Eat the City(42)
The story of how Jorge came to plant this bit of cane from the southern coast of Puerto Rico in the borough of the Bronx is the story of New York City itself. But the forces that brought him to New York began to conspire long before the man or even the city existed.
MOST people don’t think much about where sugar comes from. It tastes like pleasure and looks like purity. Surely it must be retrieved naked, bare, and white, as rock crystal from some natural recess. But no. In fact, it comes from the sap that fills a freakishly tall bamboo-like grass that was eaten in New Guinea at least 8,000 years ago. The plant made its way to India and was being processed into syrup by 327 B.C., when Nearchus, a general of Alexander the Great, marveled at “a reed” that “brings forth honey without the help of bees.” The Arabs planted this reed in Sicily, Cyprus, Malta, and Rhodes, and in various parts of Spain, sometimes using slave labor—but no planter of sugar could ever harvest enough. The European voyagers of the fifteenth century who ended up, lost, in the New World, had been questing for, among other things, lands suitable for growing cane.
Christopher Columbus—who, it turns out, had once worked as a sugar buyer—was the first to bring cane to the Americas in 1493. The landscape sustained sugar better than any other place he knew. “The sugar canes, the few that were planted there, have taken,” he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Saccharum officinarum thrived in Spanish-occupied Santo Domingo, and its processed juice was shipped back to Europe as early as 1516.
“Our sugar islands,” the Europeans fondly called the bits of land they claimed and crammed with cane plants on the Caribbean Sea. Soon Africans were shackled, forests were stripped, and Jamaica, Barbados, Saint-Domingue, Antigua, Montserrat, Saint Kitts, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Nevis, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago all grew sugar. In many cases, that single crop became the whole economy, and slaves became cogs in a relentless cutting and processing machine—the closest approximation to a factory yet invented.
Beginning in the 1500s, Europeans imported several million Africans to the Caribbean, at least a quarter of the total number brought to all of the Americas. The workers stooped in the fields using machetes to hack through the cane wood near the ground, to preserve the maximum amount of juice-filled stalk. Cane juice spoils quickly and has to be extracted and processed right away; in the mills, the cane was crushed and its sap reduced and dried. During the harvest, the mills worked twenty-four hours a day, leaving enslaved workers so tired that they would catch their fingers and hands in the giant grinding rollers. “A hatchet was kept in readiness to sever the arm,” one historian wrote.
In this environment, a small-eyed, sharp-nosed bureaucrat named Peter Stuyvesant moved up the ranks of the Dutch West India Company. He had started his career in the rich Dutch sugar colony in Brazil in the 1630s. In the West Indies, he served as governor of Cura?ao, Aruba, and Bonaire. He converted farmers to sugar crops, loaned them money, sold them slaves, and transported their sugar to market, turning an enormous profit for the company. He became known for his genius at translating sugar into wealth, without ever even planting cane. When he lost his right leg in a Caribbean battle, Stuyvesant was sent to govern New Amsterdam. Adapting his particular mercenary skill to Manhattan’s prospects, the new director general began shipping food to the Dutch Caribbean and taking payment in “clever and strong” slaves who cleared land, hewed wood, and built the wall on Wall Street and the road to Harlem. Stuyvesant, meanwhile, kept attuned to the sugar markets, and when the English took Manhattan from the Dutch, he sent his son back to Cura?ao and instructed officials to furnish him with the best plots of land for planting sugar.
Sweet sugar could be many things. The Dutch certainly had a weakness for cakes and custards, fruit compotes, cookies, from the Dutch cookjes, and a fried treat they called dough nuts. They used unrefined sugar and molasses as well as refined sugar, all of it cheaper and more freely available in the New World than in Europe. “The quantity of these articles used in families, otherwise plain and frugal, was astonishing,” wrote an Englishwoman who had spent time with a Dutch family in New Netherland. Yet the company town of New Amsterdam also considered sugar to be a symbol of command over a global network of commerce: When a Dutch official visited New England, he arrived with “a noise of trumpets” and presented, among several gifts, “a chest of white sugar.” As an item of trade, a little bag of sugar could buy scissors and thimbles and knives and needles; a ten-pound sack would buy a strand of Venetian pearls. Europeans had first discovered sugar in the apothecary, and continued to use it as a drug. One Dutch cookbook common in New Amsterdam kitchens suggested that a spoonful of red currant juice cooked with sugar could treat pestilence or cool a hot fever, and that a sugary black cherry sauce could strengthen the heart. (Boil black cherries in wine and sugar, add cloves, cinnamon, ginger, galangal, nutmeg, mace and grains of paradise.) Sugar was a delight, an elixir, a panacea, a currency, a symbol, a product of dark arts.
Down in Cura?ao, Dutch West India Company officials would inventory the thousands of pounds of sugar in chests and barrels and load them onto galliots such as the Nieuw Amstel. On the months-long journey to North America, the men on board subsisted mainly on salted meat, as well as the fresh tuna, bonita, and shark they caught at sea. Salt water and salt air corroded shoe leather, so they went barefoot; their shirts and pants would stiffen with sweat and dirt and salt until they fell apart. It was a perilous journey as light vessels on the open seas could be tossed about in a storm, by “such an excessive Rain, that as we had one Sea under us, we feard another had been tumbling upon our heads,” as one traveler of the time described.