Sugar Plantation Caribbean Island: Antigua Onboard the ship: Nantucket Clipper January 8, 2001 By Wayne & Karen Brown

The Nantucket Clipper is back in Antigua. During our first stop on the island, we visited Nelson’s Dockyard where the British Navy had their Caribbean base (See December 24, 2000 journal). The British Navy protected the sugar plantations on Antigua and the other British Caribbean islands. The sugar plantations are now all gone on Antigua, but today we’ll visit the remains of an old one to see how the sugar was produced and how people lived and worked here.

Started in 1650, this plantation was the first large sugar farm on Antigua. The plantation was once covered with fields of sugar cane, like the fields we saw on St. Kitts (See December 25, 2000 journal). The sugar cane fields have long been gone. Now the fields are filled with thick bushes covered with lots of prickly thorns. We’re wearing shorts, so we carefully walk through the bushes trying to find some of the old buildings. Soon we see the buildings are all in ruins. Nearby, tumbled stone walls have plants growing on and around them.

On a hill we find two old windmills. One has been rebuilt and the other is still in ruins. The windmills were an important part of making sugar from sugar cane. The windmills moved the gears that turned the rollers that squeezed the juice from the sugar cane. This juice is where sugar comes from.

Sugar cane is a type of tall grass that grows over eight feet high. In the fields, big knives were used to cut the cane into 4-foot-long pieces. These pieces were brought to the windmills and crushed between three big, heavy metal rollers to squeeze out the sweet cane juice. Then the juice was boiled in big iron pots until it turned into thick, gooey syrup. The syrup was poured into wooden trays and pushed back and forth with wooden rakes so it would cool and turn into sugar crystals. The gooey sugar crystals were packed into big wooden barrels with holes in the bottom. Each barrel weighed about 1,500 pounds! The barrels were left for a month until the sugar crystals drained and dried out. Drippings from the crystals became molasses, which was collected and sold along with the sugar.

Planting, harvesting, and processing sugar required a lot of people. It’s sad to think that the demand for workers encouraged slavery. Most slaves were men, women, and children who were kidnapped in Africa and sold as slaves. Thousands and thousands of black Africans were brought to the Caribbean in this manner. By the time of the American Revolution, slaves outnumbered whites in the Caribbean ten to one. Slavery in the region was finally ended between 1834 and 1848. Now the descendants of those slaves are the people who live, work, and play on islands throughout the Caribbean.

Karen carefully walks between thorn bushes as we investigate of one of the old buildings where the sugar was made into crystals.

On a hill we found two old windmills. These windmills used wind to power the big rollers that squeezed the juice out of the sugar cane.

Inside the windmill, Karen looks into a big cane crusher. The sugar cane was fed between big metal rollers that crushed it. The sweet cane juice was squeezed out and made into sugar.

These kids we met on Antigua are descendants of the African slaves that were brought to the Caribbean islands to work on the sugar plantations over 200 years ago. Clockwise from the front: Rodney, age 10, Daniel, age 8, Clarence, age 10, and Gertrude, age 10.