SUGAR-CANE 410 SUGAR-CANE
product sugar, taken from a foreign source, leads to the belief that the plant is
indigenous, and was disseminated by one people directly or indirectly. What people
J+ u 18 ' T , t0 dete™iine, but it is most natural to conclude that it was
W n Ifignage ^ word appears in its most perfect or least corrupted
? would limit us to the Malays and Javanese, and 1 should incline to the last
ment (^civilisation1 ° greatest progress in agriculture, as in every depart-
With respect to the names for sugar, the case is just the reverse of what it is with
® cane> for every one of them is foreign, with the exception of those of the polite
language of Java, namely, kara and gtadis. The ordinary Javanese name is gula, a
b^h l C“ '™P 0 * Sanscnt gura or gud-a, which properly applies to the crude
article before separation from the molasses. This name has extended to almost
every tongue of the Malay Archipelago, but has not reached the Philippines, where
sugar was unknown m any form when discovered by Europeans, although palm-wine
thR1Cna *?• f froiu in the Malay Archipelago was copiously used, as we find from
the narrative of Pigafetta, and this beverage too, designated by its Malayan name,
^ iVc AvT ? ame, f0r su^ ,ln Javanese, but confined to that language, is sakara
with its abbreviation kara. This, too, is Sanscrit, the original word being sarkara
the probable ongm of the Arabic word sakar, from which all our European names
r e c o n d i t e 11! derived. In Javanese however, the word sakara belongs to the
fnr hnn lag,uage> an d 18 equal]y aPpBed to honey as to sugar, the popular synonym
for honey, namely, madu; being, it is singular enough, also Sanscrit, while the comb,
the wax, and the hive are all expressed by native terms.
But it by no means necessarily follows that the sugar of the Indian islands with
Sanscrit names, was the produce of the cane. On the contrary, the great probability
is that the sugar to which these originally applied was the product of the sap of
Af ?v ’Taj ¡11811 'W m of the cane, forms the saccharine consumption, not
A“ ¿S ’ A* °n “ 0St 0f the Pe°Ple of Coehm-chmese, the Siamese, the Burmese, and all the nattiroonpsi coafl ASosiuat,h earsn oIfn dtihae,
including that particular one, the Telmgas, from whom the Malayan nations received
iw T ’ aA ,wb?m probably they acquired the art of making
sugar, even that from the sap of palms. The islanders obtain their palm-sugar from the
gomuti (Borassus gomuti), and the people of the continent from the Palmyra
(Borassus flabelliformis). Sugar, it should be observed, is obtained from the sap of
palms by a far simpler and easier process than from the cane. This consists in
mere boiling m small earthen vessels, and no attempt is ever made at any kind
of refining, although the crude product is equally capable of it as that of the cane.
ih e sugar-cane, in so far as native industry is concerned, is grown everywhere
luxuriantly in the Indian Islands, in small patches near the dwellings of the inhabitants
where rich dressings are easily available, but nowhere as a branch of husbandry
I t is grown, m fact only to be used as a kind of sweet-meat to be masticated in its fresh
state ana never for the production of sugar, an art which, there is every reason to
conclude was unknown to the natives until taught by the Chinese. To grow the
cane profitably on a large scale as a branch of husbandry, for the manufacture of
sugar, is quite another matter. In this view it can be produced only in rich volcanic
or alluvial lands such as exist in some provinces of China, in some parts of Java
m some of the Philippine Islands, in parts of Cochin-china, Siam, and the valley of
the Ganges. Even m these, it is excluded from the perennially irrigated lands on
which it is more profitable to grow rice. In general it may be said that, for native
T ’ j Ugf r 18. °. .y produced from the cane in countries where palms cease to be
abundant, which is the case in every country of Asia without the tropic. Hence it is
grown for this purpose, as it were by necessity, in the upper valleys of the Jumna and
Ganges, as well as m the greater part of China.
Ih e sugar of the Indian Islands, therefore, to which the Sanscrit names were applied
A 'L H f ? con°lude was ^ a t of palms and not of the cane, and this commodity
Th« Tb™?78 2? We See 111 now’ in its crudest form mixed with its molasses
Jnd w T P - f S °Ut saP of the cane t0 use W m its fresh state as a beveTage
a spe-ficname for it,—juruh ‘but beyond this very simple proceeding thev
dfA?™ • naT A ula is aPPlied alike to the palm and cane sugar, but to
Tbfin t efirst>the word 18 added which makes cane-sugar, gula-tftbu
SUgars made fr.om tlie cao0 have even a modern air, consisting
r / ^ Senonc name with epithets, clayed sugar meaning literallv “ sand
sugar” (gula paser);and candied or crystallised^ “ ston! sugar” (gula S . 7 In the
early mtercourse of Europeans with the Archipelago, it may be added that sugar is
SUGAR-CANE SUGAR-CANE
never once mentioned as an article of commerce, whether of the cane or palm.
Barbosa gives an enumeration of above fifty different articles to be found in the
emporium of Malacca, naming, for example, such inconsiderable commodities as
safflower and cubebs, but he makes not even an allusion to sugar.
I strongly suspect that the same remarks apply to the sugar of the Hindus, their
gura and sarkara, namely, that it consisted of a coarse unrefined article, the produce
of the Palmyra palm; and, indeed, the first of the names mentioned, even now
expresses only the ugly unrefined mass of sugar and treacle which is the form in
which the natives of Hindustan still consume sugar,^the jaggory of Europeans, a
name which is a corruption of the Kanara word sharkari, itself a corruption of the
Sanscrit sarkara. The modern names, too, of cane-sugar, both clayed and candied,
are certainly foreign,—the first, chini, signifying Chinese, and the last, misri,
Egyptian. This would lead to the belief that the Hindus were unacquainted with
the art of refining sugar in any manner until instructed by their Turkish and Persian
invaders, themselves instructed by the Arabs, the same people who taught the
nations of southern Europe. This notion is strengthened by the account which the
Emperor Baber gives in his Memoirs of the very rude condition of the Hindus when
he himself invaded India, which was twenty years after the arrival of the Portuguese
at Calicut. It may be considered a further corroboration of this opinion, that
Barbosa, in his price-current of the merchandise of that emporium, although it
amounts to near thirty articles of several countries, such as indigo, borax, cinnamon
of Ceylon, Chinese rhubarb, the clove and nutmeg, does not enumerate sugar in
any shape, and Barbosa’s manuscript is dated ten years earlier than the last successful
invasion of Baber. The only early notice of cane-sugar in any Asiatic country except
China that I have seen, relates to Siam, in which De Cauto (1548) expressly states
“ that, near the capital, Odia (Ayudya) much cane was grown, and sugar and spirits
made from it, but the Chinese had been immemorially settled in Siam.”—Decade 8,
chapter 22. No doubt there was palm-sugar in the markets both of Malacca and
Calicut in the time of Barbosa, but the article was evidently too coarse and rude a
commodity to bear the cost of distant transport, even after the discovery of the route
by the Cape of Good Hope, and hence would not be an article capable of competing
in the European markets with the cane sugars of Sicily and Egypt.
With respect to the Indian Islands, then, the conclusion we must come to is, that
sugar made from the cane was wholly unknown to their inhabitants, until introduced by
the Chinese, and not even by them until exercising their industry under the protection
of European governments. Down to the present day they are the sole manufacturers,
not only in the Malay Archipelago, but in the Philippines, Cochin-China, and Siam ;
the origin of this branch of industry in the two last-named countries, or at least its
revival, being an affair of our own times.
With respect to the Hindus, there is, at least, no evidence to prove that they manufactured
a marketable sugar before the invasion of their country by the Mahommedan
nations, in the 11th century. The probability then, is, that the Chinese were the
inventors of the processes of making clayed and candied sugars from the cane. But the
Greeks and Romans of antiquity were acquainted with sugar as a commodity which came
to them in the course of the oriental trade, and Pliny describes it as a product of Arabia
and India. This is his account of it, such as, we may presume, it appeared in the
market of Rome in the 1st century : “ Saccharon is a honey, which forms on reeds,
white like gum, which crumbles under the teeth, and of which the largest pieces are
of the size of a filbert.”—Book 12, Chapter 8. The account of Dioscorides, a little
earlier in the same century, gives the article the same name, and adds, that “ in consistence
it was like salt,” that is, like salt of solar evaporation, or in large crystals, the
kind known to the Greeks and Romans. Pliny’s account seems to be a very fair one,
of sugar-candy, the only mode of refining from clayed sugar known to the present day
by all the eastern nations. But it is to Chinese sugar-candy, which is in distinct white
crystals, and not to Indian, which is in the form of a confused brown crystallised mass,
a very inferior article, to which it is applicable.
Had the sugar-cane existed in northern India, and sugar been made from it, as it
now is, it is not likely that so remarkable an object should have escaped the Macedonian
and Bactrian Gfeeks so long in communication with that part of the country,
or that they should have failed in giving an unmistakable account of it. As soon as
it was actually seen by Europeans, and this was by the Crusaders in Syria, in the
beginning of the 12th century, their historians not only describe the plant, but the
process of manufacturing sugar from it, in a manner which leaves no room for misapprehension.
In the philological part of this account, I have been assisted, as I have