A Chinese Hemp Merchant in Gala Attire.
I have not yet told all the tricks of the natives. They cheat also in the planting, by not making deep enough holes for setting out the shoots. In consequence, planters no longer pay at once for shoots and labor, as formerly, but reserve payment for three years, or until full growth is attained. Then $10 are paid for each hundred of live plants.
In addition to the large planters, many of the Filipinos produce bast in a small way, selling it to Chinese dealers. Or a Chinaman may, for a petty sum, gain the right to work a native plantation for a fixed term of years. With but one thought in mind—that of immediate gain—he strips the plants in their immature stage, producing a white but weak fibre, and returns the plantation to its owner ruined for the time being. The Chinese are, in consequence, held under suspicion, and their bast is severely inspected before purchase.
In fact, the whole process of hemp-production, from the proprietor down to the lowest laborer, seems permeated with fraud; and between efforts to cheat on the one hand, and efforts to escape being cheated on the other, life on a hemp plantation is not a state of beatitude.
Competition with Other Lands.
Manila hemp never fails of a market, particularly in the United States, where it is most largely used. No other fibre known is so valuable for cordage, and the production might be greatly increased without overstocking the market. To the various frauds practised in its production may be added another employed by the manufacturers of cordage: the free adulteration of the pure Philippine fibre by the admixture of New Zealand flax and Russian hemp.
The cultivation of the plant has been attempted outside the Philippines, but with no satisfactory result. Abacá planting, it is true, was tried successfully in the botanical gardens at Saigon, Cochin China, but the experiment was abandoned, for some reason unexplained. Abacá has also been planted in British India, and flourished as well there as at Saigon, but the effort to produce hemp from it failed through ignorance of the proper method of the drawing of the fibre.
The mode of extraction tried was that practised with the ordinary hemp of India, excepting that the stems were first passed through a sugar-cane mill, to get rid of the sap. By this means fifty per cent. of the whole weight was squeezed out; the stems were then immersed in water and left to rot for ten or more days; afterward they were washed by hand and dried in the sun. Less than two pounds of fibre were thus gained from one hundred pounds of stems, and this bad in color and lacking in strength.