Something about sugar

by George M. Rolph

Mauritius was discovered by the Portuguese in 1505. From 1598 to 1710 it was in the hands of the Dutch, and in 1715 it was taken by France, from whom it was wrested by the British in 1810.

The Dutch brought sugar cane from Java to Mauritius in 1650, but their efforts at cultivation were not successful.

When in 1741 de la Bourdonnais was appointed administrator of Mauritius, or, as it was then called, l’Ile de France, it was a crown colony under the control of the French East India company. The island was without agriculture or commerce and the inhabitants were sunk in indolence. The genius of the new executive brought order out of chaos, and his example and assistance aroused the people from their lethargy. Sugar cane was again imported in 1747 and in 1750 a sugar estate was established at Pamplemousses in the northern part of the island by de la Villebague, the governor’s brother. The industry expanded and was carried on with profit.

In 1769 an experiment station was established with a view to furnishing planters with the knowledge of which they were so sorely in need. Agricultural development, however, was not carried forward to any great extent while Mauritius remained under French rule. State interference with the planters had an unfortunate effect, and besides this the greater number of the inhabitants looked upon the colony not as a permanent home, but as a means to acquire sufficient money to enable them to return to France and live there in comfort. The authorities deemed it essential that the colony should produce the greater part of its foodstuffs, while the planter on his side was anxious to grow crops that he believed would give him the best results in money; for example, sugar, cotton, coffee, indigo and spices.

In 1776 there were three small sugar factories on the island, and in 1789 the production of sugar was 300 tons. Disaster overtook the industry, owing to conditions that made the cost of the mills abnormally great and the extravagance with which they were operated. In consequence many of those who built factories were ruined.

Shortly after the British occupation there was a change for the better. In 1816 the production of sugar was 4430 tons, and from that time forward the industry made continuous and steady progress. The planters were encouraged and, as far as could be, helped in their operations, while the policy of the government developed the colony’s resources and established for it trade relations on a firm basis with other countries.

The method of extraction of sugar from the cane employed at the beginning of the last century was primitive indeed. The apparatus consisted of a solid, heavy table made of thick planks carefully finished and having a perfectly smooth top. It was made in the shape of a parallelogram, with a groove or gutter on each of its four sides and an opening in the middle of each end gutter. Upon this table was a huge, heavy cylinder of hard wood, slightly longer than the width of the table. Three, four, or five stalks of cane were placed lengthwise on the table and submitted to pressure by rolling the cylinder over them from one end to the other and back again. The juice thus expressed from the cane ran into the gutters at the sides and ends and through the holes into two tubs placed to receive it. The cane stalks were then removed, put in the sun to dry and afterward used as fuel in the boiling of the sugar juice. This operation was repeated until a sufficient quantity of juice was obtained.

From the tubs, or “bacs,” the juice was run through a series of kettles, or open-fire caldrons, for concentration. The kettle next in position to the bac into which the juice from the table fell was called la grande, because it was really the largest of the set. It was farthest from the fire and served as a defecator. As soon as the juice contained in it became heated, a thick, creamy substance formed on the surface and was immediately skimmed off. The liquor was then ladled into the second kettle, where the boiling became more lively on account of closer proximity to the furnace. The juice bubbled up in foam and at this point the cleansing process began. A long, flat piece of wood was passed slowly over the surface of the liquor, thus removing certain impurities. Here the mixture of lime begun in la grande was continued until the liquor was found to be perfectly clear.

Passing to the third kettle, the liquor was reduced to syrup by the increased heat. It was concentrated in the fourth and boiled to grain in the fifth. Directly under the fifth and last kettle of the set was the furnace, which was fed by bagasse and cane trash.

The boiling process finished, the sugar was removed from kettle number five and placed on tables, where it remained until it had to be taken to larger tables farther on to make room for a fresh batch. There it stood with other boilings until the following morning. Then the crystallized mass was shoveled into pots and carried to large bins constructed so that the liquor, or syrup, could drain off. This usually took from fifteen to twenty days, after which time the sugar was dug out by pick and shovel, put into baskets and taken to be spread out in the sun to dry. After two to three hours of this drying, according to the intensity of the sun’s rays, the sugar was packed in a double sack containing about 135 pounds.