They grew sugarcane, ground it on-site, extracted the juice, processed it, and shipped the raw sugar to Britain to be refined into various products.
Although the production cost has exceeded the selling price globally, Barbados has maintained the industry for its foreign exchange value. However, the economic challenges led to the number of factories being shrunk, from 10 to 2. Joseph and Portvale in St. James produces sugar.
To improve efficiency and maintain production costs, the Barbados industry has also moved from labor-intensive to full mechanization. To read more about a 17th century plantation in Barbados, see my post about St. Nicholas Abbey. Plantations needed field labourers. In the early years, owners would obtain indentured servants from the British Isles, mostly willing, though not always so. These servants would agree to indenture themselves for a period of 5 to 7 years after which time they would get their freedom dues in the form of land, or in later years, an agreed amount of sugar.
As sugar production took over there were not enough indentured servants to supply the need, and plantation owners relied more and more on imported slaves from Africa. During periods of war and invasion in the 17th century, English Parliament forcibly shipped Scottish prisoners of war and displaced Irish men and women to work the fields. After the Battle of Worcester , approximately 1, prisoners of war were shipped out of London according to one of those prisoners, a German mercenary named Heinrich Von Uchteritz.
Thanks to his account, we know that he was sold to a plantation owner in Barbados for pounds of sugar. It also appears from his account that there was no time limit for his indenture. He expected to a bondsman until he died. Fortunately for Heinrich, his countrymen ransomed his freedom. The English settlers relied heavily on the Dutch for the knowledge of how to cultivate and harvest sugar cane.
The Dutch not only taught them how to grow and convert the rich cane juice into lucrative sugar, they lent them the initial funds to purchase the equipment needed ingenio. Canes took approximately fifteen months to mature they initially experimented with twelve months but their yields were low. Once cut, the sugar canes needed to be crushed within hours of being cut. Men and women would be working in the fields in ten hour days and during harvest time, it would not be unusual for them to be working into the night.
In the 17th century, cut stalks would be loaded onto a cart, piled vertically in the back of an ox-drawn cart such that the cane could be easily tipped and taken to the rollers. Alternatively, they were loaded on a crook rigged to the packsaddle of a donkey. The crushing mills were situated on a high point of the plantation and designed like windmills. A team of oxen would turn the gears of the rollers.
Crushed juice was collected into troughs, which ran downward through a series of tubes to the boiling house, which was situated at a lower elevation than the crushing mill. The ingenio refers to the sugar works, or the equipment needed to crush the sugar cane and process the juice.
This would include the crushers, rollers, the coppers in the boiling house and the stills. The end products include muscovado brown unrefined sugar , refined white and rum also called kill-devil in the 17th century. The cut canes were passed through the rollers twice in order to extract all the juice. The remaining plant material would be carted away and used for pig fodder.
Crushed cane juice would pass through a series of five boiling coppers followed by two cooling tanks. The entire process would take a week. The fires in the boiling house were kept alight day and night from Monday to Saturday at which point they were extinguished for Sunday.
By the time the reduced cane juice reached the coolers, crystals would begin to form. However, given its location in a region where plantation societies proliferated, especially by the 20th century, it is necessary to draw comparisons with sites that are both on and not on the UNESCO World Heritage and Tentative Lists in the Spanish-; Dutch-; French-; and English-speaking Caribbean.
As early as the 16th century, cultivation and processing technologies in Cuba Trinidad and the Valley de los Ingenios on the World Heritage List , the Dominican Republic The Ruta de Los Ingenios on the World Heritage List , Jamaica under Spanish rule were established, though on a much smaller scale than the industrial development of sugar processing driven by wind and water mill technology in the 17th century which transformed the sugar plantation economies of the region and were perfected in Barbados.
By the 19th century, however, the development of the centralized, steam-powered mill in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, once again transformed the sugar industry, maximizing sugar output in their large economies of scale. This development prompted a decline in the sugar industry in the older plantation economies in Barbados, St.
Kitts, Antigua and Jamaica. Typically, in the 20th century, larger territories competed globally with larger economies in the production of sugar in Brazil and Mauritius.
The plantation societies of the English-speaking Caribbean are well documented and several sites in Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua, Barbados and Grenada retain significant authenticity and integrity — many as continuing and relict landscapes. Most of these plantation societies exhibit the expected pattern of rural development advancing port development. Some of these sites are represented on the World Heritage Tentative List.
Seville Heritage Park Tentative List in Jamaica experienced sugar plantation development as early as the early 16th century, which makes it one of the oldest sugar plantation sites in the English-speaking Caribbean, though at outset under a Spanish and not English regime. About us.
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