L. L. Torbert, one of the early planters, in a paper read before the Royal Agricultural Society in January, 1852, claims that the earliest sugar factory was put up on the island of Lanai in 1802 by a Chinaman who came to the islands in one of the vessels trading for sandalwood. He brought with him a stone mill and boilers, and after grinding one small crop and making it into sugar, went away the next year taking his apparatus with him.
Anderson[38] makes a statement that 257 tons of sugar were exported from the islands in 1814, but cites no authority upon which to base his assertion.
According to Jarves[39] the first instance of the manufacture of sugar goes back beyond 1820, but the name of the pioneer planter is unknown. It is certain that at first molasses was manufactured and then sugar some time before 1820.
Don Francisco de Paula Marin made sugar in Honolulu in 1819, the year before the arrival of the first missionaries. Lavinia, an Italian, did the same thing in 1823. His method was to pound the cane with stone pestles on huge wooden trays (poi boards) by native labor, collecting the juice and boiling it in a small copper kettle.
Accounts from various sources agree that the making of sugar and molasses was general in 1823-24. This undoubtedly had direct connection with the manufacture of rum, which was extensively carried on at that time.
In 1828 a considerable amount of cane was raised in the neighborhood of Honolulu and mills were built in the Nuuanu valley and Waikapu, Maui. A pioneer cane grower, Antonio Silva by name, lived at the latter place, and some Chinamen had a sugar mill near Hilo. In those days mills were made of wood, very crudely put together and worked by oxen.
The first attempt at sugar cultivation on a large scale was made at Koloa, Kauai, by Ladd & company, a Honolulu merchant firm, in 1835. This was the beginning of what is now known as the Koloa plantation, and the first breaking of the soil for planting cane was done with a plough drawn by natives. A mill was established here at the same time, and the enterprise was managed by a Mr. Hooper.
As has been said, the general character of the mills was rude and primitive and it continued to be so up to 1850. The rollers were generally of wood and the kettles in which the juice was boiled were whalers’ trypots. The buildings were adobe or simple grass huts. Only one grade of sugar was made. The juice was boiled to a thick syrup and put into coolers to grain, after which the granulated mass was packed in mats, bags, boxes or barrels with perforated bottoms for the molasses to drain off. The mills were run by bullocks, horses and in some cases by water power, and were fed by hand, one stalk at a time. The whole process, both in the field and in the mill, was very crude and imperfect.
The value of the sugar exported from the islands from 1836 to 1841 was $36,000 and that of the molasses for the same period $17,130.
An article by the late William Ladd on the “Resources of the Sandwich Islands,” published in the “Hawaiian Spectator” for April, 1838, speaks thus prophetically of the manufacture of sugar, then in its infancy: