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Updated: May 3, 2025
R , stipendiary magistrate; himself a Creole and a man of colour: 'When I was a lad of about seventeen years of age, I was very frequently on a sugar-estate belonging to a relation of mine; and during crop-time particularly I took good care to be there.
He who sees four-eyes for the first time without laughing must be much wiser, or much stupider, than any man has a right to be. Suddenly the mangroves opened, and the creek ended in a wharf, with barges alongside. Baulks of strange timbers lay on shore. Sheds were full of empty sugar-casks, ready for the approaching crop-time.
"No, mostly married to slave girls on the estate: their wives live with them, unless they breed, and then they are removed up to the nurseries." "And what work do you exact from them?" "Eight hours a day except in crop-time, and then we are very busy; so that they have plenty of leisure to look after their own interests if they choose." "Do they ever lay up much money?"
If it is crop-time, the men will carry a goulet a hand of steel, mounted on a long bamboo by the sharp edges of which the pods are cut from the higher branches without injury to the tree.
In any case, there seems good hope that a race of Hindoo peasant-proprietors will spring up in the colony, whose voluntary labour will be available at crop-time; and who will teach the Negro thrift and industry, not only by their example, but by competing against him in the till lately understocked labour-market.
But the ground had scarcely cooled when replanting and rebuilding commenced; and now the canes were from ten to twelve feet high, the works nearly ready for the coming crop-time, and no sign of the fire was left, save a few leafless trees, which we found, on riding up to them, to be charred at the base. And yet men say that the Englishman loses his energy in a tropic climate.
Through rich rolling land covered with cane; past large sugar-works, where crop-time and all its bustle was just beginning; along a tramway, which made an excellent horse-road, and then along one of the new roads, which are opening up the yet untouched riches of this island.
They thus devote their own capital and intellect to increasing the yield of their estates; while the central factories, it is said, pay dividends ranging from twenty to forty per cent. I regretted much that I was unable to visit in crop-time one of these factories, and see the working of a system which seems to contain one of the best elements of the co- operative principle.
Many of them say that he has only Sunday to himself; and others, that even Sunday is occasionally trespassed upon by his master. It appears, also, that even where the afternoon is given him, it is only out of crop-time.
From two till dark they resume their labours, when they generally knock off and return home, except in crop-time, when it is important to get the canes cut and carried as rapidly as possible, and the boiling-house requires a number of hands.
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