Handout: "Sweet Nexus: Sugar and the Origins.."

      This section of the handout informs us of sugar planting, harvesting, and processing is tiring, hot, dangerous work and requires a large number of workers. A problem from the very beginning of sugar processing in the new world was that there were not enough European settlers to work in the plantations and still make a profit when selling it. The solution they came up with was to force native americans to work on the earliest sugar plantations, especially in Brazil. This was completely unfair. The Europeans just came took over their land then forced them to work very long hours, while being underpaid and still give a profit to the land owners. For the next three and a half centuries, slaves of African origin provided most of the labor for the sugar industry in the Americas.

Men and women were expected to plow plant and harvest the fields. This was such excruciating labor it is hard to even imagine the idea of doing this as your daily routine. It says in this chapter that between 5,000 and 8,000 pieces had to be planted to produce one acre of sugar cane. Workdays in the fields typically lasted from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. with a noon-time break of perhaps two hours.

The slavery in this period makes me sick to think about. Mostly because when you think about where they were technologically wise and medicine wise it is no where. They had little to no vaccines. They had knowledge of probably 1 out of ever 100 illnesses we know of today. They put their body through hell in the process of harvesting this product. They had to stoop to cut the cane at ground level because the most sugary section of the cane is the lower stem. Harvesting cane was as backbreaking work as planting cane, and cuts from the sharp tools were common. Once the cane stalk was cut, slaves stripped any remaining leaves and stacked the cane. It then would be tied into bundles and loaded onto donkeys, wagons, or two-wheeled carts to be carried to the sugar mill. On top of that while they worked their owners walk through and whip the field slaves. Sugar cane brought on an extremely eventful era of new world.