As sugar prices continued to fall, the sugar planters needed cheap labour as well as better methods and machinery, and in the end, the surviving sugar planters were those who sought both. Cheap labour is still used in the developing world to harvest cane, but in the industrial countries, cane setts are planted in furrows by machine; cultivation, spraying, harvesting and every other process is done by machine.
With the end of slavery, growers still needed access to a poor peasant class who would grow their sugar for them, and as new areas of sugar growing developed, so it became necessary to bring peasants to those areas. The polite name given to this was ‘indentured labour’, but where this had once meant bringing out Celtic peasants from Britain to serve English masters, it now meant bringing ‘coolies’, as the Asian peasants were dismissively called, from some other part of the world.
To put matters in perspective, the conditions for travel at sea were always appalling in the age of sail. Of the 775 convicts who set out in 1787 from England for Botany Bay, 40 died before they reached Australia in early 1788, and others died soon after. Even free travellers had a hard time of it, as Janet Schaw reported after seeing a Scottish family who were heading for Jamaica on her ship in 1774 (and interestingly, paying for their passage by the husband signing indentures). Miss Schaw thought it a bad bargain when she saw what they had to eat:
It is hardly possible to believe that human nature could be so depraved, as to treat fellow creatures in such a manner for a little sordid gain. They have only for a grown person per week, one pound neck beef, or spoilt pork, two pounds oatmeal, with a small quantity of bisket, not only mouldy, but absolutely crumbled down with damp, wet and rottenness. The half is only allowed a child, so that if they had not potatoes, it is impossible they could live out the Voyage.
THE RETURN OF INDENTURED LABOUR
The rate of slave mortality for Barbados was regarded as normal on sugar plantations, but the figures for white indentured servants were almost as bad, and in the nineteenth century, indentured labourers who came from India suffered death at the same levels. The missionaries, deprived of slaves to emancipate, suddenly found a new cause to fight: that of people who were slaves in everything but name. The big stick they had was the level of mortality that the indentured sugar workers suffered.
A small number of Indians had arrived in Mauritius from Pondicherry in 1735. The next example of indentured labour comes in a report from 1800 of about 80 Chinese working on sugar plantations in Bengal and Bombay! Peter Cunningham, a surgeon who visited Australia several times on convict ships and owned a property in Australia, visited Port Macquarie, north of Sydney, where he saw sugar cane growing. He recommended the use of convicts and later, Chinese workers:
With good superintendence, convicts may be made to do quite as much as ever I saw accomplished by slaves, their labour being furnished free from any primary outlay of capital, while that of the slaves must be previously purchased, the interest upon the original price of the slave amounting to at least ten pounds annually . . . But perhaps as good a plan as any would be to establish a colony of Chinese on our shores, these being the principal sugar-growers in the Indian islands, and always ready to emigrate to any place where money is to be made.
By ‘Indian islands’ Cunningham meant Indonesia, where Chinese sugar growers had long been a major force. A wealthy Chinese community was established on Java by about 1400, and at some stage soon afterwards started growing sugar. Certainly the Dutch found sugar manufacture under Chinese control in the East Indies, when they began arriving in the area in 1596.
We can get an idea of the size of the East Indies industry when we consider the so-called Chinese Rebellion that took place in 1740. The Governor-General, Adriaan Valckenier, realising that the sugar industry of Java was all in Chinese hands, set out to round up and sell all of those Chinese without regular employment as slaves to Ceylon. A number of wealthy Chinese were arrested in short order. The other Chinese took up arms, and as many as 10 000 were killed before peace was restored. Around 1759, we find the first record of Chinese sugar workers at Penang off the coast of the the Malay Peninsula.
Some of the Chinese were independent travellers. One entrepreneur set up a stone mill and started to make sugar in Hawaii, on Lanai in 1802, but he left the next year. In 1832 William French put up the first lasting Hawaiian mill, operated by Chinese labour. In 1836 the mill sent the first 4 tons of sugar to the United States, and about 30 tons of molasses. The importation of workers here was minor, compared with what would soon happen.
John Gladstone, father to the later British Prime Minister, W. E. Gladstone, realised soon after emancipation that Indians could be successfully introduced into the West Indies. He retained the Calcutta firm of Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co., which had been recruiting labour for Mauritius, to obtain workers. In January 1838 the first 414 recruits left on a five-week voyage to the Caribbean. Eighteen died on board, the other 396 arrived safely. Later, Lord Brougham (a Whig politician) would claim that 20 per cent had died on the voyage, with another 30 per cent dying in the next five weeks.
Five years later, another 98 of the survivors had died, 238 had returned to India, 60 had elected to stay, and two had disappeared from view; this gave a death rate of more than 27 per cent. Those figures caused concern in those more enlightened days, and the British government would not agree to any extension of what could be represented in some quarters as ‘slavery in disguise’ until the returnees reached India and had been examined. In 1844 the authorities were satisfied and ‘emigration’ was again allowed.
John Gladstone’s Indians were described as ‘hill coolies’, but they were in fact Dhangars, a non-Aryan caste of nomadic agricultural labourers from Chota Nagpur. Unfortunately, later selections were far less discriminating, and members of warrior castes, untouchables and others were all mixed together.
In 1845 Lord Harris, Governor of Trinidad, set up a code of regulations for the management of the Indian workers, but the BFASS had this code disallowed. Instead of the immigrants being managed, a policy of laissez aller prevailed and the Indians were told they were free to move on if they wished. At the end of the first year many declined to re-engage, flocking to the towns as beggars and vagrants. From this point on, Exeter Hall in its various guises tended to be an active opponent of indentured labour, claiming that it was a form of slavery, while remaining blind to the abuses visited upon working folk at the heart of the British Empire.
THE WHITE SLAVES OF ENGLAND
Robert Sherard, the great-grandson of William Wordsworth, was a journalist and social campaigner. He could see the plight of the unfortunate as clearly as the BFASS, but he was concerned about those closer to home. The main criticism that Carlyle and others in the mid-nineteenth century had offered of Exeter Hall was that the English campaigners for social justice for slaves, like the union-crushing William Wilberforce, were oblivious of the pain and suffering under their own noses. All over England, people were working in hideous conditions, as Sherard explained in his crusading work The White Slaves of England.
His set of essays first appeared in Pearson’s Magazine, informing his readers about trades that few of them would ever have heard of, like the stone nobblers, old men who broke stones in an alkali works, so that sulfur could be extracted. They were paid at eightpence the ton, and a king among stone nobblers could earn thirteen shillings a week; few earned more than eight shillings. As one stone nobbler told him, ‘This is the last stage before the workhouse.’
Like Queen Elizabeth in the late sixteenth century, many of the workers in chemical factories of the late nineteenth century lost their teeth, though rather less pleasantly, as they were eaten away by the fumes and dust that they breathed and swallowed. Sherard found that a ‘salt-cake man’ could be recognised anywhere. His teeth, if not entirely destroyed, were but black stumps, and the effect made itself seen in less than twelve months. But it was not only the old and the infirm who were treated like this, well after most of the world’s slaves had been freed. Consider another girl he saw in a factory at Cradley:
She was fourteen by the Factory Act, by paternity she was ten. I never saw such little arms, and her hands were made to cradle dolls, yet she was making links for chain-harrows . . . Next to her was a female wisp, forging dog-chains, for which she received three farthings a piece. It was the chain which sells currently for eighteenpence. She worked ten hours a day and could ‘manage six chains in the day’.
The grinding poverty we meet in the novels of Charles Dickens and the works of Gustave Doré was still a grim reality even at the close of the nineteenth century. Many had no choice: it was either work in those conditions, or perish in the workhouse, which held power over the English (and even poor foreigners) who fell into its clutches right into the twentieth century.
Grace Elizabeth (‘Betsy’) Jennings Carmichael was an Australian poet of considerable promise, who wrote as Jennings Carmichael. Her husband, Francis Mullis, deserted her and her three sons while they were travelling in Britain and she was forced into the Leyton workhouse in 1904, where she died. Her three sons survived in another workhouse, and outraged Australians raised a public subscription to bring them back to Australia, where they unsurprisingly changed their name to Carmichael. Two generations earlier, though, the workhouses were far worse, so perhaps things were improving slowly.
Thomas Austin was a resident of the Hendon workhouse when he fell into the laundry copper and was scalded to death in 1839, soon after Britain freed all its slaves in a welter of self-congratulation at the country’s humanity. The workhouse authorities quietly buried the body, but the coroner, Dr Wakley, heard of the matter. He asked for the body to be exhumed, and declared the man had died of scalding, adding a rider to the effect that the master of the workhouse had been guilty of contributory negligence in not providing a protective railing round the copper. This was too much for the workhouse master, and he observed forcefully that the jury might have found a verdict, but had not identified the body, provoking Wakley to gain instant fame when he asked, ‘If this is not the body of the man who was killed in your vat, pray, Sir, how many paupers have you boiled?’
THE MASS MIGRATIONS
During the nineteenth century, many more people travelled the seas as ‘free labourers’ than did so in any comparable period when the slave traders operated, or even when the Spirits stole folk away from the ports of Britain. The profits may have been less, but many ships plied a trade that was, by all accounts, out of control. The need for control can be seen in the figures for Chinese coolies travelling to Cuba—between 1847 and 1880 some 140 000 were shipped around Cape Horn. About 12 per cent died on the trip, less than 25 per cent survived Cuba, and fewer than 1 per cent ever returned to China.
Jamaica was little better: of the 4551 Indians who arrived there in 1845–47, and 507 destitute Chinese who had come from Panama at the same time, just 1491 were still working in agricultural employment by 1854, with 1762 repatriated and a further 1805 dead or disappeared. (In fairness, though, it must be mentioned that a major cholera epidemic in 1850 killed 50 000 people across the island.)
Hawaii was another but rather less damaging user of indentured labour. The brig Thetis brought 253 Chinese to Hawaii in 1852, and by 1898 some 37 000 had landed. The 1910 census showed 21 674 Chinese still there. A group of 148 Japanese arrived on the Scioto in 1868, five more following in 1882 and another 1959 in 1885. This was the start of a flood, with 176 432 Japanese arriving between 1882 and 1907, when the flow was restricted by agreement. After that, emigration exceeded immigration, but there were still 45 000 Japanese in the Hawaiian islands in 1936.
There was clearly money to be made from transporting indentured labour, and more and more people started doing it. Attempts were made to start the import of Indians to Natal in 1858 and 1859; the bill approving the practice was passed in 1860. Soon afterwards, sugar workers began to flood in from India. One of the Indians who went to Natal, but as a lawyer, not a sugar worker, was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. In 1893, the 24-year-old Gandhi left a lucrative law practice in Bombay to work for the rights of the Indian sugar workers in South Africa, where they were made to feel that they were remarkably second rate, and needed a firm and knowledgeable representative. Clearly, Gandhi already had a strong conscience, but the man we know as Mahatma Gandhi strengthened himself for his struggle to free India while tending to the needs of the Indian sugar workers in Natal. Once again, sugar policies had an unexpected result.
The main advantage of foreign labourers anywhere seems to have been the language barrier that tied them to a workplace, but the excuse for bringing them in from other places was usually that ‘the natives won’t do the work’—ironically, at the same time that Fijians were being recruited to work on other islands, Indians were being recruited for Fiji. The first Indian indentured labourers arrived in Fiji in 1879, and by 1916 a total of 68 515 had arrived. A number of these Indians were repatriated, found no place for themselves in India, and so re-emigrated to Fiji, where their descendants remain today.
Ralph Shlomowitz, an Australian academic, points out that the Natal and Fiji experiences allow us to assess the death rates reported from the various sugar plantation areas in a more balanced way:
More generally, the importance of epidemiological factors is also shown in a consideration of the variation in the average death rate of Indian indentured workers at home and abroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Highest death rates occurred in the epidemiologically hostile tea estates of Assam, with its endemic malaria and cholera, and the sugar cane plantations of Malaya, with its endemic malaria; lowest death rates occurred in the relatively epidemiologically benign sugar cane plantations of Natal and Fiji, generally free of malaria and cholera. Death rates on Caribbean sugar cane plantations were higher than in Natal and Fiji as malaria was endemic in the Caribbean; the death rates in the Caribbean were lower than those in Assam and Malaya because the malaria strains in the Caribbean were much less lethal than those in Assam and Malaya.
AUSTRALIA AND THE KANAKAS
For the most part, the Exeter Hall faction did little about the recruitment of indentured labour in Asia (as opposed to its use in various places), perhaps because they felt it was better supervised in India and China. However, the London Missionary Society and various Presbyterian missionaries on South Sea islands were outspoken in their complaints about the ‘blackbirders’, the ships’ captains who recruited labour from the islands to work in the sugar plantations of Queensland and New Caledonia (people referred to at first as ‘Polynesians’ and then as ‘Kanakas’). It was, they asserted, no better than a slave trade. This claim is maintained today by the descendants of the Kanakas who still live in Australia and by many other Australians, but the evidence is less than clear.
Anthony Trollope had visited Demerara and Trinidad before travelling to Australia, where he saw some of the first Kanakas working on the plantations:
Then as now there was a fear in England that these foreigners in a new country would become slaves under new bonds, and that a state of things would be produced,—less horrible indeed than the slavery of the negroes who were brought into the West Indies by the Spaniards,— but equally unjust and equally opposed to the rights and interests of the men concerned . . .
Let us have no slavery in God’s name. Be careful. Guard the approaches. Defend the defenceless. Protect the poor ignorant dusky foreigner from the possible rapacity of the sugar planter. But . . . be not led away by a rampant enthusiasm to do evil to all parties. Remember the bear who knocked out his friend’s brains with a brickbat when he strove to save him from the fly. An ill-conducted enthusiasm may not only debar Queensland from the labour she requires, but debar also these poor savages from their best and nearest civilisation.
Trollope outlined the diet of the Kanakas; under the standard contract the daily ration was 1 lb of beef or mutton (he missed the alternative of 2 lb of fish) and another 1 lb of bread or flour, 5 oz sugar or molasses, 2 lb of vegetables which might be substituted by 4 oz of rice or 8 oz of maize, with a weekly issue of 11/2 oz of tobacco, 2 oz of salt and 4 oz of soap. Commenting on this, he observes that their ‘dietary is one which an English rural labourer may well envy’.
Trollope quoted figures to show that the total cost of hiring a Kanaka over a three-year contract was £75, at a time when a white labourer on weekly wages of 11s. would cost about £86 over three years. Against that, he admits that in Queensland, 15s. was the usual minimum, with sugar establishments paying white workers between 15s. and 20s. a week. He also quoted a figure of 25s. a week, including rations, for white labourers, and added: ‘I was told by more than one sugar-grower that two islanders were worth three white men among the canes.’
In short, it would appear that Trollope’s evidence shows that the Kanakas were underpaid, but this related mainly to the first three years, when some degree of training was needed. Kanakas seeking a second contract were generally reported to be paid rather better rates, though actual figures are hard to find. Trollope, having discussed the nature of the contract signed by the Kanakas, and the extent to which they understood it, observed in relation to some of the criticisms:
There is not a word said here that might not be said with equal force as to the emigration of Irishmen under government surveillance from the British Isles to the British colonies,—except in this, that in regard to the poor Irishman there is seldom any contract insuring him work and food and wages immediately on his arrival. Were there any such contract he would not understand it a bit better than the islander,— who does in fact know very well what the contract ensures him.
The main claim of the missionaries was that the labourers were kidnapped by the blackbirders. Those ‘engaging in the Queensland labour trade’ (the same parties by their own preferred description) answered that it was a blatant lie, that the missionaries were objecting because they knew that a ‘boy’ would be much less amenable to their demands and strictures once he had seen something of the world. William Wawn, one of the recruiters (if we may use that as a neutral term), explained it like this:
The returned islander, however, is a very different personage for the missionary to operate on. He has seen the world. He does not believe in offerings to the church in the shape of pigs, fowls, yams and breadfruit. He knows how clergymen are regarded by the white workmen with whom he has come in contact . . . the missionary finds him a terrible stumbling-block in his path.
Certainly some of the indentured labourers in other parts of the world had been kidnapped. A commission which travelled to Cuba from China found that of about 40 000 Chinese who had been shipped there, around 80 per cent had been kidnapped or decoyed. This was not the case in the South Sea, according to William Wawn.
Whatever the reliability of Wawn’s other comments, his points about Pidgin English are certainly valid:
This custom of making presents to recruits’ friends has been eagerly seized upon by our opponents as proof that we really bought the recruits—that the latter were slaves, probably captured in war; which is simply absurd. New Hebrideans never spare their enemies in battle, or make prisoners of the men. Slavery is unknown to them; they are not yet sufficiently advanced to appreciate it . . .
Owing to their limited knowledge of the English language, such terms as ‘buy,’ ‘sell,’ and ‘steal,’ have a wide and comprehensive meaning. ‘You buy boy?’ is often the first question asked of a recruiter when he arrives at a landing-place. This simply means ‘Do you wish to engage boys?’ ‘Boys,’ as elsewhere, signifies men of any age. The term ‘steal’ is also frequently misunderstood. If you take away a recruit from his home without ‘buying’ or ‘paying’ for him,—that is, without making presents to his friends to compensate them for losing him,— they will say you ‘steal’ him.
From his detailed defence of the ‘labour trade’, it is hard to tell whether Wawn is a plausible rogue, or a knockabout ruffian telling a (perhaps somewhat shaded) version of the truth. He admitted that certain traders were guilty of infringements of the rights of some of their recruits, but that in general it was only those recruiting for the French colonies who did such things. He argued that if the ‘recruiters’ had indeed kidnapped recruits from the islands they would never be able to go back there again, that they would be destroying their future markets, or putting their lives at risk.
Wawn also applied a kind of logic to the situation, arguing that many of the workers signed up for a second contract, and that many of those signing up for their first contract were from villages where former labourers lived. He drew attention to the presence of a government official on each boat, charged with the task of ensuring total fairness, reminding his readers that the recruiter needed to sign a £500 bond that he would not engage in kidnapping.
In all probability, both sides in the debate were somewhat at fault. There must have been times when desperate traders, faced with financial ruin, seized some unfortunates, or where a bribe encouraged the government supervisor to look the other way. It is certainly the case that many of the missionaries sent out to the islands were totally unsuited to the positions they held, and entirely untrained. The same could be said of the recruiters, and each party was very happy to blame all of their woes on the other. Against that even-handed consideration, there is a weight of tradition, among both whites and Kanakas, that the labour trade was a form of slavery. So we find The Worker in 1911 saying that ‘Australians are not likely to submit without a protest against being treated like the Kanakas of slavery days’.
We can see from the records that large numbers of workers died periodically, a fact popularly held to be have been due to harsh treatment. However, blaming the excessive mortality on harsh treatment does not explain why the mortality was highest soon after the arrival of the islanders in Queensland. Ralph Shlomowitz has shown that the death rates declined by the year of residence, and this suggests that people who understand the germ theory and epidemiology have no need to blame harsh treatment to explain what happened.
White planters began by saying that only coloured races could work the sugar cane, but later they wondered, with cheerful racism, if Mediterranean Europeans might also be up to the task. The first 180 Portuguese arrived in Hawaii in 1878, and 30 000 had followed by 1913. Between 1907 and 1913, Hawaii saw the arrival of 6588 Spaniards, mainly from Malaga, a depressed sugar district. Australia began admitting Italian migrants to work the cane fields and other nationalities followed, coming, however illogically, even from countries like Finland. Where Australia had been a stolidly, solidly British place, we might wish to trace the eventual breakdown of the unofficial White Australia Policy to the entry of the sugar workers. It was certainly a first step in making Australia less exclusively British.
All over the world, history’s greatest human mass migrations were taking place. Between 1887 and 1924, for example, Argentina had a net gain of 800 000 Italians and 1 million Spaniards, many working in the sugar industry. Many more had returned home richer than when they left.
ANZAC BISCUITS
For 48 biscuits, you will need 125 g butter, 1 tbsp golden syrup, 2 tbsp boiling water, 11/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda, 1 cup rolled oats, 3/4 cup desiccated coconut, 1 cup plain flour, 1 cup sugar. Melt the butter and golden syrup over a gentle heat, add mixed boiling water and bicarbonate of soda. Pour the liquid into mixed dry ingredients and blend well. Then drop teaspoonsfuls of the mixture onto a greased tray and bake in a slow oven [150°C] for 20 mins. Allow the biscuits to cool on trays for a few minutes and then remove them. The biscuits should be stored in airtight containers when cool.
The standard modern recipe of a treat for First World War soldiers from Australia and New Zealand