Sugar Complexes

Sugar plantations and mills were called engenhos in Brazil and ingenios in the Spanish Americas.²⁰ Sugarcane estates were large complexes encompassing fields, stables, mills, furnaces, and workshops that supported their operations.

In several parts of the Americas, sugar estates had various sizes and employed slightly differing techniques that improved over time. Yet, in Brazil and the West Indies, the process of sugar production carried many similarities. Sixteenth-century Brazilian engenhos were initially small. Most mills were powered by oxen or horses, with a few mills powered by water.²¹ Engenho owners could be the state, companies, or private holders. Religious orders of the Roman Catholic Church such as the Carmelites and the Benedictines also owned engenhos, whose profits supported their activities. But in Brazil, the Jesuits of the Society of Jesus were the largest owners of sugar plantations. Jesuits were also slave owners in other parts of the Americas where they owned plantations.²²

Figure 7.1. Romeyn de Hooghe, Braziliaanse suikerwerkers, 1682–1733. Etching, 21.2 × 29.9 cm. Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

A few families controlled most existing engenhos in Brazil. These sugar production complexes included not only the cane fields, a mill, furnaces (figure 7.1), and workshops to produce tools (especially those required for sugar production) but also a big house, slave quarters, and the residences where free workers resided.

Initially, enslaved Africans worked in the fields alongside Indigenous peoples in Brazil. But starting in the early decades of the seventeenth century, enslaved Africans progressively replaced the enslaved Indigenous workforce.²³ A painting by the Dutch artist Frans Post (figure 7.2) who sojourned in Brazil during the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco from 1630 to 1654 represents a sugar plantation setting. The depicted image evokes a scene that probably took place during a weekend, as Black and Indigenous characters featured in the painting are neither working nor under the watch of overseers. With dwellings suggesting slave quarters in the background, in the midground Black and Indigenous men, women, and children are standing or sitting along a path, interacting, gesticulating, playing drums, and displaying foodstuffs in what appears to be a weekend marketplace. Despite being a romanticized depiction of a plantation, represented as a harmonious space, the painting is a rich visual document attesting to the moment when enslaved Indigenous and Black workers coexisted in Brazil sugar estates.

Figure 7.2. Frans Post, Brazilian Landscape with a House Under Construction, c. 1655–60. Oil on panel, 70 × 46 cm. Courtesy of Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands.

Brazilian planters employed select wage workers as managers, foremen, overseers, and drivers, as well as other specialized positions such as sugar masters, who supervised the transformation of the sugarcane juice into processed sugar. Still, most of the workforce in sugar estates were enslaved African-born individuals and their descendants, who participated in all stages of sugar production, including planting, harvesting, milling, boiling, and curing sugar.

In the seventeenth century, Pernambuco became the first sugar-producing captaincy in Brazil, followed by Bahia. In these two regions, sugar estates were large complexes, but most enslaved people toiled in the fields. Bondspeople performed heavy work during the harvest period, which lasted between six and seven months and occurred at the same time that sugarcanes were ground and transformed into sugar. When a new plantation was established, bondsmen cleared the land to plant the sugarcanes. After growing for twelve to eighteen months, according to the variety, the canes could get as high as twenty feet and be ready for harvest. When the harvest season arrived, mature sugarcanes had to be immediately cut and processed; otherwise, they were lost. Enslaved people harvested sugarcane from sunrise to sunset. In Bahia, most sugar plantations employed a task system, in which each enslaved person was assigned a certain amount of cane to cut on a daily basis. For example, each bondsperson was expected to cut 4,200 canes daily in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.²⁵

Working in extremely hot temperatures and divided in groups, enslaved workers used cutlasses to chop the bottom of the stalks a few inches above the ground. This process allowed a new sprout to grow for the next harvest and could be repeated for several years before planting new canes. Overseers, who could be either enslaved or free, supervised the rhythm of the harvest to make sure each enslaved person was fulfilling the assigned quota. Overall, in Brazilian sugar plantations, enslaved people were constantly exposed to sun and rain, slept few hours, were barely clothed, and ate a meager diet for the kind of strenuous work they performed.

Because of these horrible conditions, it is not surprising that mortality rates among enslaved people were quite high in Brazil’s sugar-producing areas, as they were in the West Indies.²⁶ Several Brazilian historians have asserted that after disembarking in Brazilian slave ports, enslaved Africans rarely survived more than seven or eight years toiling in sugarcane fields.²⁷ One demographic historian has challenged the life expectancy of seven to eight years by contending that overall mortality among enslaved people was not very different from what prevailed among the rest of the population for the nineteenth century.²⁸ Still, this general response is largely insufficient to disprove that enslaved Africans who were transported to Brazil to toil in sugarcane plantations during the sugar boom that started in the seventeenth century survived longer than eight years when it is clear that slave traders were introducing new enslaved Africans in Brazil to work in sugar estates more than in any other region of the Americas.