Sweet-Tooth Politics: African in the Caribbean - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 323

when the cane arrived at the processing site, it was fed into crushing-stones and rollers
(mills) to extract its liquid. The first crushing mills were little more than stones pulled by
slaves. The liquid drawn off from the mills was then hauled to boiling sheds where the
ambient temperature rose upward toward the liquid's boiling point. Added to these miser-
ies were slaves' inadequate diet and the overseers' lash. Little wonder, then, at the short
lifespan of slaves in the sugar trade. One estimate suggests eight years for field hands;
another estimate reduces their lives to a scant three years. Dead slaves required constant
replenishing, and the Atlantic slave trade flourished. One estimate reckons that by the
mid-1600s, Jamaica was importing 10,000 slaves per year, and Barbados 5,000. Overall the
Caribbean had become a long string of slave-holding islands.
WHAT CONNECTS SUGARCANE TO POLITICS AND WAR?
By the 1600s, sugar was an immense source of wealth and national pride. Adam Smith in
his Wealth of Nations (1776) asserts that profits from West Indian sugar were greater than
elsewhere in the world. Sugar riches helped to reverse an ancient equation. Historically, it
was almost always the case that political power brought economic power. Now, with in-
creasing frequency in Europe and America, wealth would be used to buy political power.
In 1661 Charles II created the first of Britain's sugar barons, as thirteen baronets were be-
stowed on the richest planters in the English Caribbean.
The relationship of sugar wealth to political power was not lost on the Dutch. Taking
advantage of a decline in Portugal's sea power, the Dutch seized the easternmost area of
Brazil, Pernambuco, an ideal location for sugarcane. The Dutch held Pernambuco from
1630 to 1654. Slaves were imported by the shipload, so many that Pernambuco today is the
most African part of Brazil in terms of skin pigmentation, dress, cuisine, music, and reli-
gious practices. The Dutch also carried an advanced technology to Brazil. They installed
there the world's most efficient machinery for crushing sugar cane. And as sugar wealth
flowed back to Holland, Dutch investors quite literally bet their national future on sugar-
cane cultivation. The Dutch were trading across the farthest reaches of the globe. Dutch
trading had brought the Lowlands into armed conflict with their seafaring rival, England.
When an Anglo-Dutch war was ended by the Treaty of Breda (1667), the Dutch willingly
traded their North American colony of New Amsterdam for possession of England's claims
to its sugar colony of Surinam on the northern coast of South America!
WHAT WAS THE TRIANGULAR TRADE?
Molasses to Rum to Slaves
— 1776 , (Musical), Sherman Edwards, 1969.