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Updated: May 9, 2025
These preliminaries accomplished, they bore the reptiles into the cane-fields at widely separated places and lighted the waste. Esteban, from his saddle, saw the first wisps of smoke arise and grow and unwind into long ribbons, reaching deep into the standing crop. Soon tongues of flame appeared and the green tops of the cane began to shrivel and to wave as the steady east wind took effect.
We passed sugar-plantations with their wide cane-fields, the sugar-houses with tall chimneys, and the balconied house of the administrador, keeping a sharp look out over the village of negro-cabins, arranged in double lines. In the houses near the stations where we stopped, cigar-making seemed to be the universal occupation. Men, women, and children were sitting round tables hard at work.
Once they met up in the hills, where they had been asked with others to take a dish of tea with Mistress Montgomerie. They sat alone for an hour on one of the terraces above the house, laughing and chattering like children, then rode down the hills through the cane-fields together.
As we sailed along the shore, having the mountains still as the background, here and there appeared the most lovely little caves and bays, fringed with luxuriant cane-fields, and enlivened by the neatly laid-out mansions of the planters; while numerous fishing and passage boats, with their long light masts and lateen sails, were gliding over the calm waters.
Their business is to clear the land, dig and plant the cane-fields, and in crop-time cut the canes and attend to the mill-house, where the canes are crushed and the sugar and molasses manufactured. The second gang is composed chiefly of the bigger boys and girls and more weakly women, who are unable to do the harder work, and the older men who have lost their strength.
We must add, that the quality of Mexican sugar is as good as the yield is enormous, and, were the cane-fields in our hands, it would be impious to doubt of there being a fall of a mill on the pound all the world over. So is it with Mexican cotton, which propagates itself, and is not raised annually from the seed, as in our cotton-growing States.
Of what avail to lament the prospective devastation of cane-fields, to discuss the possible ruin of crops?
They had a dash of red about them somewhere, and their turbans were white. Rachael's imagination never gave her St. Kitts without its slave women, the "pic'nees" clinging to their hips as they bore their burdens on the road or bent over the stones in the river. They belonged to its landscape, with the palms and the cane-fields, the hot gray roads, and the great jewel of the sea.
The low price of sugar renders economy imperative in all branches of the business, in order to leave a margin for profit. A planter informed the author that he should spread all of his molasses upon the cane-fields this year as a fertilizer, rather than send it to a distant market and receive only what it cost.
They have, as well, I understand, as the gentlemen of Martinique, discovered the worth of the 'division of labour. Throughout the West Indies the planter is usually not merely a sugar-grower, but a sugar-maker also. He requires, therefore, two capitals, and two intellects likewise, one for his cane-fields, the other for his 'ingenio, engine-house, or sugar-works.
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