Sugar and the Visual Imagination in the Atlantic World, circa 1600-1860 (JCB Digital Catalogue)

Invisible Sweetener

Sugar is an unseen but indispensible ingredient in  this scene, as it  was in so many images of polite conviviality in this period. This  title  page imagines the consumption of three increasingly popular beverages   imported to Europe as a sociable meeting of a coffee-drinking Turk and a   tea-drinking Chinese man. They sit and sip their drinks around a low  table,  while a Native American stands by (perhaps deemed too savage to  share their  table), bow in one hand and a large cup of chocolate in the  other. While  coffee, tea, and chocolate were routinely consumed at  their points of origin  without sugar, the soluble white crystals  invisibly transformed these products  into sweet consumables that  appealed to European taste.

The Evils of rum and Freedom

Rum was a lucrative by-product of the sugar refining  process.  In the  eighteenth and  nineteenth centuries it was more likely to be pictured  as a drink held by tipsy  sailors in English caricatures than  represented in allegories of colonial  wealth or in diagrams detailing  the stages of its West Indian production. In  this pro-slavery satire, a  flask of rum lays beside the dead or delirious figure of a  former  slave who can no longer labor and feed his starving family. This print   promotes the argument repeatedly made by the West Indian interest that  slaves  were well-cared for by their benevolent masters, and were  incapable of caring  for themselves.

Rum and Anti-slavery

This woodcuts  link the production of rum by slaves  to the negative effects of rum on slaves.  Rarely do texts or images  represent the entire system of  sugar commodification from the cane field to  markets in Europe.

Sugar was the engine driving Jamaica, Britain's most profitable colony  in the eighteenth century, but it was not included on the colony's  original coat of arms (1661). However, sugarcane was added as a grassy  flourish to this engraving of the seal, which appeared on the first page  of the most authoritative eighteenth-century history of the island. The  double spray of cane serves as a discreet background for the seal,  which features a helmet (sign of British imperial power), tropical  exotics (pineapple and a crocodile) and figures representing the native  Arawak Indians, who mostly had been killed or driven out of Jamaica, and  displaced by African slaves.

Icing Slavery

This pro-West Indian satire is notable for its unusual and witty use of  sugar in its white crystalline form. It appears as a snowy substance  that covers the ground and ices the roof of "Canten Humbug and Co's Free  Sugar Warehouse." John Bull's telescopic view of the happy festive  slaves on the shore of a West Indian island is obscured by the crude  print of a slave being whipped, which a fanatical abolitionist waves  before the lens. This pro-slavery print directly links the campaign to  eliminate the duties on East Indian sugar with the campaign to abolish  slavery in the West Indies.

Sugar, Putti, and Heraldry

A long stalk of cane, with its flowering top, lies in the foreground, while two putti carry bundled cane and another holds a skimmer used in the boiling house. Cones of refined sugar are strewn about the foreground and held by another putto. To the far right, a lounging putto is sucking on a piece of cane. Putti were frequently used in the early modern period to represent industry and the arts. They do double duty here as stand-ins for black slaves and white consumers. The composition centers on and is framed by heraldic seals of corporate entities and the individuals to whom the book is dedicated (most were involved in the West Indian trade).

Sugar Wars on the Seas (continue)

The defeat of De Grasse was treated in this  naval battle scene showing  his ship on fire, and mocked in this crude satire.  In the satire, the  French admiral is shown stuck  in a sugar hogshead, and placed between  Admiral Rodney and a British sailor.

Mixing Work with War

This engraving represents an attack in 1645 by 1000 Portuguese rebels  on a large Dutch sugar plantation that was defended by slaves wielding  spears and clubs.  The image oddly combines a battle scene with a  traditional composite view showing the various stages of sugar  processing—as if sugar-making would continue with a battle raging just a  few yards away.  The line-up of armed slaves doing battle echoes the  manner in which a gang of slaves would cultivate a cane field, adding to  the uncanny mixture of war and work.

Van den Broeck, who wrote the personal journal in which this  print appeared, was a soldier for the Dutch West India Company in the  late 1640s, when the Dutch attempted to put down a revolt by the  Portuguese that led to the latter's takeover of Brazil in 1654.

Hoes as Weapons? 

The happy slaves on the left, dancing and playing instruments, are  countered on the right by a vignette of slaves before a cane field and a  planter.  These energetic slaves, hoes raised in the air, seem to be  threatening the planter rather than cultivating cane.  Whether intended  or not, this "confrontation" could be taken as an ironic reference to  the threats planters faced from rebellious slaves in the West Indies in  the decade before emancipation (1834).

Aggressive Planting

There is little doubt that these three powerful slaves have more on  their minds than just holing cane. The planter, whip held low, seems  unaware of the violence that is about to erupt. The engraving is from an  anti-slavery children's book that uses humor and irony, as well as  sentimentality, to convey its message.

Nature, Calm, and Untamed

The lower image on this page is rather unusual. Storms  and hurricanes  were ever-present threats to sugar plantations in the Caribbean;  they  were often discussed, but rarely pictured. Benoit manages this natural  threat first by pairing a calm scene with a  stormy one, and second, by  focusing on a slave hut, not a mill, cane field, or  plantation house.  These contrasted views might well have been interpreted as  symbolizing  the threat posed to the colony by the end of slavery. Storms often  symbolized human conflict in nineteenth-century  art. The British ended  slavery briefly when they occupied Suriname, but the  Dutch reinstated  it, only abolishing it in 1863.

Imaging Deforestation 

This partial plan of Fort Plantation in Barbados is regularly dotted with trees, denoting the forests native to the island; it also strikingly represents the rapid process of deforestation by showing tree stumps in the upper register, designated "fallen land" (under preparation for sugarcane planting), and in lower green sections devoted to pasture and potatoes.

Barbados in Flux

In this map, the charming camels reference a doomed attempt to introduce them to transport hogsheads of sugar; the animals languished because no one knew how to care for them. The Indian marks a ghostly presence: most of the island's Caribs were killed, died of disease, or left after the Spanish invaded in 1492. The trees ornamenting the spaces on the map vanished quickly as land was planted in sugarcane: they were gone by the time this second edition of Ligon's book appeared. The hogs the Spanish introduced into the island fared better than the camels, trees, and Caribs: they multiplied successfully and were viewed as pests. They were hunted as runaway slaves were, and Ligon balances a scene of hog hunting (upper right) with slave hunting (upper left). This map raises the question of flux and change as it attempts to fix the island as an artful colonial space.

Mapping Connections and Difference

This outline map stresses Barbados' colonial connection to Britain by calling attention to hilly Scotland, the northern region of the island. This supposed topographical similarity is offset by the difference between colony and metropole suggested in the images that dot the rest of the map: the sugar mill with black slaves, tropical plants (pineapple, cabbage tree, papaw), and imported sugarcane. 

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The web of lines overlaying the map recalls the rhumb lines of the Mediterranean portolan chart, which denote particular compass headings for navigational purposes. This "faux" portolan feature lends a note of maritime authenticity to Ogilby's land-focused presentation and emphasizes the colony's connectedness to other sites in the Atlantic world.

Conflict and Measurement

Moxon's flamboyant reworking of a map of Jamaica by John Man celebrates the island as a British conquest held by force. Military banners bristle in the center of a display framed by two cannons. Animals and exotic plants serve as decorative space fillers for the unsurveyed areas. Moxon has represented ongoing conflict with a vignette of two men firing at each other—at either a great distance or very close, depending on how one reads their position within the triangular border of the unnamed parish that surrounds them. In the lower right, a black slave holds the map's scale in one hand and a bundle of sugarcane in the other. This vignette suggests that sugarcane and slaves are the true measures of this island.

Commerce as Movement

This bird's-eye view from the water testifies to the high productivity of sugar plantations in Barbados by picturing the island's only major harbor lined with warehouses and thronged with shipping. 

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The ocean is shown churned up—not by a storm, given the fluffy clouds that ornament the view, but by the movement of ships. The agitated waves lend visual variety to a view lacking dramatic focus and also suggest the pulsing activity of the sugar trade out of this port.

Sugar as Energy and Currency

This map is bristling with names and icons, suggesting the acceleration of agricultural development across Barbados at this time. Although the descriptive text under the smiling figures of Britannia and Plenty mentions that cotton, ginger, aloe, and other crops are grown on the island, the only commodity imaged on the map is sugar. It is depicted as icons denoting the energy source—wind, water, or cattle—used by mills to extract the juice from the cane. Ford got the Barbados assembly to pass an act prohibiting copying of the map—a strange gesture, since there were no copperplate presses on the island at this time. The penalty for printing the map without Ford's license: 2000 pounds of sugar.

Mapping Jewish Planters

This brightly colored display map advertises Dutch colonization in Suriname via the interlocking geometrical shapes of the sugar plantations that jut out from the rivers and spread into the green and yellow areas marking lands as yet undeveloped by Europeans. The conflict that comes with the establishment of plantation slavery is acknowledged by the bright red flames, which mark the location of a slave rebellion.

Half of Suriname's European population was comprised of Portuguese Jews, who established plantations on the savannah. On the map, their presence is denoted by the Jewish names mixed in with the Dutch on the plats and the lists of planters that frame the map, and by the words "de Joode Savanne" and "Joodish Dorp (village)" set in the yellow/green section of the map. This area was also occupied by communities of maroons (runaway slaves who formed their own settlements) and native peoples.

Sugar Crossing the Waves

While sugarcane, mills, and plantations commonly appear as fixed icons on maps of the West Indies, sugar is rarely pictured in motion over the ocean—a crucial part of its journey from cane field to market. This illustration from an anti-slavery children's book places a hogshead of sugar on a small boat heading out to a transport ship bound for London.

Flipping the Image

This woodcut appeared in an herbal that included plants from around the  globe. The original image of sugarcane is taken from Willem Piso's  Historia naturalis Brasiliae (1648).  As in many prints that are copied from other sources, the  Zwinger's copy is reversed.  A design carved into a block of wood (or  metal plate) will be reversed when printed, so copying directly from a  print will result in a mirror image in the new print.  Much of the  history of sugar was created by re-using images and texts.

Harvesting the Specimen

The designer artfully crisscrossed the sugar cane's long, spear-like  leaves to form a pleasing pattern across the surface of this plate.  Human investment in the plant-as-crop is suggested by the stubs of  canes, cleanly cut-off by a sharp tool.

The Poetic Specimen

One might not expect to find a botanical specimen in a book of poetry,  but this image of a sugarcane serves as the frontispiece for Grainger's  popular georgic poem celebrating the plant and its cultivation in the  West Indies.  Following the conventions of the natural history  illustration, this simplified and generalized rendering of the leaves  and cane is set against a blank background. Like Bordiga's  engraving  (see above), Grainger's illustration indexes the labor of slaves via  sharply cut stalks of cane. Here the stubs frame the single stalk that  remains, its crown of leaves expanding gracefully to fill the upper part  of the page.

Narrative of a Sugarcane

Stedman's Narrative is much more than an account of a military  expedition against slaves in revolt. In chapter 13, vol. 1, there is a  depiction of sugarcane that is more detailed than most contemporary  natural history illustrations. The time involved in the growth of the  plant is depicted as movement from the foreground space into the  distance. On the left, and nearest to the picture plane is the cane when  it first sprouts; next, the plant at half maturity; and farthest away,  the mature plant with drooping leaves.  Closing out the composition on  the right is a fragment of cut cane, which stands outside this narrative  of maturation.  Shading and coloring gives this enlarged cane-piece a  bold sense of presence, as if to underscore its economic importance.

Cutting Cane

This wood engraving shows full grown cane together with cane that is  cut.  What the genre of natural history illustration is not designed to  show is the effort expended in the labor of cutting.  Here a black slave  is cutting cane with something resembling a saber, which suggests the  toughness of this plant.

Sugarcane as Heraldic Device

This Italian translation of an English New World  history displays a  specimen of sugar cane as though it were a coat of arms on a  banner of  animal hide waving above a view of a sugar plantation. Curiously, the   leaves are shown with a hair-like fringe not found on the plant.  The  plantation view below shows vast fields of  cane, with improbably-placed  palm trees scattered among them. Slaves dot the  landscape, while a  double row of slave huts frames the scene on the left.  Like other early  modern images, slaves are not  pictured here in the large numbers  needed to produce such a huge crop. This  engraving was reworked from a  plate in the famous Encyclopédie  ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences compiled by Diderot and D’Alembert  (1762). In the original  illustration the sugarcane banner and the landscape  were reversed and  shown separately.

Sugar vs. Cotton

There were  nearly equal numbers of cotton and sugar plantations in St.  Croix in 1750, when  the Danish were in control, but sugar came to  dominate in the later decades of  the century. This plate acknowledges  sugar’s overtaking of cotton. It has  numbered specimens of both plants,  but gives more visual weight to sugar by  presenting an elevated view  of a cane plot with plants at various stages of growth.  This figure is  placed above that of tools used in sugar production: a cane-cutting   knife, a hoe, and two views of a sugar skimmer.

The Comparative Anatomy of Sugar

Fossier’s plate represents the most detailed  dissection of sugarcane  published up to this time. It appears not in a work of  natural history,  but in the most authoritative treatise dedicated to improving  sugar  technology published in the eighteenth century. Improving the yield and   quality of the commodity requires analyzing the plant in a scientific  manner:  that is the message of this image. Examples of healthy cane  (figs. 12-14) are  placed for comparison next to sections of cane with a  “feeble constitution”  (figs. 10-11). The scientific rigor of image is  emphasized by the multiple ways  the cane is shown under dissection.   For  example, in cross-section with the eye (fig. 18), under a  microscope (fig. 15),  and with a magnifying glass (fig. 16).
       Fossier’s illustration of sugarcane retained its  authority for  at least 40 years. The plate was reproduced with its figures rearranged   in George Porter’s 1830 account of sugar technology, which centers on  an  English translation of Dutrône’s book.

Making Exotica, Domesticating Cane

The Dutch were known for their still life paintings  as well as their  accomplished skills in engraving; this print capitalizes on  both. The  designer and engraver used odd shifts of scale, fine engraving, and   artful composition to create an exotic Brazilian still life. The  sugarcane is a  foreign transplant, but makes its place here among  plants native to the  Americas. The crossed pieces of cane, detailed and  boldly textured, provide  compositional balance for the two swelling  papayas--one cut open as if in an  eerie smile. In the highly compressed  middle ground, sugarcane plants loom as  large as the cashew and papaya  trees that seem only a short distance away.  Mixing still life with  natural history illustration, this plate aestheticizes  sugarcane and  naturalizes its place among the native flora of Brazil.

The Elusive Cana

Jamaica had become Britain’s most profitable sugar  island by time this  first volume of Sloane’s natural history was  published.  While images  of a land crab,  African instruments, Spanish coins, and a jellyfish are  among those featured at  the beginning of this volume, the sugar cane  is all but buried. It appears in  the section on grasses (botanically  appropriate), and is shown with only its grassy  top.  The cane stalk,  the focus of labor  and the source of wealth, has been left off. This  cropping was deliberate; this  is clear when the engraving is compared  with the actual specimen (see left) from which the  drawing was made,  which has a stalk over six inches long. Other specimens of  tall plants  in this volume are simply shown in two parts, so the problem of  plant  size does not explain the elimination of the stalk. 

Sloane devotes consideration attention to sugar and  plantation  slavery in his text. The absence of the sugarcane image in the   introduction suggests that this important commodity had ceased to be a  curiosity,  lacking the visual drawing power of the novelties displayed  in the opening  pages.

Figuring Slavery

One of the first engravings of sugarcane milling and of slavery in  America, this plate was made for de Bry's beautifully illustrated  compilation of writings on the Americas; it illustrates Benzoni's  history of the Spanish colonies. The text refers to the Spanish  switching of black slaves to sugar production in Hispañola (now Haiti  and the Dominican Republic) when gold mining ran out. Although the text  identifies the figures as blacks, they are pictured as light-skinned.   At this moment human difference was marked as much by culture (dress,  religion, etc.) as by skin color, hair texture, and physiognomy. These  figures' near nudity codes them as more savage than Europeans, thus  candidates for enslavement. While processing cut cane occupies most of  the composition, the viewer's attention is also drawn to distant cane  fields by the smiling sun beaming down on the fields and laboring  slaves.

The Plantation as Curiosity

In this composite view of a sugar plantation in the French Antilles a  white overseer, stick in hand, directs the actions of black slaves who  scurry to take their bundles of cane off to the three-roller cattle mill  in the background.  As is common in this kind of view, cane fields are  relegated to the background and shown here as a tightly compressed  block. Less common is the focus on slave huts (marked 10 in the right  foreground); usually they are placed in the distance when shown at all.  The plate is also striking in its emphasis on tropical plants. Boldly  modeled and outlined and placed like a screen in the foreground, the  exotic trees and plants threaten to draw the viewer's attention away  from the titular subject of the print.  Natural history and production  scene combine here to form a decidedly curious image.

Up-scale and 'Natural:' Sugar in Brazil

The boiling house is foregrounded here; behind the slaves skimming and  pouring sugar liquor are rows of cones. These are visual reminders that  the Portuguese in Brazil commonly produced pure white crystals, rather  than the crude muscovado that was imported to Britain, France, and  Holland. Not one, but two large mills dominate the middle ground, one  driven by cattle, the other water.  They suggest the large scale of the  operation in Brazil, where milling was often centralized and the labor  force increased by planters renting slaves from other proprietors.  This  composite view has some of the liveliness and naturalism of  contemporary Dutch landscape painting.  Note here the light raking  across the scene from left to right, the agitation of the water, and the  hint of a breeze rippling though the sugarcane plants in the center.

Doing Double Duty

The scores of composite views of sugar plantations published in the  early modern period repeatedly draw on a limited set of scenes and  visual elements that define important stages in transforming cane into  crystals. Guarding introduces another element, highlighting the value of  the sugarcane crop and the violence needed to protect it from animals  and people. Sword in one hand and lance in the other, this slave seems  ready to kill and harvest all at once.

The French Country House Goes to Cayenne

This plate appears in a manual designed for new planters in the French  colony of Cayenne.  It contains two plans that offer idyllic visions of  sugar plantations styled after a French country estate. On the left, the  elaborate birds-eye plan includes a chapel and an olive grove, as well  as a sugar mill and a cattle pen.  The stress is on opulence and order:  most of the estate is bounded by fences and organized by trees and paths  set in straight lines.  Like a French chateau, there is a formal  garden, replete with ornamental fountain, next to the planter's house.   The second plan (small, but still including a large formal garden)  emphasizes surveillance:  everything is organized along a narrow axis  and the text states that all activities take place under the master's eye.

Guarded Bounty

This frontispiece to a planter's manual celebrates the  bounty of the sugar plantation in an amateurish image and georgic  verse.  Both word and image operate through excess. The verse is loaded  with adjectives; in the image, leafy branches spill over the wall, and  cane fields extend to the mountains. The estate's buildings are nearly  obscured by the line of palm trees marching across the background. In  the foreground two white men are inspecting cane plants, while a black  slave cuts cane behind them. As in the previous two plates (to the  left), guarding and surveillance assume visible form—here in the  well-built wall with its guardhouse and large, pointed gates, which  not-so-subtly frame the slave.

It is unusual to find a print engraved and  published in the West Indies at such an early date, since presses for  making copperplate engravings and, later, lithographs weren't imported  until the nineteenth century.

Imperial Georgic

This anonymous watercolor submits the agro-business of sugar-making to  the conventions and ideology of georgic landscape painting. The georgic  celebrates the bounty, peace, and harmony (social and visual) emanating  from the agricultural landscape. This composition is harmoniously  ordered through the rhythmic line of the green hills and the central  trees that soften and partially obscure the buildings on the estate.  Labor is banished almost completely—there are two slaves in the middle  ground, but it is unclear what they are doing.  The horses and cattle  all seem to be at rest, although someone is working—given the blue smoke  that pours from the chimney on the boiling house.

The Edge Runner

In this view of the chief sugar region of Brazil, the river traces a  map-like course, dividing the composition in half: the fort, the city,  and the fields on the right are all shown from above. The scene of sugar  processing (lower right) is dominated by an edge runner—the most  primitive type of wheeled sugar mill used in the New World. The circular  motion of the mill is animated through the repetition of its form  across the composition—in the swirls of smoke coming from the boiler and  from the huge fire in the distant mountains.

The Vertical Roller Mill

By the seventeenth century roller mills, rather the edge runners, were  being used in the Americas to express the juice from sugarcane.  This in  an early woodcut of a vertical three-roller mill, in which the rollers  are placed in a triangle, rather than in line.  The bold lines of the  curved walking beams frame this vignette, emphasizing the power  generated by the ensemble of the machine, animals, and slaves, including  the white men who closely oversee the process.

The Horizontal Mill: from Coinage and Cotton to Sugar

This technical engraving seems to offer all there is to know about the  construction of a water-driven roller mill. The parts, clearly  delineated and labeled, are presented for inspection without sugarcane  or laborers obscuring any part of the machine. There has been much  speculation about the origins of the horizontal roller mill. Leonardo da  Vinci devised a two-roller horizontal mill that was the model for a  machine to roll metal for coinage. Horizontal mills were also used in  India for processing cotton—and provide perhaps the most likely source  for those developed in the West Indies.

Labat was a Dominican missionary who was in the Antilles from 1693 to  1706, and his Nouveau voyage contains many mill images. Catholic  missionaries like Labat were crucial sources for information about sugar  technology; several religious corporations, especially the Jesuits,  owned sugar mills in Brazil in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Softening Slavery

In this composite view a three-roller vertical sugar  mill is  theatrically framed by banners containing the labels for the various   parts of the illustration. Two slaves  thread the cane through in front  and back of the rollers. Working long shifts  during harvest, slaves  were always at risk for losing fingers or worse in the  rollers. The  path of the cattle and attendant slaves in their endless journey  around  the mill forms a circle that orders the rest of the vignettes showing   various stages of purification.

Two scenes on the right suggest  a positive relationship between  masters and slaves. In the lower right a slave  looks out and smiles at  viewers to engage their attention. Behind him a white  man looks  solicitously at a slave carrying a bundle of cane.

Centering the Mill

The engraving for this smaller edition is less bold,  and also evidences  less concern for slaves than the version of the print from  the  Rotterdam edition (above): the image of the white man looking with  concern at a  slave (on the right) has been eliminated in this edition,  as has the smiling  slave in the lower right.

The vertical roller mill may have come to the  Americas from  China; if so Jesuit missionaries would have been likely conduits  for  this innovation.

Technology Trumping Labor

This plate is a celebration of the combined power of technology and  water. The three roller vertical mill is placed within a grid-like space  where everything seems measured and under control. The image suggests  that the human labor needed to work this mill is so minimal that one  white woman, dressed as a servant, can operate it—although one might  worry about that dainty hand, so close to the powerful rollers.

Women and the Mill

The previous plate  improbably imagines a white woman operating a mill.   Black women did perform this labor, although they are seldom pictured  working at the rollers in early modern prints. This nineteenth-century  image of a mill in Brazil puts black women in the picture, drawing the  viewer's attention to them by showing them wearing brightly patterned  skirts.

Space not Place

This plate displays  innovations in the rollers and the system for  delivering the cane to the mill.  Unlike other compositions, which  imagine some  kind of physical location, this engraving sets the mill in  the notional space  of the technical drawing.  Lines form  corners in  the background that denote the idea of space, but not a place. As  for  scale: How could the diminutive slave feed cane into these huge rollers?   Where would he stand?

Milling Cane to Make Lemonade

This  lithograph shows a portable  sugar mill used for making liquid  sugar extract.  This liquor was used to sweeten lemonade made  in  Brazilian cities. Debret turns the conventional image of an  agro-industrial  sugar mill into an urban curiosity.  The  three-roller  mill appears simply to have been miniaturized, with the powerful  bodies  of slaves taking the place of cattle or horses.  And yet, because of  the mill’s scale and  placement, it looms large, resisting  domestication. It is hard to imagine that  the slaves could fully turn  the long walking beams driving the rollers.

Working around the Clock

Speed is a factor in processing sugar cane. The  juice goes sour  quickly, so the mill and boiling houses operate around the  clock during  harvest time.  Mill images  tend to be static, because they are  conveying a technology and a process, not  the experience of human  labor.  This  plate of a three roller wind-driven mill from an  anti-slavery children’s books  uses doggerel verse to convey the speed  and human effort (including that of  children) involved in grinding.

Blood, Sweat and Tears

This frontispiece for an anti-slavery tract, likely written by a  European posing as a slave ("Le More-Lack"), emphases the blood, sweat,  and tears expended by a slave in producing the sweetened beverages on  the table in this West Indian scene.  While the image shows a white man  beating a hungry slave, the even more horrible specter of white  cannibalism is raised only in the inscription ("Those who drink my  blood, my sweat and my tears … refuse me a piece of bread and beat me").

Caricaturing Atrocity on a Sugar Plantation

Gillray appropriates the abolitionist trope of white cannibalism,  transforming a sugar vat into a cannibal's pot. The slave is reduced to  desperately waving appendages that set up a ghastly resonance with the  black arm and ears tacked up on the wall next to some vermin.

This pro-slavery print is a satiric effort to  discredit  testimony given before the British Parliament during debates on  ending  the slave trade.  The testimony  claimed that a white slave driver had  thrown a slave into a vat of boiling  sugar as punishment. Caricature  depends on exaggeration, and here Gillray maximizes  the horror in order  to show how supposedly absurd abolitionist testimonies of  such  atrocities were.

Cannibal Hell

In a hellscape compressed  into the foreground, these Brazilian natives  represent the height of exotic  barbarism; wearing elaborate  headdresses, they cook a human in a pot.  Animal parts and a human leg  hang overhead.  This grisly collection of parts eerily  resonates with  the one on the wall in Gillray’s Barbarities, published a  century later.  While the British caricature is deeply  satiric, this  Dutch print indulges in a bit of wit by way of contrast: the  cannibals’  cooking pot echoes the round bath containing indigenous Virginians  in  the Arcadian background.

Elegant Cannibals

Tupinamba (from Brazil) prepare a human victim for boiling in this  engraving that illustrates a republication of an early account (1557) by  Hans Staden of cannibalism in the New World.  Unlike Gillray's  monstrous slave driver, the cannibals in this early eighteenth-century  engraving are represented as idealized nudes. The standing female in the  center manages a graceful pose as she raises the victim's severed arm.  Horror and aesthetic pleasure are both on offer here.

Blood in the Refinery

This illustration comes from a detailed account of  sugar refining in  Orleans. Cattle blood was used in the refining process—revealing  yet  another link between blood and sugar beyond those made by abolitionists a   few decades later. The cask labeled 8 (on the left) contains cattle   blood.  According to the text, such casks were usually placed outside  the  boiling house because of the bad odor. The author claims that when  the refinery was at full capacity, it was  necessary to import cattle  from Paris to provide enough blood for the process  of clarifying the  liquid sugar extract.

Blood, Refinement, and Pollution

This page showing sugar refining in England (rarely  pictured) makes a  sly double reference to blood, refining, and pollution.  As the verse  below the image suggests, the baker seems  to be adding a dark liquid,  like blood, to the sugar cones: this references  both the practice of  clarifying sugar with cattle blood (see image to the left)  and the  abolitionist campaign against “blood sugar.”

The Plantation as Artful View

Framing trees, a road and river winding into a bright distance  ornamented by billowing clouds, small figures called "staffage": all of  these elements from European landscape painting are used to aestheticize  this view of the grounds of a sugar plantation owned by the artist's  patron. There are slaves in this scene, but they are driving cattle and  selling fruit, not cultivating sugar. In the foreground a woman, coded  by her dress and skin tone as mixed race, buys produce from a kneeling  slave.  This vignette echoes an imperial motif, often used in book  illustrations, in which kneeling figures personifying the continents  offer up gifts to Britannia.

Banishing Labor to the Shadows

This idealized view of William Beckford of Somerley's plantation is the  only one in the set that depicts buildings involved in sugar production.   The roofs of the mill and other structures are nestled picturesquely  below the mountains; the smoke breaking the horizon serves as the most  visually striking sign of human activity. Slaves ornament the view, but  the only labor actually pictured takes place in the shadows on the left:  here a slave is bent over carrying a large bundle of cane. This figure  echoes those of English rustics carrying wood that populate the works of  artists like Thomas Gainsborough. Here and throughout the series, the  artist works to make Jamaica beautiful and somewhat exotic, but also  familiar.

Claude Goes to Jamaica

The motif of the "bridge in the middle distance" was made famous by  French seventeenth-century painter Claude Lorrain in his many idealized  scenes of Italy, and it was often copied by later European artists.   Here Robertson uses this device to associate this Jamaican scene with  some of the most highly regarded landscapes in the canon of art.  The  figures provide a pleasing point of interest in the foreground (but  laundering bed sheets in what appears to be a fast moving river, then  hauling them out to dry, would be no small task).

Domesticating the Tropics

At first glance this looks like a picturesque view of England's Peak  District, with its swelling hills and winding rivers.  The artist has  offered up a scene that is both familiar and exotic: there are palm  trees on the densely-wooded hillside, but they are not calculated to  stand out as icons of tropicality. As in Dutch and English landscapes,  small figures are seen on a winding road.  European rustics morph into  slaves that seem to have no masters and never venture near a cane field.

The Touristic Gaze

Jaglust was a coffee plantation and Suzanna’s Daal a sugar plantation   that were located on the Suriname River. The image renders  the two  plantations as tourist sites viewed from a passing riverboat. The text  offers details about the sugar mills  and the process for making sugar,  noting that most of the ninety sugar mills  are steam powered. The image  however,  offers few hints about the activities taking place in the  buildings onshore,  except for the smoke stack that likely marks the  boiling house.

Plantation Discipline vs. Artful Irregularity

In this view of a slave village in Suriname, the artist strives to   accommodate opposing organizing principals: 1) Regimentation—seen in the  regularized  placement of the huts along a central axis, which displays  good plantation  management. 2) Picturesque variety and  irregularity—achieved through the use of  dappled shadow, the placement  of trees to break the horizon line, and the  figures. Pictured with  un-modulated black skin and bright clothing, the slaves  add “local  color” to the scene. In nineteenth-century Europe black skin was  often  deemed aesthetically inferior to white, but that didn’t prevent black   slaves from becoming picturesque.

The Elegiac Cane

This elegiac image of the small volcanic island of Saba is the final   plate in this lithographic set.  Voorduin’s  text stresses the Edenic  nature of this island, with its mild climate, fertile  valley, and  relatively bloodless history. In the lithograph, the island seems to  float on the placid sea. Delicately  tinted in pinks, blues, and greens,  the scene seems more visionary than topographic.   An uprooted  sugarcane plant floats in  the foreground, evoking, perhaps, the general  collapse of the sugar and slave  economy in the Dutch colonies.

The Grid and the Fort

The laborious task of digging holes and placing sugarcane cuttings in a  grid-like pattern is pictured here in some detail. This labor was  overseen by black slave drivers, shown in hats with high crowns. Also  overseeing the field is the fort (Monk's Hill) dominating the hilltop.   The boldly marked grid and the crenellated fort operate in tandem to  emphasize the ideas of surveillance and order that were so central to a  plantation economy.

Endless Harvest

This print emphasizes the  size of fully-grown cane and the size of the  labor force needed to harvest  it.  The towering plants twist and turn,   almost as if they were alive, and the line of laborers seems as endless  as the  cane field.  The hierarchy of the cane  field is encapsulated  by the conversing figures in the foreground: the white  planter or  overseer looks down from his horse to speak with the black overseer  in  the red coat, who has removed his hat in deference.

The Static Mill and the Well-Dressed Worker

People and animals are busily working here, but it is the powerful  windmill that drives the scene.  It is unclear how this can be the case,  since no wind ruffles the palms that press into the scene, and the  vanes of the mill seem still. Throughout the series black figures are  well dressed (no rags or bare torsos). As if to call attention to the  care for clothing, the artist shows two coats hung up next to the  rollers—their owners involved in the dirty and dangerous work of feeding  in the cane.

White Judgment, Black Labor

Acts of judgment were key to the appreciation of art and to making good  sugar, and both were associated primarily with white men. On the right  white men assess the quality of brown muscovado sugar, while black male  laborers on the left work over the boiling coppers.  Boiling cane was  the province of black men, not black women, and was seen to require more  skill than field work.  In this well-ordered scene, even the smoke  never strays: it goes straight up and out of the building, appearing as  well disciplined as the laborers.

Picturing Sugar for Children

The two most extensive pictorial accounts of sugar  making in this  exhibition are in publications designed for children. The Clark  aquatints that the JCB’s  lithographs are based on have been widely  reproduced in histories of slavery,  the West Indies, and sugar  making. The Cuffy wood engravings, by contrast, are  virtually  unknown. The work of manuring, shown here, has rarely been pictured  in  books detailing sugar cultivation.