Tea plantation

“ When the very large amount of labour required to carry on a plantation is considered, it is evident that facilities for it are a sine quâ non to success. Assam and Cachar, the two largest Tea districts, are very thinly populated, and almost entirely dependent on imported labour. [4] The expense of this is great, and it is the one, and consequently a great drawback to those provinces. The only district I know of with a good Tea climate and abundance of local labour is Chittagong. [5] Several other places have a good supply of local labour, but then their climates are not very suitable. ”

“ They work tea plantations in Ceylon, tobacco plantations in Cuba and Sumatra, coffee plantations in Guatemala, rubber plantations in the Congo, hemp plantations in East Africa, and cotton plantations in the Delta of the Nile. ”

“ For 77 money we had no use, as everything was grown or manufactured on the plantation. We had a steam mill for sawing lumber, and mills for grinding corn and wheat. Sugar was made in quantities for negroes, but there was no way of refining it.
Everything was bountiful and we lacked nothing, but coffee and tea. Every known and unknown substitute was used for these drinks, but none were satisfactory; otherwise we never lived with greater abundance.
Our swamps yielded us all game bountifully, venison, wild turkeys, partridges, and reed birds. It was a rich country and could feed an army. ”

“ Until such time as large areas of tea land can be leased or owned, cultivated and carefully managed as they are in India. Ceylon, and Java to-day, there can be nothing similar to an Indian plantation or a Ceylon estate in China, where the land is owned by the foreigner, the plants tended and cultvated by the foreigner, the leaves picked day by day, and day by day manufactured by machinery on the spot. ”

“ Then they have another gathering when the leaves are fully opened, and then another and another, till they have five or six gatherings in the course of the year. Each time the leaves are coarser than those of the previous gathering, and consequently the tea is not of so fine a quality. A well-managed plantation produces all kinds of tea; and it was a wise requirement of the Dutch government, when they started the tea-culture in Java, that the planters should produce proportionate quantities of both black and green, and not less than four qualities of each. ”

“ Men tea-pickers receive eight cents a day and women six cents. Hut rent, garden, and medical service is free. Over 3,000 bushes grow to the acre. Sunday is a big day with these mountain natives; every one working on the tea plantations for miles around comes to town—Bhutians, Thibetans, Nepales, and other tribes—when the market-place and bazaars literally swarm with them. In the Darjeeling district are 60,000 acres of land under tea cultivation, and the output is nearly 20,000,000 pounds a year. ”

“ The foot-hills of the Himalayas are admirably adapted to the cultivation of tea, and a great many tea plantations have been established there. On the road from Calcutta to Darjeeling many plantations are passed, and the business of tea culture is increasing every year. The forests of the lower slopes of the mountains are fast disappearing, to make way for the less picturesque tea-plant, and the export of the product amounts to many ship-loads annually. The system of cultivation was introduced from China by the East India Company. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The necessities of the people had driven them to desperation, and they had resolved upon a forcible cessation. The growing tobacco of one plantation was no sooner destroyed than the owner, having been deprived either with or without his consent of his crop, was seized with the same frenzy and ran with the crowd as it marched to destroy the crop of his neighbor. ”

“ The young plantations are generally allowed to grow unmolested for two or three years, till they are strong and healthy; and even then, great care is exercised not to exhaust the plants by plucking them too bare. But, with every care, they ultimately become stunted and unhealthy, and are never profitable when they are old; hence, in the best-managed tea-districts, the natives yearly remove old plantations, and supply their places with fresh ones. ”

“ The self-interest of the planter in the efficiency of his labor does not necessarily lead him to see the highest interests either of the negro race or of the South, under the present industrial system, which makes a plantation a workshop rather than a farm. The ownership of rich cotton lands only means wealth if you can find negro laborers and keep them at work. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ In those days few persons in the world opposed slavery. Even kings and queens made money out of the traffic. But for tobacco slavery would not have taken such a hold on America. When it was found that the negro made the cheapest laborer for cultivating the plantation many more were imported.
They were also employed in the New England and Middle States, largely as household servants, the soil not being favorable to the production of rice, indigo, cotton and sugar, which were the staples of Southern agriculture. Moreover, the African is not physically adapted to the northern climate. ”

“ In the East tobacco and corn were the staple commodities. Cattle and hog raising became profitable west of the mountains, while various other employments which did not require so much vacant land were more popular near the sea. Besides, when the dwellers near the coast sought the cheap labor which the slave furnished the mountaineers encouraged the influx of freemen. It is not strange then that we have no record of an early flourishing slave plantation beyond the mountains. ”

“ When there is a sudden rise in the prices of sugar, a certain amount of labor in a given time is of more consequence to the owner of a plantation than the price of several slaves; he can well afford to waste a few lives. This is no idle hypothesis—such calculations are gravely and openly made by planters. Hence, it is the slave's prayer that sugars may be cheap. When the negro is old, or feeble from incurable disease, is it his master's interest to feed him well, and clothe him comfortably? ”

“ There being few towns in the cotton country, the shops, or stores, are frequently kept at some cross road, or other public place, in or adjacent to a rich district of plantations. To these shops the slaves resort, sometimes with, and at other times without, the consent [Pg 130] of the overseer, for the purpose of laying out the little money they get. Notwithstanding all the vigilance that is exercised by the planters, the slaves, who are no less vigilant than their masters, often leave the plantation after the overseer has retired to his bed, and go to the store. ”

“ There are several extensive cotton plantations on the island. The overseer of the plantation on that part of the island where I resided was a Georgian—a man of stern character, and at times cruelly abusive to his slaves. I have often been witness of the abuse of his power. In South Carolina and Georgia, on the low lands, the cultivation is chiefly of rice. The land where it is raised is often inundated, and the labor of preparing it, and raising a crop, is very arduous. Men and women are in the field from earliest dawn to dark—often without hats, and up to their arm-pits in mud and water. ”

“ By the beginning of the eighteenth century the prevailing industrial system in Virginia and Maryland was these small plantations or farms where Negro slaves gradually took the place of white redemptioners and the prevailing staple was tobacco. About the end of the seventeenth century the Jamaican or West Indian type of plantation was introduced on the coast region around Charleston. It consisted of larger estates cultivated by thirty or more slaves, with few or no white laborers, the master and his family often being the only whites present the year around. ”

“ Since slave labor is economical only where the slaves can be worked together in gangs, there was never much slavery among the farmers and small business men of the North. On the other hand, in the South, the developing plantation system made it possible for the owner to use large gangs of slaves in the clearing of new land; in the raising of [Pg 46] tobacco, and in caring for rice and cotton. The plantation system of agriculture and the cotton gin made slavery the success that it was in the United States. ”

“ Sweet potatoes are usually abundant on Southern plantations at this time of year, but we were unable to find any. We found plenty of corn, but it was as hard as flint. We also found a quantity of the peas before described; and this was all that we could raise in the way of a supper. Skirting the plantation, we finally reached the highway beyond it. A consultation was held, and all the pros and cons of the situation discussed.
After due deliberation, we decided that it would not be safe to build a fire, as the light would betray us. We must do the best we could, with the raw material. ”

“ Their medical attendant visits them regularly, and each plantation has a practitioner, who is engaged by the term for his services. If the growth of sugar-cane, cotton, and corn, be the great end of man’s mission on earth, and if all masters were like Governor Roman, slavery might be defended as a natural and innocuous institution. Sugar and cotton are, assuredly, two great agencies in this latter world. ”

“ Such plantations, where the natives lack neither food nor good treatment, can only have a favourable influence on the race, and it is not quite clear why the Presbyterian missionaries do not like their young men to go in for plantation work. Owing to the good treatment of their hands the Messrs. Th. have always had enough labourers, and have been able to develop their plantation wonderfully. It consists almost exclusively of cocoa-nut palms, planted on ground wrested from the forest in a hard fight. ”

“ In the second place, plantation work as a rule had the limitation of daylight hours; in plowing, mules which could not be hurried set the pace; in hoeing, haste would imperil the plants by enhancing the proportion of misdirected strokes; and in the harvest of tobacco, rice and cotton much perseverance but little strain was involved. The sugar harvest alone called for heavy exertion and for night work in the mill. But common report in that regard emphasized the sturdy sleekness as well as the joviality of the negroes in the grinding season ”

“ At that time, however, there were already in the United States about one million slaves to serve as a stock from which other millions were to be born to replenish the plantations in the east and to aid in the peopling of the west. These were ample to maintain a chronic racial problem, and had no man invented a cotton gin their natural increase might well have glutted the market for plantation labor. ”

“ And this is how our tea, which we set so much store by, is produced in Ceylon and other places. These plantations are sad-looking places. Commercialism somehow has a way of destroying all natural beauty in those regions where it dwells. Here the mountain sides are torn up, the immense and beautiful forests ravaged from base to summit, and the shaly escarpments that remain planted in geometrical lines with tea-shrubs. ”

“ Nothing can differ more than does the usage of the slaves in different plantations. The overseer, Mr Handy, on Watson's plantation, he whom I had just left, was a brutal person, almost constantly under the excitement or reaction of rum, and his slaves were constantly beaten and ill used in every way; whereas the Hillside slaves were allowed all possible indulgences, and really seemed quite happy. They used to go about, on the fine Jamaica evenings, singing, dancing, and playing upon instruments, visiting and returning visits, and enjoying all the happiness of which their state was susceptible. ”

“ 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. ”