The sweet, sweet sugar we know, love, heap into our tea and sprinkle joyfully over our morning cornflakes, generally comes from one of two delicious and heroic plants: the sugar cane and the sugar beet. Hail them and all their sugary goodness. Curse them for all those dental bills. Nowadays, the two sugar daddies provide us with a roughly even amount of our natural sweetener and both are, more or less, as sweet as each other. But being today more a matter of taste, it once was a matter of economy.
King Cane
Sugar cane, the largest crop in the world and certainly our first sugar-love, lives overground and dominated the industry for hundreds of years. This well-over-2000-year-old species of tropical grass towers at a hefty 2-5 metres tall, sways elegantly in the breeze and looks suspiciously like its cousin, Bamboo. Endlessly hungry for sunshine and as thirsty as a humpless camel, the cane, once it’s been hacked down with a cutlass, stripped of its leaves and painfully squeezed dry, eventually agrees to donate a surprisingly measly 10% of its body weight as liquid sugar.
The Eager Beet
Enter the competition. Short, plump and reminiscent of our beloved turnip, the sugar beet is considerably less parched and tan-obsessed, happily residing beneath the soil. It does demand a larger dwelling than its grassy foe and is more particular about the finer trimmings of its earthy living conditions but in return, the reasonable beet will gladly hand over a generous 12 – 21% of its juicy self, when asked. How sweet. Sadly though, due to its fear of crowds, the challenging beet will only yield about the same amount of sugar as cane, overall.
Cane and Stable
During the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, Cane ruled the many sugar plantations of the then British-colonised Caribbean. Enjoying wonderful success, the archipelago painstakingly and almost single-handedly satisfied the western world’s ever increasing appetite for Sucrose. At the centre of this success was the island of Nevis. The richness of Nevisian soil meant that a single gallon of cane juice would yield an unusually high 24 ounces of sugar, whereas at neighbouring St Kitts one could expect only 16. With the European tooth being so devilishly sweet, Nevis became a source of great wealth for Great Britain, and one of the richest places on Earth, for some.
Beet to the Punch
But as with all monopolies, this didn’t last forever and the rising sugar beet finally found its sugary feet during the early 1800s. Its advantage? Being less fussy. Unlike the picky cane, the beet proved itself to be quite content in the non-tropical climates of Europe, an open-mindedness that would spell the beginning of the end of Cane and the Caribbean’s lengthy reign. Being so far flung and with European industry-boosting import blockades now in place, the cane of the once mighty colony slowly started to lose its grip until, by 1960, all of the once thriving Nevisian plantations had closed.
Montpelier of Today
Today these ancient sugar-factories exist only as ruins or resorts, peaceful shadows of the hard-labouring world that once was. Among these is the Montpelier Plantation. Having been abandoned by the end of the 19th century, this 200 acre fallen kingdom was finally renovated and transformed into a luxury hotel in 1965. Here, relaxation and reflection have replaced production and the long-retired mill now finds itself in the lighter role of housing restaurant guests. The walls, pillars and fields whisper stories of rich and poor, and the various mechanical remnants merely hark back to the days when Cane was their king. Thanks to the Eager Beet, the battle is over, old Cane of Nevis has been laid to rest, and the island is restored to its original calm and beauty.
If you should choose to visit the tranquil fields of the Montpelier Plantation, spare a thought for old Cane, won’t you? Your surroundings will have many stories to tell.