Rubber plantation

“ Ever since plantations of Hevea have been made on an increasing scale in the Straits Settlements, the Federated Malay States and in Ceylon, and at the present time rubber plantations form the principal industry in these colonies. ”

“ They are also planting up their forests with valuable exotic hardwood trees, and the department is training hundreds of intelligent young Africans in the arts of forestry conservation. These rubber plantations are usually communal property, although in some cases individuals have plantations of their own on their family land. ”

“ Never in the whole world’s commercial history has so great a triumph been achieved in so short a time and in the face of such difficulties as the development of the plantation rubber industry. Here, indeed, is a triumph that should make you proud of your countrymen, for the motive power behind that development67 was British; for years the British pioneers who paved the way to success were derided for their faith in the new enterprise, and they almost had to pawn their shirts to meet expenses whilst they were bringing the first plantations to bearing stage. ”

“ There is no reason why the scientific cultivation of the rubber tree should not be attended with as good results in Colombia as have so signalized its culture in Ceylon and the Malay Peninsula. In view of the destructive system of treating the rubber trees in Brazil and other parts of South America in collecting the latex, and the increasing demand for rubber in our various rapidly expanding industries, it would seem that the rubber plantations, like the one above mentioned, are sure to yield their owners a handsome profit. ”

“ I have already related how my ignorance was enlightened with regard to the manufacture of ploughs on Alabama plantations. I afterwards saw the blacksmiths at work upon these somewhat rude implements, and learned that some of the larger plantations manufactured their own carts and wagons. The plantation harness is a simple affair, and is nearly always made on the place. While the negro women are spinning and weaving cloth in rainy-weather, the men are bending hames, braiding mule-collars of corn husks, and making back-bands of leather or bagging. ”

“ Many articles in common use had now to be made at home, and the plantation developed many small industries. There was much joy when a substitute was found, because it made the people independent of the outside world. Farm implements were made and repaired. Ropes were made at home of various materials, such as bear-grass, sunflower stalks, and cotton ”

“ Near this was another plantation, abandoned by its Rebel owners, and occupied by lessees from the United States. The absence of responsible proprietors could be everywhere read in the dilapidated buildings and the general air of neglect. Still there was a fair crop of cane and cotton, and the negroes seemed to be working tolerably well for their Northern employers. ”

“ Many of the old plantation customs still survive. A little before noon the bell is rung to summon the hands from the cotton fields. Over the red plowed soil you hear a darky cry, a melodious "Oh-oh-oh!" as wild and musical as the cries of the south-Italian olive gatherers. The planters cease their work, mules stand still, traces are unhooked from singletrees, and chain-ends thrown over the mules' backs; then the men mount the animals and ride in to the midday meal, the women trudging after. ”

“ Though the most of the stock had been accustomed only to rice and cotton planting, there were among them a number of very passable mechanics, who had been taught to do all the rougher sorts of mechanical work on the plantations. There were coopers, carpenters, shoemakers and blacksmiths, each one equal, in his various craft, to the ordinary requirements of a plantation; thus, the coopers could make rice-tierces, and possibly, on a pinch, rude tubs and buckets; the carpenter could do the rough carpentry about the negro-quarters ”

“ With the arrival of more farmers and traders from the lower settlements it was not long before the colony had a church, a windmill, warehouses, and a shipyard busily constructing shallops, wherries and pinnaces for the Indian trade.
Despite a devastating fire that once destroyed all the buildings, death from marauding savages, and sickness, as well as many other hardships, the plantation flourished. In the spring its fields were green with tobacco and corn, and its wharves were busy with trading boats and bundles of furs. ”

“ It seldom happens that mulattoes are in possession of plantations; but when a white man dies, who happens to possess twenty negroes, he will divide them among his brown family, leaving (we may say) five to each of his four children. These are too few to be employed in plantation work; they are, therefore, ordered to maintain their owner by some means or other, and which means are frequently not the most honest, the most frequent being the travelling about as higglers, and exchanging the trumpery contents of their packs and boxes with plantation negroes for stolen rum and sugar. ”

“ Many of these fields have been abandoned altogether, and are overgrown by cedars, which spring up in infinite numbers almost as soon as a field ceases to be ploughed, and furnish materials for fencing such parts of the ancient plantation as are still kept enclosed. In many places the enclosed fields are only partially cultivated, all the hills and poorest parts being given up to the cedars and chinquopin bushes. ”

“ This was quite an ordinary form of punishment; but when they cut the same woman’s toes off, the natives banded {192} themselves together, burned down the whole plantation, and killed the planters’ children. The two planters, sad to relate, escaped.
But those days are passed now, and the planters are very different men, and live their lives in peace and tranquillity, and many of them treat the natives so well that they will do anything for them. ”

“ The sugar-mills, stables of mules, boilers, coolers, etcetera, were all examined, and the party returned to the plantation house.
“Well, captain, now you have witnessed what is termed slavery, what is your opinion? Are your philanthropists justified in their invectives against us?”
“First assure me that all other plantations are as well regulated as your own,” replied Mr Berecroft.
“If not, they soon will be: it is the interest of all the planters that they should; and by that, like all the rest of the world, they will be guided.” ”

“ It is, in fact, a great straggling plantation of firs, over swells and declivities of land, with a branch or neck of a river meeting you unexpectedly at almost every turn. The more we have seen of this dismal settlement "in the bush," the more do we revert to our first impression on entering it. The place is like the strange and squalid plantation of some necromancer in Spenser's "Fairy Queen." Many trees are black and shattered, as if by lightning; others distorted, writhing, and partially stripped of their bark ”

“ The roads, long neglected, are in disorder and, having in many places become impassable, new tracks have been made through the woods and fields without much respect to boundaries." Many a great plantation had been confiscated by the federal authorities while the owner was in Confederate service. Many more lay in waste. In the wake of the armies the homes of rich and poor alike, if spared the torch, had been despoiled of the stock and seeds necessary to renew agriculture. ”

“ On the large plantations, where perhaps as many as a thousand people are busied on the crop, the manager looks upon the laborer simply as an element of production; you must have seed, rain, and the niggers in order to get a crop. Even the most kind-hearted and conscientious plantation owner cannot avoid this feeling that the laborers are, like the live-stock, a part of the implements; he houses them, and if humane and far-sighted, he houses them better than the mules ”

“ On a great cotton plantation, such as this of my master's, the field hands, who live in the quarter, are removed so far from the domestic circle of their master's family, by their servile condition and the nature of their employment, that they know but little more of the transactions within the walls of the great house than if they lived ten miles off. Many a slave has been born, lived to old age, and died on a plantation, without ever having been within the walls of his master's domicile. ”

“ There are plantations here where the whip never rests during all these months. You can have no idea of such flogging.”
I will not repeat those scenes which the planter related to me, scenes which he himself had witnessed of violence, cruelty and suffering, during more than fourteen years; abominations which finally drove him thence, which drove him to sell his plantation, and leave the Slave States for ever. I will merely introduce some of this excellent man's words. [1]
“I have known men and women who were actual devils towards their slaves; whose pleasure it was to torment them. ”

“ We can visualize the scene—the planter and his older sons leading the way, servants following with axes and other implements, chattering women and girls, servant women bringing up the rear with lunch baskets, and children riding pillion, or in front of some older person, or when the procession halted, darting about chasing a butterfly or rabbit.
"Processioning" day was an important time, for in those days land surveys were not always true and the boundaries of each man's plantation were uncertain. ”

“ Only the owners of plantations sell their productions for ready money, with which they purchase, in the upland towns, European goods, particularly printed and plain cottons, coarse woollen stuffs, knives, hatchets, fishing-tackle, &c.; with these goods they pay their [Pg 277] laborers, charging them for every article five or even six times its value. As there is throughout these forest regions a great want of men, the plantation owners endeavor to get the few Indians who settle voluntarily on their property, fixed to it for ever. ”

“ He found that the segregation of large numbers of slaves upon a single plantation was not favorable either to the most rapid multiplication or economy of sustenance. He had carefully determined the fact that plantations of moderate extent, upon the high, well-watered uplands of the Piedmont belt, were the most advantageous locations that could be found for the rearing of slaves. Such plantations, largely worked by female slaves, could be made to return a small profit on the entire investment, without at all taking into account the increase of the human stock. ”

“ On my way home I traveled for several days, by a road different from that which we had pursued in coming down; and at the distance of fifty or sixty miles from Savannah, I passed by the largest plantation that I had ever seen. I think I saw at least a thousand acres of cotton in one field, which was all as level as a bowling-green. There were, as I was told, three hundred [Pg 288] and fifty hands at work in this field, picking the last of the cotton from the burs; and these were the most miserable looking slaves that I had seen in all my travels. ”

“ Q. Do you think a plantation is more productive where, under a general supervision by the planter or the owner, it is let out in small sections to the negroes to cultivate, or is it better to cultivate the plantation as a whole? ”

“ That is the sum of plantation life. So the man or woman known as a “contract laborer” toils, till gradually or suddenly death comes, and the poor, worn-out body is put to rot. Out in the forest you come upon the little heap of red earth under which it lies. On the top of the heap is set the conical basket of woven grasses which was the symbol of its toil in life, and now forms its only monument. For a fortnight after death the comrades of the dead think that the spirit hovers uneasily about the familiar huts. They dance and drink rum to cheer themselves and it. ”

“ The Indian plantation is no orderly market-garden. To begin with, the women have nothing but the roughest wooden implement, a wedge-shaped stake, with which to dig, and rake, and hoe. The ground is always uneven and broken; the charred remnants of the original vegetation are left to crumble beside the young growth, and the cultivated seedlings have to struggle for space and air with quick-growing wild things, forest growths and creepers that encroach on every side, and would speedily reclaim any cleared portions of the unconquerable bush were it not for the incessant diligence of the women. ”

“ In some places the country was somewhat cultivated; that is, there were some plantations where cotton and Indian corn were raised. Such a plantation consists only of wooden buildings; in the middle is the house of the planter, with a piazza; on its right and left are log-houses for negro slaves, and barns for corn and cotton. Horses are kept in very spacious wooden stables; cows and pigs in the open air within an enclosure of worm fences. Only fattening beasts are kept in stables. ”

“ Designed as security for the planters, it proved a powerful instrument in their undoing. Slavery five hundred miles away on a Louisiana plantation was so remote from the North that only the strongest imagination could maintain a constant rage against it. "Slave catching," "man hunting" by federal officers on the streets of Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago, or Milwaukee and in the hamlets and villages of the wide-stretching farm lands of the North was another matter. ”

“ Plenty of negroes could be hired to chop wood for a dollar per cord. Half a dollar more would pay for its delivery on the river bank, where steamboats bought all they could get for five dollars per cord—thus affording the proprietor of the wood-yard a net profit of three dollars and a half on every cord.
Less than fifty hands had yet been hired on the plantation; not as many by at least thirty, the overseer said, as were absolutely needed to cultivate the eight hundred acres; but with this inadequate force the work on the plantation was further advanced than on any I had seen. ”