Our friends were invited to visit a sugar plantation in Northern Queensland. They accepted the invitation, and one morning embarked on a steamer which took them in the direction which they wished to go. The steamer called at several places on the coast, including Rockhampton, Bowen, Mackay, Keppel Bay, and Somerset; the last-named place was their destination, and it was here that they landed.
“We utilized the time of stoppage at each port by going on shore,” said Harry in his journal. “Except for the exercise of the trip, we might about as well have stayed on board, as there was very little to be seen at any of the places. The coast towns of Queensland are pretty much all alike. They have from one to two thousand inhabitants each, and though they’re pretentiously laid out, they consist of little more than a single street. On the streets, other than the principal one, there are scattered houses, where the owners of land have endeavored to increase the value of their property by putting up buildings, but generally with poor success. For pavement the natural earth is obliged to answer, as most of these towns are too poor to afford anything better. The streets are very dusty in dry weather, and very muddy after a rain. At one of the places where we landed there had been a heavy shower the night before, and the main street was a great lane of mud. Ned said the street was a mile long, eighty feet wide, and two feet deep; at least, that was his judgment concerning it.
“One thing that impressed us in these towns was that hardly a man in any of them had a coat on. Everybody was in his shirt sleeves, and if he had a coat with him, he carried it on his arm. For the novelty of the thing, we took dinner at a hotel in Mackay, more with a view of seeing the people that went there, than with an expectation of a good meal. There were squatters from the back country, planters, clerks, merchants, lawyers, and doctors, all with their coats off, and we were told that this habit of going without coats is universal. One man who had lived there a good while said, ‘You may go to a grand dinner party, and find the ladies dressed in the height of fashion, and the gentlemen in their shirt sleeves.’ I don’t wonder that they have adopted this plan, as the climate is very warm. The region is decidedly tropical, the air is damp and oppressive, and in the daytime especially the heat is almost insupportable. I wonder, though, that they don’t adopt the white linen jacket for dinner purposes, just as the Europeans living in China and Japan have done.
“Somerset, where we landed, is principally a pearl-fishing station, and the pearl fishers who live there are a very rough-looking lot. The business is very profitable, those engaged in it estimating that the pearls pay all the expenses of their enterprise and a little more, while the nacre, or mother-of-pearl, the smooth lining of the shells, is a clear profit. The exportation of shells from Queensland is worth, annually, about half a million dollars. The pearl shells sell ordinarily for about one thousand dollars a ton. They are gathered by black divers under the superintendence of white men.
“These white men own the sloops and schooners devoted to the pearl fishery, and they go out with these craft, taking along a lot of black men as divers. The diving is done in the same way as in pearl fisheries all over the world, so that there is no necessity of describing it. The shells are like large oyster shells; in fact, they are oyster shells and nothing else. They are about twenty inches long, and from twelve to fifteen inches from one side to the other; so, you see, it doesn’t take many oysters to make a load for a diver. The divers are paid according to the number of shells they gather, and not by fixed wages. A man familiar with the business said, that if you paid the men regular wages, you would be lucky if you got one dive out of them daily.
“I tried to ascertain the value of some of the pearls obtained here,” continued Harry, “but my information was not very definite. They told me that several pearls worth five thousand dollars each had been taken, but they were not very common, the value ordinarily running from a few dollars up to one hundred or two hundred dollars each. My informant said that the best pearls were found on the coast of West Australia, but that the fishery in that locality was more dangerous than on the coast of Queensland. He said that the sea in that locality was subject to hurricanes, and sometimes an entire fleet of pearl-fishing boats would be overwhelmed and sunk, hardly a man escaping. ‘These disasters,’ he said, ‘do not deter those who survive from taking the risk over again, and there are always plenty of black men who go out as divers there whenever a boat is ready to start.’”
To go to the sugar plantation to which our friends were invited, they had to make a journey inland, in a wagon over a rough road about forty miles long. The plantation was located on both sides of a small river, and employed, at the time of their visit, about one hundred and fifty men. One of the owners was there, and exerted himself to his fullest ability to make the strangers comfortable and have them see all that was to be seen. They visited the crushing mills and the boiling rooms, and learned a great deal about the process of manufacturing sugar from the sugar cane.
“We may say briefly,” said Ned, “that the cane-stalks are crushed between rollers, and the juice is caught in vats, whence it flows in troughs or pipes to the evaporating house. Here it is boiled till it is reduced to syrup, and then it is boiled again, until it is ready for granulation. Then it is placed in perforated cylinders which revolve with tremendous rapidity. By means of centrifugal force all the moisture is expelled and the dry sugar remains behind.”
Our friends visited the fields where the luxuriant cane-stalks were growing, but they were quite as much interested in the men they saw at work there as in the fields themselves. Harry remarked that the men seemed to be different from any of the Australian blacks they had yet seen in their travels.
“These are not Australian blacks at all,” said their guide; “they are foreigners.”