1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

  Sugarcane is easy to grow in tropical places but hard to transport far because the stalks ferment rapidly, turning into a smelly brown mass. People who wanted something sweet thus had to grow it themselves. The crop marched steadily north and west, infiltrating China and India. Crops, rather—the sugarcane in farm fields is a hodgepodge of hybrids from two species in the grass genus Saccharum. The spoilage problem was solved in India around 500 B.C. when unknown innovators discovered how to use simple horse- or cattle-powered mills to extract the juice from the stalks, then boil down the juice to produce a hard golden-brown cake of relatively pure C12H22O11. In cake form, sugar could be stored in warehouses, shipped in chests and jars, and sold in faraway places. An industry of sweetness was born.

  Almost all of the Middle East is too dry to grow sugarcane. Nonetheless, people figured out how to do it anyway, irrigating river valleys in Iran, Iraq, and Syria. By about 800 A.D. cane had become particularly common on the Mediterranean coast of what are now Lebanon and Israel, which is where the Crusaders for the first time encountered “reeds filled with a kind of honey known as Zucar”—the description comes from the twelfth-century chronicler Albert of Aachen.

  The writer Michael Pollan has recounted his son’s inaugural experience of sugar: the icing on his first birthday cake.

  [H]e was beside himself with the pleasure of it, no longer here with me in space and time in quite the same way he had been just a moment before. Between bites Isaac gazed up at me in amazement (he was on my lap, and I was delivering the ambrosial forkfuls to his gaping mouth) as if to exclaim, “Your world contains this? From this day forward I shall dedicate my life to it.”

  Much the same thing happened to the Crusaders’ army in Lebanon. Clerics, knights, and common soldiers alike drank al-zucar juice “with extreme pleasure,” Albert of Aachen reported; the chance to sample sugar was, in and of itself, “some compensation for the sufferings they had endured.” As with Pollan’s son, a single, heavenly taste was enough to ensure a lifelong craving: “the pilgrims could not get enough of its sweetness.”

  In their new sugar estates the Crusaders saw an opportunity: exporting to Europe large quantities of C12H22O11—“a most precious product,” said the archbishop of Tyre, the new rulers’ first sugar center, “very necessary for the use and health of mankind.” Sugar was then a rarity in Europe; regarded as an exotic Asian spice like pepper or ginger, it was found only in the kitchens of a few princes and nobles. The Crusaders proceeded to stoke a hunger for sweetness in the continent’s wealthy, and to make money by temporarily satisfying it.

  As important as sugar itself was its manner of production: plantation agriculture. A plantation is a big farm that sells its harvest in faraway places. To maximize output, plantations usually plant a single crop on big expanses of land. The big expanse requires a big labor force, especially during planting and harvesting. Because agricultural products spoil, plantations typically ship their crops in processed form: cured tobacco, pressed olive oil, heat-solidified latex rubber, fermented tea, and dried coffee. They must also have some way to transport their products. Thus plantations as a rule consist of a lot of land near a port or highway with an attached industrial facility and a pool of laborers.

  Sugar is the plantation product par excellence. Even the most sugar-mad grower cannot consume the entire harvest at home; some must always be sold off the farm. Once refined, sugar can be easily packaged and shipped for long distances. And there is always a market abroad: nobody has ever overestimated humankind’s appetite for sweetness. The main pitfall is labor: without workers, fields, mills, and boilers will sit idle. To avoid this calamity, plantation owners must take steps to ensure an adequate supply of employees. In an exhaustive study published in 2008, the University of Provence historian Mohamed Ouerfelli has shown that Islamic sugar plantations kept their workers by paying relatively high wages. European-owned plantations initially adopted the same strategy—in Sicily, Ouerfelli showed, people actually migrated from other parts of Europe to work on sugar plantations. But over the course of time Europe’s sugar producers reconsidered.

  After the First Crusade, European Catholics in later anti-Muslim missions seized sugar plantations from their Muslim and Byzantine creators in Cyprus, Crete, Sicily, Majorca, and southern Spain (Islamic empires later took some of them back). But no matter how much sugar they produced, Europeans wanted more. Eventually they ran out of areas warm and wet enough to grow sugar in the Mediterranean. Portugal looked overseas, to the Atlantic island chains: Madeira, the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands, and São Tomé (St. Thomas) and Príncipe. Spain went to another set, the Canary Islands.

  Madeira was first and in some ways most important. It set precedents and established patterns. Located about six hundred miles off the Moroccan coast, the archipelago consists of more than a dozen islands, of which two are by far the largest: Porto Santo and Madeira itself. Both are the summits of extinct volcanoes, but Porto Santo is low and partly ringed by beaches whereas Madeira is high and bristles with cliffs.

  Both islands were uninhabited until 1420, when they were visited by an expedition led by two squires in the Portuguese court and a Genoese navigator resident in Lisbon, Bartolomeu Perestrello. Two decades after his death, Perestrello became a footnote to history: his daughter married Colón, who may have lived on the islands and inherited his private navigational charts. While Perestrello was alive, he was best known as the man who brought rabbits to Madeira—or, more precisely, to Porto Santo, where the party initially disembarked. In Perestrello’s luggage was a pregnant rabbit, which gave birth aboard ship. Upon arrival he released mother and offspring, presumably intending to hunt them later for stew. To the colonists’ horror the animals “multiplied so much as to overspread the land,” Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Portugal’s royal archivist, recounted in 1453. Being rabbits, they ate everything in sight, including the colonists’ gardens. The Portuguese “killed a very great quantity of these rabbits,” Zurara reported, but “there yet remained no lack of them … our men could sow nothing that was not destroyed by them.” Starved out of Porto Santo by its own fecklessness, the expedition retreated to Madeira island.

  Click here to view a larger image.

  So delicious is this ecological parable that one naturally doubts its veracity. But Zurara, generally regarded as a careful writer, had visited the island; rabbits still plagued it at the time he wrote. Adding to the plausibility of the tale, much the same occurred after Spain took the Canary Islands. Colonists brought donkeys to Fuerteventura, the chain’s second-biggest island. Inevitably, the animals escaped. So many bands of donkeys rampaged through grain fields, reported a historian who lived there at the time, that the government “assemble[d] all the inhabitants and dogs in the island, to endeavor to destroy them.” An orgy of asinine slaughter ensued.

  Even if the Portuguese did not cause rabbit chaos on Porto Santo, they wreaked still worse ecological mayhem on Madeira. The island, unlike relatively open Porto Santo, was covered with deep forest (its name is the Portuguese word for “wood”). To plant crops, some portion of that forest had to be removed. The settlers chose the simplest method: fire. Predictably, the burn escaped control and engulfed much of the island. The settlers fled into the sea, where they stayed for two days in neck-deep water as flames roared overhead. Supposedly the fire continued, burning in roots underground, for seven years. The settlers planted wheat on the burned land, exporting the harvest to Portugal. Not until the 1440s did they learn that the island’s warm climate was better suited to another, more profitable crop: sugarcane.

  Meteorologically, Madeira was a fine place to grow sugar. Geographically, it was a challenge. The island has little land level enough for agriculture, and most of that little is on three high, inaccessible “shoulders” around the island’s two main volcanic peaks, the tallest more than six thousand feet. Elsewhere the terrain is so steep that in some parts cattle are kept in small, shed-like byres for their entire lives for fear they will tumble fatal
ly down the slopes. (Tourist guides extol Madeira as “the island of sad cows.”)

  The first settlers parceled out most of the land among themselves. Late arrivals either had to lease fields as sharecroppers or hack terraces from unused land. In either case, they had to channel water from the wet peaks to their plots, which involved creating an octopoid network of tunnels and conduits that twisted every which way through the stony hills. Despite the obstacles, sugar boomed. According to Alberto Vieira, the islands’ most prominent contemporary historian, between 1472 and 1493 production grew by a factor of more than a thousand. Prices fell, as one would expect. Planters who had been making huge profits suddenly saw those profits threatened. The only way to keep the money rolling in was to ramp up production: build new terraces, carve out new waterways, and construct new mills. They clamored for workers—wanted them now—to slash cane, extract juice, boil down sugar, and ship the crystallized results. With little evident reflection, some colonists made a fateful decision: they bought slaves.

  In some sense this was nothing new; slavery had existed in the Iberian peninsula since at least Roman times. At first many slaves had been taken from Slavic countries (the origin of the word “slave”) but in the intervening centuries the main source of bondsmen had become captured Muslim soldiers. As a rule, they worked as domestic servants and were treated in much the same way as other domestic servants; their main purpose, according to Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, a historian at the University of Granada, was to serve as “sumptuary articles”—status symbols. Slaves were living, breathing testaments to the wealth and rank of their owners. Being able to summon a captive Muslim or African to pour wine was proof that one was important enough to possess an exotic foreign human being. The system was not benevolent, but it had escape hatches big enough to avoid murder, insurrection, mutiny, and the other problems with slave labor identified by Adam Smith. Slaves often were allowed to earn their own money, for instance, with which they could rent their freedom on a monthly basis. Often enough, this led to emancipation. Domínguez Ortiz has speculated that Iberian slavery, left to itself, would have evolved into a system in which owners had the right to extract money from slaves, rather than labor, and only for designated periods of time.

  In Madeira, Iberian slavery was transformed. True, most of the Europeans there had only a little land and couldn’t afford bondsmen. And even those who did buy slaves rarely had more than two or three, and often they didn’t grow sugarcane. Initially the slaves themselves were not from the Gulf of Guinea, the great indentation along the west-central African coast that was the origin of the great majority of slaves in the Americas. Instead the first captive workers were a luckless, scattershot collection of convicts, Guanches (the original inhabitants of the Canary Islands), Berbers (the people of northwest Africa, long-term adversaries of the Portuguese), and, probably, conversos (Iberian Jews and Muslims who had been more or less forcibly converted to Christianity—many Portuguese and Spaniards viewed them as potential traitors). Nevertheless Madeira was where plantation agriculture was joined, however shakily, to African slavery. In time, Vieira says, the convicts, Guanches, Berbers, and conversos were replaced by west-central Africans. Africans grew and processed sugar, and their numbers rose and fell with the fortunes of the sugar industry. The world of plantation slavery was coming, terribly, into existence. And Madeira was, in Vieira’s phrase, its “social, political and economic starting point.”

  Sugar mills were smoky, steamy places that required many workers, as shown in this engraving of a Sicilian mill around 1600 (it is based on a painting by Jan Van der Straet, a Flemish artist active in Florence). (Photo credit 8.3)

  Two key elements, though, were missing: the organisms responsible for malaria and yellow fever. Both were abundant in São Tomé and Príncipe, two islands in the Gulf of Guinea that Portugal took over in 1486. Like Madeira, they were uninhabited, thickly forested places with a warm climate, good volcanic soil, and plenty of water—perfect for producing C12H22O11. Like Madeira, they were settled by entrepreneurially minded petty nobles who hoped to cash in on Europe’s sweet tooth. Unlike Madeira, though, São Tomé and Príncipe swarmed with Anopheles gambiae, Africa’s worst malaria carrier; and Aedes aegypti, which transmits yellow fever. It was a bit like a natural scientific experiment: change one variable and see what happens.

  The first two, small movements into São Tomé failed—killed off by disease. A third, larger attempt in 1493 succeeded, partly because it was accompanied by a mass of slave labor: convicts and undesirables, notable among the latter some two thousand Jewish children who had been taken forcibly from their parents. Sugar planters and sugar processors, criminals and children—all died in droves. After six years, only six hundred of the children were alive. Nonetheless the colony somehow kept going. A Dutch force landed in 1599 on Príncipe, the second island, intending to transform it, too, into a sugar center; the invaders departed after just four months, leaving more than 80 percent of their men beneath the ground. A year later the Dutch tried a different tactic: occupying São Tomé itself. Two weeks and 1,200 dead Dutchmen later, they bolted. Europeans perished with such routine dispatch on the islands that the Portuguese government took to exiling troublesome priests there, thus ensuring their deaths while technically avoiding the Vatican’s ban on executing its functionaries. In 1554, six decades after colonization began, São Tomé had but 1,200 Europeans. By 1600 the figure had shrunk to about two hundred—slaves outnumbered masters by more than a hundred to one. In 1785 an official report claimed that just four people—four people!—of pure European stock lived on the island. Trying to build up the colonial population, the monarchy ordered that female African slaves be awarded to every new male European arrival, along with exhortations to breed. The ploy failed to boost the number of migrants—the risk was not worth it. Even the bishops the Vatican appointed to the island refused to come. After the post had been vacant for forty-three years, a new bishop finally had the courage to land in São Tomé in 1675. He was dead in two months. “In São Tomé, there’s a door to come in,” the Portuguese sang, “but there’s no door to go out.”

  Despite the lack of colonists the colony flourished—for a while. At the height of the boom São Tomé exported four times as much sugar as Madeira. About a third of the island’s surface had been converted to sugarcane; much of the forest had vanished to fuel sugar mills. Because few Europeans ventured there, the land was not sliced into small parcels, like Madeira. Instead São Tomé was divided into a few dozen big plantations, each with several hundred slaves. From a distance, the plantations looked like tiny cities, with the slave huts clustering like suburbs around the high-timbered “big house” for the plantation manager and his family, many of whom were the mixed-race results of the free-concubine system (the owners themselves remained in Portugal if they could). With their tiny, fever-ridden European populations brutally overseeing thousands of enchained workers, São Tomé and Príncipe were the progenitors of the extractive state.

  An onslaught of sugar from big new plantations in Brazil knocked both Madeira and São Tomé out of the sugar market in the 1560s and 1570s. But what happened to the two islands was entirely different. Madeira’s lack of malaria and yellow fever had long been noted, though only in the last century did scientists discover the cause: the island does not host the mosquito vectors for the diseases. In the absence of disease, wealthy Europeans, many of them not Portuguese, had moved to the warm island. Around their manors and palaces they erected cathedrals, hospitals, convents, schools, and customs houses—tourist attractions today, valuable investments then. And the farms themselves weren’t monocultures, entirely devoted to a single crop, because they had to feed their owners and their owners’ neighbors. When the sugar market crashed, sugar squires were reluctant to abandon the homes, fields, and neighborhoods into which they had sunk so much effort. Instead they switched to a newly invented product: the fortified, heat-treated wine today called Madeira.

  Wine making, which typic
ally emphasizes quality rather than quantity, is not well suited to plantation slavery. In 1552, the apex of the island’s sugar era, three out of ten of its inhabitants were slaves; four decades later, with Brazilian sugar washing across the Atlantic like a white tide, the figure was one out of twenty. By and large, Madeirans freed their slaves; because they weren’t working sugarcane anymore, it was cheaper than feeding them. The ex-slaves, having no way off the island, became tenant farmers and sharecroppers for their former masters, who were now building wine presses and cellars. Constantly eyeing famine, the freed slaves survived, like shack people in the Chinese mountains half a world away, mainly on sweet potatoes. But they did survive; Madeira remained a crowded place. At the end of the nineteenth century the island became a tourist destination, touted in guidebooks as a mecca “for those convalescent and requiring rest after dangerous illnesses, malarial fever, etc.”

  No one has ever advertised São Tomé as a place to rest and recuperate from malaria. Its economy, too, crashed before the onslaught of Brazilian sugar. But São Tomé, unlike Madeira, did not adapt and recover—it simply marched on, though in ever-more-degraded form. Not having neighborhoods to protect, many of the island’s offshore landowners contented themselves with watching from afar as their Afro-European managers in their rotting haciendas half-heartedly tried to continue operations by growing food to provision European slave ships. Other planters simply transferred their interests to Brazil, walking away from their property in São Tomé. Some former overseers acquired their own land and bought slaves to tend it. So did some former slaves. By the mid-eighteenth century, São Tomé’s colonial masters had been replaced by a new elite of “Creoles” who traced their ancestry (or said they did) to the mixed-race children of the Portuguese and the first emancipated slaves. But the new management changed nothing about the plantations themselves. Even though there was little to sell and few customers, these zombie enterprises struggled on, slaves planting under the lash as the forest overran former sugar fields and colonial buildings crumbled into the harbor.