Killer Sugar ii

I wrote a post about a year ago on Jamaican sugar plantations. I'd gathered that sugar cultivation was particularly deadly for its workers, but didn't understand precisely why. Then I read this:

Ligon was impressed with the intensity of the labor. In English traditional agriculture, as in much of the world, seasons varied, and often there was little to do except wait for the crops to grow. In the seasonless tropics, the planting, weeding, and harvesting of sugar demanded a continuous round of toil all year. The actual sugar mill, the ingenio itself, set new standards for industrial production-line techniques. But it took a northern European Protestant work ethic to develop a workweek that began at 1 am on Monday and continued around the clock in four-hour shifts until midnight the following Saturday, when religion, at least, forbade such toil. Any minor interruption anywhere on the line, from the mills to the furnaces to the boiling vats, brought the whole process to a halt and had everyone else standing idle. The cane could not be stockpiled while waiting for the line to restart, because within a day the sugar content was lost. "For all these depend upon one another, as wheels in a Clock," Ligon says, adding significantly, "or if stills be at fault, the kill-devil [rum] cannot be made."

Standing by the furnaces in already tropical heat probably isn't too pleasant, either.