Sugar cane

Sugar cane was introduced to Madeira, it seems, in 1425. The first cuttings of the plant, which are said to have come from Sicily on the orders of Prince Henry the Navigator, were planted in the Campo do Duque (‘duke’s field’), the ground in the city of Funchal now occupied by the Cathedral (Sé Catedral), its churchyard and open square, the Largo da Sé (‘cathedral square’), the Rua do Aljube (‘bishop’s prison street’) and the Largo do Comércio, formerly Largo de São Sebastião. From the Campo do Duque the cane passed to Machico, where its cultivation prospered so greatly that it yielded thirteen arrobas of sugar, which was the first sugar sold on the island.

From Madeira sugar cane passed to the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Angola and Benguela. It may be supposed that this useful plant also spread from our island to the Portuguese and Spanish colonies of America, where there still exists today a variety of cane called crioula, perfectly identical to the old local cane grown here.

Cane cultivation prospered and expanded in Madeira until the middle of the 16th century, when the island came to produce 300,000 arrobas of sugar. By 1590, however, when Gaspar Frutuoso wrote the ‘Longing for the Homeland’ (Saudades da Terra), the once flourishing sugar industry was already tending to decline, owing to the influx of sugar from Brazil and the Spanish colonies into European markets, although valuable plantations of the grass still existed here.

To avert the crisis that was beginning to appear, the Funchal Council requested and obtained in 1598 a royal decree (alvará) forbidding any ship to load sugar from elsewhere here. This measure brought the island no benefit, and nor did a contract made in 1608 between the city’s residents and the same Council, under which sugar imported from Brazil was not to be sold to foreigners until they had made up a third of their cargoes with local sugar.

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By a royal decree of 1649’, says Dr Azevedo, ‘rewards and loans were promised to those who rebuilt the old sugar mills (engenho), by then already in ruins, or built new ones. However, the sugar industry on the island of Madeira had been mortally wounded ever since, from the end of the 16th century onwards, American sugar came to supply the European markets at prices with which it could not compete. Competition had indeed become impossible for it, both because America was made fruitful by the almost unpaid labour of the slave, whereas Madeira was worked for the most part by the free tenant farmer (colono, under the colonia contract); and because in America the land, the cultivation, the manufacture and perhaps the capital as well formed a single interest, a single force, a single enterprise, whereas here they did not. The ill-matched duality of landlord and tenant farmer, or holder of the entail and peasant, long dormant in its mutual jealousies in the shade of an opulence to which it had given no impulse, awoke, self-destructive, as soon as the sheltering tree split and fell under the axe of adversity.

The illustrious annotator of the ‘Longing for the Homeland’ gives the year 1748 as marking the end of the sugar period on this island. It should be noted, however, that only the industry of processing sugar disappeared almost entirely at that time, for the cultivation of cane continued, albeit on a much smaller scale than before.

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From the middle of the 18th century onwards’, says Dr Azevedo, ‘Madeira was reduced to a mere consumer of American sugar, with which it kept up its confectionery. This, it may well be said, had been raised here since the 16th century to a true art and a valuable export industry, as is shown by certain documents... and by various passages of the Saudades da Serra, especially the one which says that Captain Simão Gonçalves da Câmara sent to Rome to visit the Pope with a great service... many trinkets and delicacies of the island in preserves, and the Sacred Palace made entirely of sugar, and the cardinals all made of alfenim (white sugar paste for modelling figures)... of the height of a man.

Few sugar mills existed on the island in 1730, and in 1736, 1739, 1741, 1748, 1758 and 1765 royal decrees were requested for the import of sugar from Brazil.

Thomas Edward Bowdich, who was in Madeira in 1823, says that an insignificant quantity of sugar was made here, and the author of Rambles in Madeira, who visited us in 1826, says much the same about this product, adding that there was then only one mill for crushing sugar cane on the whole island. In 1827, according to a newspaper of the time, Madeira had one more mill for the same purpose, but by 1851 the number of these establishments had risen to four, all driven by oxen, as Eduardo Harcourt attests in his Sketch of Madeira.

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The manufacture of sugar and of spirit (aguardente, distilled from sugar cane or wine)’, states Dr Azevedo, ‘revived almost immediately after the destruction of the vineyards between 1846 and 1852. Spirit came first, in 1847, with a distillery set up in Câmara de Lobos; there followed another in Ribeira Brava in 1853; another in Câmara de Lobos in 1854; another in Canhas in 1855; two in 1857, one in Arco da Calheta and another in Câmara de Lobos; nine in 1858, namely two in Machico, two in Porto da Cruz, one in São Jorge, one in Ponta Delgada, one in Paul do Mar, one in Madalena and one in Câmara de Lobos; two in 1859, one in São Jorge and another in Faial; one in São Vicente in 1860; and lastly one in Ponta Delgada in 1861.

Then came the sugar factories: that of Ferraz Irmãos, begun some years earlier, and that of William Hinton & Son, both in Funchal, and that of Ferreira Nogueira in São Martinho, all in 1856; in 1858, that of Ornelas Frazão in Santa Cruz (‘Holy Cross’); in 1859, that of Joaquim da Silva in Funchal; between then and 1866, that of Diogo Frazão in Arco da Calheta and that of Wilbraham in Ponta do Sol (‘point of the sun’); and lastly the great São João (‘St John’) factory, some of the last seven also making spirit.’

The quantity of cane juice (garapa) obtained in 1855 was 311,500 gallons, according to White in the book entitled Madeira its climate and scenery. The report presented by the agronomist Eduardo Dias Grande to the Funchal Agricultural Society (Sociedade Agrícola do Funchal) in 1865 shows that the island produced 14,688,043 kilograms of cane that year, the area under this crop then being about 357 hectares. According to the same agronomist, these 14,688,043 kilograms should have yielded 84:218,98 hectolitres of cane juice, representing a capital of 175,039,550 réis (old Portuguese money of account; 1$000 = 1,000 réis, 1:000$000 = one conto = 1,000,000 réis).

Sugar cultivation remained flourishing in Madeira until 1881, but in 1882 a disease hitherto completely unknown on the island began to attack the canefields, ending by destroying them almost completely in 1884, 1885 and 1886.

This disease, caused by a fungus, Conyothyrium melasporum, in the opinion of the distinguished agricultural engineer Mr Alfredo de Fraga Gomes, did very great damage to the island, and every treatment employed to combat it proved fruitless.

The Bourbon cane, imported from Cayenne at the beginning of the 19th century and from Cape Verde in the middle of that century, was the variety destroyed by Conyothyrium. However, the introduction from 1833 of new, selected varieties from Mauritius and other countries allowed the canefields to be rapidly re-established. By 1890 they had already spread across almost the whole of the island’s lower zone, and there was even one variety, the bamboo cane, which had been found to grow at altitudes that sugar cane had never before reached.

The native or Creole cane, short and green, was, as we have already said, the first to exist in Madeira. It was followed by the Bourbon cane, with taller and sometimes slightly reddish stalks, introduced in the 19th century. In 1861, or a little earlier, the Antilles cane, with violet leaves and stalks, was introduced to the island, but this variety, which grew poorly in our climate, never formed large plantations.

The varieties of cane on the island in 1890 were chiefly the Otaheite, the crystalline Haiti, the elephant and the bamboo, all with green, yellowish or greenish-yellow stalks; the violet, the light violet and the dark violet, with violet stalks and green leaves; the red, with stalks of the same colour; the Port Mackay, with russet stalks and striped leaves, already somewhat attacked by the disease; and the striped and the striped crystalline, with thick, striped stalks. These last two varieties, the violet and the Otaheite or white cane, dominated the plantations, being also the hardiest and the richest in cane juice (garapa). The Yuba cane, one of the most widely cultivated, has greater vitality than any of the other varieties and also outyields them, owing to the abundance of its stalks. The average yield per hectare, which in former times was 20, 25 and 30,000 kilograms, now reaches 30, 35 and 50,000 kilograms, the largest yields always coming from land eminently suited to cane growing and properly fertilised with manure and chemical fertilisers.

Although sugar cane is grown successfully in Málaga and Motril, in Spain, experience shows that in Madeira it should not go above an altitude of 250 to 300 metres on the south coast, or 150 to 200 metres on the north. At an altitude of 450 metres the cane juice registers only 4 to 6 degrees Baumé, so that the cane produced there never fetches the prices paid for cane from the lower zone (coastal belt). According to the analyses made in 1911 by Dr Otto Klein, the juice of Yuba cane grown in the island’s lower zone reaches as much as 10.46 Baumé, whereas that of the old Bourbon cane sometimes registered 11.05.

Mr Luiz de Castilho states in a work entitled A Fabricação do Assucar de Canna (Rio de Janeiro, 1892) that in Guadeloupe analyses of cane showed an average of 12.29 per cent sucrose, in Cuba 12.5 to 14 per cent, depending on the season, and in Brazil, on the lands of Bracuhy, 14.86 per cent. In seventy-one analyses of Yuba cane stalks made by Dr Otto Klein, the average obtained was only 11.7. It should be noted, however, that much of the cane sent to this chemist came from land situated about 350 metres above sea level.

In Madeira, before the Yuba cane, the sucrose content of the various varieties then grown was 11%, and their yield of crystallised sugar ranged between 6 and 7 kilograms per hundred. Now, thanks to better varieties and the gradual improvement of manufacturing processes, the cane’s yield of crystallised sugar is 9 to 10 per cent. According to published technical information, ‘every 100 kilograms of Yuba cane contain 78 litres of cane juice or jus with a purity of 86’, which leads us to consider this variety as valuable, or almost as valuable, as the varieties grown in the West Indies, ‘whose juices have 84 to 88 purity’, as stated by the author of a pamphlet published in 1910 under the title A Questão Sacarina da Madeira.

The price of cane has varied considerably in Madeira. In 1872 the Companhia Fabril de Assucar Madeirense paid 55 centavos for every 30 kilograms of cane of 9 to 10 degrees Baumé, 60 for cane of 10 to 11 degrees and 65 for cane of over 11 degrees. These prices did not last long, however: as soon as the enemies of the São João factory succeeded in destroying it, the price of the product fell quite markedly. In 1881 the Torreão (‘turret’) factory paid 45 centavos for cane, but this price, which was still profitable, did not hold either, and shortly afterwards the canefields disappeared because of the disease we have already mentioned. Around 1862 the factories paid 30 centavos for cane; later they sometimes paid 32 and 35 centavos. Finally came the decree of 30 December 1895, which set prices of 40 to 45 centavos per 30 kilograms for the product, and the decree of 24 September 1903, by which Madeira obtained a further 5 centavos on the minimum cane prices, an increase that the decree of 18 March 1911 left unchanged.

At present, under the provisions of decree no. 27,912 of 31 July 1937, the price set for cane in legal condition is 7.60 escudos (the Portuguese currency from 1911: 1 escudo = 100 centavos = 1,000 réis) per 30 kilograms.

In 1918 some spirit (aguardente, distilled from sugar cane or wine) factories paid prices for cane higher than those set in the 1911 decree, but the government, on the grounds of protecting the district against the danger of alcoholism, ordered these factories to cease operating, and from then on the registered factories could buy the rest of the crop at the legal prices.

It should be pointed out that, for various technical reasons, the quantity of commercial sugar obtained does not correspond exactly to the sugar content of the cane, but the difference is much smaller today than formerly, thanks to the manufacturing and maximum-extraction processes recently adopted on the island.

Before the 1895 decree, farmers could have sugar made on their own account, paying the agreed price for its manufacture with part of the product or with a certain sum of money. This right, however, was not recognised by the Torreão factory once it had been allowed to monopolise sugar production for the island’s consumption.

Cane growing, which covered 1,000 hectares in 1906, 1,100 hectares in 1911, 1,800 hectares in 1915 and 1,500 hectares in 1918, is, according to the agronomist Senhor João da Mota Prego, more profitable than viticulture, given the state of the trade in our wines, but less so than banana growing. In the same agronomist’s view, this crop ‘cannot extend over an area much greater than it has occupied in recent years; what may increase is the intensity of production per unit of area, though this increase in production will in any case be very slow, since it depends on more intensive cultivation, that is, cultivation consuming more capital, and it is therefore hampered by the present system of farming, sharecropping (parceria).

Sugar cane is usually propagated from the tops of the stalks, which are much cheaper than the other parts of the plant, and it is customary to plant them at a slant to encourage the growth of ratoons.

In the hot season the canefields are irrigated every 15 or 17 days, which does not mean that they cannot withstand longer dry spells. In certain places where water is scarce, the cane sometimes goes unwatered for as long as a month. Of the varieties grown in Madeira, Yuba cane resists drought best, owing to its hardy nature.

The building of levadas (irrigation channels) began in Madeira in the 15th century, and it was thanks to them that cane growing, which started in the Campo do Duque, was able to spread to new places, first in the south and later in the north of the island. The 300,000 arrobas of sugar produced on the island in the mid-16th century lead us to suppose that some two thousand hectares were then under cane. It is also possible that the water of many springs, which no longer exist because of the folly with which the people destroyed the old Madeiran forests, was used to irrigate the land. The Levada de Santa Luzia, the Levada do Castelejo and the levada of the Ribeira dos Socorridos had already been built in the 16th century. By the royal decree (alvará) of 19 October 1562, the queen regent, Queen Catherine, acting in the name of King Sebastian, ordered that these and other channels be cleaned, ‘bisto se perderem muytas canas daçucar & deixarem de se prantar outras por se nom tirarem e limparem as levadas em tempo’ (since many sugar canes are being lost and others are not being planted because the levadas are not cleared and cleaned in time).

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The oldest document relating to the sugar industry in the archive of the Funchal Council dates from 1562, as can be seen from the notes to the ‘Longing for the Homeland’, and it shows that the first advances of this industry in Madeira date from that time: it authorises the building of the first water-driven mill for making sugar that existed here, and its wording makes clear that before it there was no other here, powered by any means whatsoever. Until that time, therefore, sugar production could only have been scanty and a purely domestic activity.

In 1900 there were 49 cane-crushing mills in Madeira, 16 of them driven by steam and 33 by water. Today these establishments number 51, of which only one, that of H. Hinton, makes all the sugar consumed in the archipelago or exported to Portugal. The capacity of this factory, one of the largest and most perfect known, today reaches 500 tonnes of cane in twenty-four hours, whereas from 1895 to 1900 it did not exceed 150 tonnes in the same period.

Sugar cane is useful not only as an industrial plant but also as a fodder plant, since cattle eat its leaves readily while they are green. The cane is generally stripped of its leaves twice, once between July and October and again before the harvest.

The legislation published on the Madeiran sugar regime (regime sacarino, the legal framework governing sugar production) is varied and abundant. The fundamental law that governs sugar growing and the sugar industry today is Decree no. 3,847 of 14 May 1934. Under this law, cane growing is limited to cane of at least 9 Baumé that is indispensable for the sugar consumed in Madeira and, additionally, for the alcohol and spirit (aguardente, distilled from sugar cane or wine) consumed in the archipelago. This cane output is guaranteed compulsory purchase by the sugar factory at the legal price, and if in any industrial year the sugar made from it exceeds local consumption, the factory may ship the surplus to mainland Portugal, up to a maximum of 200 tonnes, exempt from duties and taxes.

To achieve this balance, the decree stipulates that the directorate of the Funchal Customs House shall determine, through appropriate prior investigation and analysis, the localities and plots distant from the sugar and alcohol factories or from the sea where the cane has less than 9 Baumé. If even so normal cane output exceeds the anticipated requirements, the Government may order the measures needed to end cultivation where it is least suitable.

The varieties that replaced Bourbon cane are extinct or nearly extinct on the island, and Madeiran canefields now consist mainly of Yuba cane, imported from Natal around 1897, and of some P.O.J. varieties, imported chiefly from the province of Angola from 1933 onwards. Yuba cane, considered of inferior quality in Brazil, Mauritius, Louisiana and other countries where it is or has been grown, has adapted so well to the soils and climate of our island that it is rightly regarded as one of the hardiest and most profitable ever grown here.

Since 1934 planting sugar cane has been prohibited on land that did not carry it at that date, and also on land where it is replaced by another crop. Later, Decree no. 25,437 of 31 May 1935 established that, when it becomes necessary to replace or renew cane plantings in order to keep the canefields economically viable, the owners may, with prior authorisation from the directorate of the Funchal Customs House, carry out such replacement or renewal up to a limit of 80 per cent of the plants replaced and 80 per cent of the area occupied.