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It was out of sight before the master of the hotel entered, followed by several negroes from the plain, to say that the "force" had risen on several plantations, had dismantled the mills, burned the sugar-houses, set fire to the crops, murdered the overseers, and, he feared, in some cases, the proprietors. "Where?" "Whose estates?" "What proprietors?" asked every voice present.
The machinery used in the sugar-houses is usually of the best; the larger plantations all use vacuum-pans; and the planters are usually intelligent gentlemen, familiar with the best methods of producing sugar, and with the latest improvements.
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.
The banks on either side are covered with sugar plantations, from the midst of which rise numberless airy mansions of the wealthy owners, surrounded with orange, banana, lime, and fig trees, with numberless other productions of the tropics; while behind them can be seen the sugar-houses and the cabins of the negroes, to remind one of the curse which hangs over the land.
"No windmills here! No cattle-mills!" the negroes were heard saying to one another. "No canes, no sugar-houses, no teams, no overseers' houses, no overseers! By God, it is a fine place, this! So we are going down there to be soldiers to the king! those cattle are wild, and yonder are the hunters going out! By God, it is a fine place!"
On leaving New Orleans, in ascending the river, the country, still the same continuous flat, is enriched and enlivened by a succession of pretty houses and plantations, with each a small negro town near them, as well as the sugar-houses, gardens, and summer-houses, which give the idea of wealth and industry.
Rising up in the midst of the verdure are the white lines of the negro cottages and the plantation offices and sugar-houses, which look like large public edifices in the distance. And who is the lord of all this fair domain?
The sugar-cane is planted in the island of Cuba in the rainy season, from July to October; and the harvest is gathered from February to May. In proportion as by too rapid clearing the island has become unwooded, the sugar-houses have begun to want fuel.
Near Hilo the long rains make cultivation costly and difficult; but the water is so abundant that they run their fire-wood from the mountains and their cane from the fields into the sugar-houses in flumes, at a very great saving of labor. Near Lahaina every acre must be irrigated, and this work proceeds day and night in order that no water may run to waste.
On the south bank, where large trees were scarce, a crib was made of logs and timbers filled in with stone and with bricks and heavy pieces of machinery taken from the neighboring sugar-houses and cotton-gins. When this was done there remained an open space of about one hundred and fifty feet between the wings, through which the rising waters poured with great velocity.
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