Bittersweet (21 page)

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

12 SUGAR IN THE
TWENTIETH
CENTURY

B
y the start of the twentieth century, sugar was a major source of energy, a major food component and a major source of agitation. Sugar proved to be an excellent source of energy for conspiracy theories, though alternative sweeteners proved to have much the same power. Where pamphleteers once wrote mainly of the evils of sugar taxes or slavery, the new pamphleteers wrote books, proclaiming the insidious nature of various sweeteners, or the promise of the new wonder fuel.

The truth was a little different.