sugar which the ripening sun developes in its juices. The sap of many a plant—the palm, the birch, the maple, the American agave—is rendered useful to man by the sugar it contains. It is this substance which imparts sweetness to the honey gathered by bees from flowers, and, after undergoing fermentation, changes the juice of the grape into delicious wine.
But although sugar is of almost universal occurrence throughout the vegetable world, yet few plants contain it in such abundance as to render its extraction profitable; and even the beet-root requires high protective duties to be able to compete with the tropical sugar-cane, a member of the extensive family of the grasses. The original home of this plant—for which, doubtless, the lively fancy of the ancient Greeks, had they been better acquainted with it, would have invented a peculiar god, as for the vine or the cereals—was most probably south-eastern Asia, where the Chinese seem to have been the first people that learnt the art to multiply it by culture.
From China its cultivation spread westwards to India and Arabia, and the conquests of Alexander the Great, first made Europe acquainted with the sweet-juiced cane, while sugar itself had long before been imported by the Phœnicians as a rare production of the Eastern world.
During the dark ages which followed the fall of the Roman Empire, all previous knowledge of the Oriental sugar-plant became lost, until the Crusades, and, still more, the revival of commerce in Venice and Genoa re-opened the ancient intercourse between the Eastern and the Western world. From Egypt, where the cultivation of the sugar-cane had meanwhile been introduced, it now extended to the Morea, to Rhodes, and Malta; and at the beginning of the twelfth century we find it growing in Italy, on the sultry plains at the foot of Mount Etna.
After the discovery of Madeira by the Portuguese, in the year 1419, the first colonists added the vine of Cyprus and the Sicilian sugar-cane to the indigenous productions of that lovely island; and both succeeded so well as to become, after a few years, the objects of a lively trade with the mother country.
Yet, in spite of this extension of its culture, the importance of sugar as an article of international trade continued to be very limited, until the discovery of tropical America[18] by Columbus opened a new world to commerce. As early as the year 1506 the sugar-cane was transplanted from the Canary Islands to Hispaniola, where its culture, favoured by the fertility of a virgin soil and the heat of a tropical sun, was soon found to be so profitable that it became the chief occupation of the European settlers. The Portuguese, in their turn, conveyed the cane to Brazil; from Hispaniola it spread over the other West Indian Islands; thence wandered to the Spanish main, and followed Pedrarias and Pizarro to the shores of the Pacific. Unfortunately, a dark shade obscures its triumphal march, as its cultivation was the chief cause which entailed the curse of negro slavery on some of the fairest regions of the globe.
Towards the middle of the last century, the Chinese or Oriental sugar-cane had thus multiplied to an amazing extent over both hemispheres, when the introduction of the Tahitian variety, which was found to attain a statelier growth, to contain more sugar, and to ripen in a shorter time, began to dispossess it of its old domains. This new and superior plant is now universally cultivated in all the sugar-growing European colonies; and if Cook’s voyages had produced no other benefit than making the world acquainted with the Tahitian sugar-cane, they would for this alone deserve to be reckoned by the political economist among the most successful and important ever performed by man.
The sugar-cane bears a great resemblance to the common reed, but the blossom is different. It has a knotty stalk, frequently rising to the height of fourteen feet, and produces at each joint a long, pointed, and sharply serrated leaf or blade. The joints in one stalk are from forty to sixty in number, and the stalks rising from one root are sometimes very numerous. A field of canes, when agitated by a light breeze, affords one of the most pleasing sights, particularly when, towards the period of their maturity, the golden plants appear crowned with plumes of silvery feathers, delicately fringed with a lilac dye.
The sugar-cane is liable to be destroyed by many enemies. Sometimes herds of monkeys come down from the mountains by night, and having posted sentinels to give the alarm if anything approaches, destroy incredible quantities of the cane by their gambols as well as their greediness. It is in vain to set traps for these creatures, however baited; and the only way to protect a plantation and destroy them, is to set a numerous watch, well armed with fowling-pieces, and furnished with dogs.