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Updated: September 15, 2025
For many years the story of this settlement and of the handful of neighboring sugar-plantations is one of privateer raids, capture, torture, slave-revolts, disease, bad government, and small profits, until we marvel at the perseverance of these sturdy Hollanders.
Owing to the impossibility of importing negroes, the market steadily improved, and Esteban reaped a handsome profit from those he had on hand, especially when his crop of young girls matured. His sugar-plantations prospered, too, and Pancho Cueto, who managed them, continued to wonder where the money went.
On the sugar-plantations there was a rush season, when the rule was twenty hours' work a day; when some of the niggers tried to shirk it, they would arrest them for swearing or crap-shooting, and work them as convicts, without pay.
Native life in the Islands is full of such contrasts, and I found, on examining the labor contracts on several sugar-plantations, that almost without exception the working people signed their own names. According to a census taken in December, 1872, the Hawaiian Islands contained 56,897 souls, of whom 51,531 were natives and half-castes, and 5366 were foreigners.
But it was over Martinique that the hurricane raged in the most appalling manner. In less than four hours the howling northwest' wind, accompanied by forked lightning, rolling thunder, heavy water-spouts, and tremendous earth-tremblings, had hurled down into fragments all the houses of the town, all the sugar-plantations, and all the negro cabins.
It remains to describe to you the "contract labor" system by which the sugar-plantations are carried on. This has been frequently and, as it seems to me, unjustly abused as a system of slavery. The laborers hire themselves out for a stated period, usually, in the case of natives, for a year, and in the case of Chinese for five years.
The Esquimaux fattens on his diet of blubber and train-oil; the slaves on the sugar-plantations grow fat in the boiling-season, when they live heartily on sugar; the Chinese grow fat on an exclusively rice diet, and rice is chiefly starch. But one of the most interesting observations of the transformation of sugar into a fat is that made by Huber upon bees.
They have schools for teaching all necessary education, even for Latin and Greek, and have a printing-house. There are many pleasant villas, or country seats, about the city; and the adjacent country abounds in rice, sugar-plantations, gardens, and orchards, with corn and sugar-mills, and mills for making gunpowder.
It is a device for relieving pain or weariness which seems to have no injurious reaction and no drawback but one it is said to fatten the subjects of it. Maui lies between Oahu and Hawaii, and is somewhat larger than the first-named island. It contains the most considerable sugar-plantations, and yields more of this product than any one of the other islands.
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