“Almost Purgatory, or Hell”
In seventeenth-century Bahia, the process of harvesting and processing sugarcanes was similar to what was done in the West Indies. Most bondspeople cut the canes while other slaves, including women, removed their leaves, bundled the stalks that were transported in oxcarts onto the backs of donkeys, and, depending on the plantation, carried them by canoe through existing pathways to the grinding mill and the adjacent structure where sugar was processed.
Whereas work in the fields was conducted by day, the mills continued grinding overnight, operating between eighteen and twenty hours a day. In addition to performing arduous and repetitive work in the fields, especially in the West Indies, enslaved people also executed other heavy tasks and took additional shifts in the subsequent stages of sugar production.29 About eight bondspeople, including enslaved women, operated the grinding mill under the supervision of a manager, either enslaved or free. Enslaved men and women introduced the canes into the roller that pressed the stalks and produced the juice. This stage of sugar production was risky. Accidents were common, especially in water-powered mills that turned faster.30In Brazil, Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Jamaica, and Cuba, enslaved people, usually women, could easily lose a limb while feeding sugar mills. As noted by historian Richard S. Dunn, at the Mesopotamia plantation in Jamaica, two enslaved women lost an arm and a hand, respectively, in sugar mill accidents. Bella, a forty-two-year-old grass cutter, lost her hand in a mill accident in 1793. Still, she continued to cut grass and cook over the next twenty years. Rose was a fifty-year-old nurse who lost her arm in a mill accident in 1765, but who also continued to work, carrying water on her head for the next thirty years.31 Similar accidents also occurred in Brazil.
In his journal of the early 1800s, French traveler Louis-François de Tollenare described the tragic fate of Queen Teresa, an enslaved African woman who worked in Sibiró engenho, near Recife in Pernambuco. According to Tollenare, Teresa was a beautiful queen in her late twenties, identified as originating from Cabinda, the seaport of the Kingdom of Ngoyo in West Central Africa. Sold into slavery as judicial punishment for committing adultery, she was highly respected by her enslaved companions and often refused to work. But one day she had to replace another enslaved woman who worked feeding the sugarcane press, a task she was not used to doing. She got one hand caught in the press, and while trying to remove it with her other hand, both hands were smashed, and her two arms were amputated. Despite the horrible accident, she continued to work, overseeing the mill’s activities.32French Dominican missionary, planter, and slave owner Jean-Baptiste Labat explained in his multivolume seventeenth-century travel account that in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-Domingue, enslaved women were also the predominant workforce in sugar mills.33 French planters assigned the weakest enslaved women to feed the mills. On various occasions, especially at night, enslaved women lost one or both of their arms or hands in the mill’s rollers.34 Attractive because it came with better food rations, the activity was conceived as punishment in the British West Indies, not because the work was hard but because the work was dangerous.
The juice extracted from the crushed sugarcanes flowed into the boiling house’s tanks. In Brazil, bondspeople, usually born in the colony, stoked the furnaces with firewood that was methodically selected to process the liquid within thirty-six hours. Enslaved people stirred and skimmed the heated liquid in copper and iron cauldrons of various sizes, depending on the stage of the sugar-making process. The sugar master and his assistant were frequently freemen.
They supervised the temperature of each cauldron and the appropriate moment to add lime, ash, and water to purify the liquid.35 Using giant ladles, they ladled and skimmed the liquid to remove its impurities and then separated the crystals. In Brazil, the boiling house’s dark atmosphere, with its heat, flames, and heavy clouds of vapors, led Jesuit priest Antônio Vieira to compare it to the hell during a sermon addressing enslaved people in Bahia in 1633.36 In the early eighteenth century, Jesuit Antonil also provided the tragic same image of the furnaces as a “prison of fire and perpetual smoke and living image of the volcanoes Vesuvius, Etna, almost purgatory, or hell.”37 Enslaved workers toiling in these conditions were exposed to extremely high temperatures. Working day and night in these structures, they often faced the risk of falling into the furnaces when they were not protected by iron bars.The final production phase took place at the curing or purging house. Bondspeople transferred the hot moistened crystals to earthenware conical pots with a hole at the bottom. Depending on the period, a cone could contain between twenty-five and sixty pounds of uncured sugar. Once the content cooled, the solid sugar stuck to the conical pot to create compact sugar cones, and the molasses that dripped out through the cone’s hole could be fermented and distilled to produce aguardente or rum. Enslaved people were once again in charge of the final phase of sugar making. After the cones dried, bondspeople cut, separated, hit, crumbled, and packed the sugar in crates.