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Learn more about the origins of sugarcane, which began in Asia and spread throughout Europe and the Americas, arriving in colonial Brazil, where it became one of the main economic activities.

The expansion of sugar cane cultivation fuelled the development of various types of mills, which varied in size and technology and were essential to the sugar-making process.

These mills also produced by-products such as sugarcane juice, garapa and rapadura, which were part of colonial daily life and the sugar economy.

Sugar as ‘White Gold’: Colonial Brazil’s Greatest Wealth from 1500 to 1822

From 1500 to 1822, from discovery to independence, Brazil exported goods worth a total of £586 million.

Which production made the biggest contribution? Many would say it was gold, but no: gold contributed just £170 million.

Coffee only came to the fore at the end of this period and, in our balance of trade, it had a smaller weight than rice, cotton, tobacco, wood, leather and only slightly more than cocoa.

During the colonial period, exports totalled no more than four million.

From the discovery to independence, there was one product that, on its own, earned more than all the others put together, including mining: sugar, of which we exported £800 million.’ (Luís Amaral, História Geral da Agricultura Brasileira, v. 1, p. 326, 1958).

The purpose of this text is to show how sugar cane arrived in Brazil, how the sugar cane plantations were structured, the sugar mills, how sugar was made, and to tell a little about Brazilian economic history in the colonial period, a time when sugar became the ‘white gold’ of the Portuguese colony in the 17th century.

One of the best accounts of sugar production was written by the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Antonio (1649-1716), who, on living in Brazil, adopted the name André João Antonil.

In 1711, he published his book, Cultura e Opulência no Brasil por suas drogas e minas in Lisbon.

In this book, Antonil describes in detail the reality of sugar cane cultivation, the structure of the mills and the manufacture of sugar, taking as his point of reference the mills in Bahia at the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century.

The original book is more than 200 pages long, although it also deals with tobacco production, gold mining and cattle breeding, among other topics. The first part of the book is devoted exclusively to sugar.

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Rota dos Engenhos em Pernambuco

Museu do Açúcar e do Alcool

For those interested, I recommend reading this book, which has versions in current Portuguese.

History of the sugar mill in colonial Brazil

1. Sugarcane from Asia to Europe and the Americas
2. Development of sugar cane cultivation in Colonial Brazil
3. Sugarcane plantations and slavery
4. Types of Sugar Mill
5. Structure of a Sugar Mill in Colonial Brazil
6. Sugar manufacture
7. Types of Sugar
8. Definition of Cane Juice, Garapa and Rapadura
9. Origin of Rum
10. National Sugar and Alcohol Museum

1. Sugarcane from Asia to Europe and the Americas

Originally, there were six species of Saccarum, the scientific name for sugar cane. The first species to be domesticated was Saccarum officinarum, whose popularity and interest in cultivation over the centuries resulted in hybridisation between species, creating hybrid species with superior characteristics to the original plants.

Crossbreeding between species in the cultivation of plants or the breeding of animals is a common and ancient process, as human beings realised that certain physical characteristics could be transmitted through crossbreeding. It’s important to emphasise that this idea arose long before the understanding of DNA, genetics, phenotyping and other modern concepts.

Another curious fact is that sugar cane belongs to the Poaceae family, the same family that includes maize, rice, sorghum, wheat, barley, rye, oats and bamboo, among others.

Sugar cane doesn’t reach the height of a tree, but it resembles corn and other canes, rising in seven to eight-foot calyces, one inch thick. It is spongy, juicy and full of a sweet, white kernel. The leaves are two cubits long, the flower is filamentous and the root is soft and not very woody. From this come shoots for the hope of a new harvest. Sugarcane likes moist soil, warm weather and cooler air. Western India is very favourable for these canes, although they are also produced in Eastern India.

1.1. Origin and spread of sugar cane around the world

Sugarcane originated on the island of New Guinea, from where it spread to the Malay Archipelago and Indonesia, until it migrated to the continent, settling in India and Southeast Asia, in countries that today include Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and southern China.

In India, we find mentions of sugar cane cultivation and its ritualistic use in ancient texts. For example, in the Mahabharata, an important Hindu poem, there are references to sugar cane, including the information that the god of love Kama had a bow made from this plant. Is that where the idea that love is sweet comes from?

Sugarcane has been cultivated for centuries by different Asian peoples, but it is not certain when exactly it migrated to western Asia.

Luís Amaral [1958] pointed out that sugar cane was brought to Persia during the time of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, since we know that Alexander made incursions as far as India. From Persia, the plant would have reached Syria. However, it was the Arabs who spread it throughout the Middle East centuries later, in the Middle Ages.

With the expansion of the Islamic empire of the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad ‘s legacy (570-632) at the end of the 11th century, Christian Europe came into conflict with the Arab world, the main reason being the conquest of the holy city of Jerusalem.

As the Crusades unfolded, Europeans came into contact with new plants, animals, peoples and cultures. One of these contacts was with sugar cane, which attracted the interest of some Italian merchants, who took seedlings to be planted in Sicily and on the island of Rhodes.

In addition, the Arab expansion led these desert people to enter Egypt and spread across North and East Africa. In what is now Morocco, the Arabs crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and entered what is now southern Spain.

In the following centuries, they expanded their domains in the Iberian Peninsula, ruling large parts of what is now Portugal and Spain. With this colonisation, they cultivated new plants such as oranges, lemons, tea and even sugar cane.

The Arabs who mixed with the Berber peoples of North Africa came to be called Moors by the Spanish and Portuguese. In Italy, Greece and the Holy Land, Europeans also referred to them as Saracens.

Sugar was used in Europe for a long time as a medicine. Doctors recommended its pure consumption or used it as an ingredient in potions, pastes and drinks. Although it has no effective healing properties, sugar, with its high sucrose content, is a natural energiser.

Even today, there are medicines that use sugar in their recipes; for example, home-made saline contains sugar and salt in its preparation.

It is now known that sugar in large quantities is very harmful to health.

However, in the Middle Ages and the Modern Age, it was common to use what we now call alternative medicine, resulting in a plethora of natural medicines that used various ingredients, reminiscent of the miraculous magic potions seen in literature, films and cartoons.

Sugar was no different. Barléu [1940] reports that, in ancient times, sugar was used as a remedy for problems with the stomach, intestines, liver and other ailments.

As well as being used as a medicine, sugar was also an important ingredient in the preparation of food and drink, after all, it was one of the spices from the Indies.

In some countries, such as Portugal, the Hispanic kingdoms (Spain was only unified at the end of the 15th century), the Italian city states, France and England, noblemen or wealthy merchants gave sugar chests as presents, something considered a luxury gift.

In England under the Tudors in the 16th century, sugar was so expensive that only the rich could afford it.

A curious fact is that, as people didn’t have the habit of brushing their teeth or using other means to clean them, excessive consumption of sugar and sweets resulted in blackened teeth due to tooth decay. However, the nobility knew how to get round this.

Decayed teeth became synonymous with wealth, because it meant that in order to have teeth darkened by sugar, you had to have a lot of money to buy sugar.

So there were cases of less well-off people using soot and other substances to darken their teeth. The lower classes always wanted to emulate the lifestyle of the elites.

Until the 18th century in Europe, sugar remained a lucrative product and for a long time only accessible to the elite, because when the lower classes did have access to this product, they consumed a very poor quality sugar, usually called brown sugar, which was seen as inferior and relegated to the less well-off classes.

In the 15th century, the Portuguese already had their sugar cane plantations in the south of Portugal, in the Algarves region, and with the start of the Age of Discovery in 1415, with the conquest of the Moorish city of Ceuta in the Maghreb (today Morocco), the Portuguese began their overseas voyages along the west coast of Africa and into the ocean.

Around 1418, the navigators João Gonçalvez Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira discovered the island of Porto Santo, and the following year, Zarco returned in the company of Bartolomeu Perestrelo and they discovered the island of Madeira, which became the name of the archipelago.

Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), one of the main figures behind Portugal’s maritime expansionist policy, was the one who issued the orders to start growing sugar cane in Madeira, the Azores, Cape Verde and other places. Henry saw that sugar was a profitable product and decided to expand the sugar cane plantations in the Portuguese domains.

On the island of Madeira, where the first Portuguese sugar mills appeared, in this case in 1452, Diogo Vaz de Teive, squire of Prince Henry the Navigator, built the first sugar mill on the island, in the Captaincy of Funchal. His mill was powered by water.

In 1590, Gaspar Frutuoso, author of Saudades da Terra, pointed to the existence of more than 30 sugar mills in Madeira alone, although it should be noted that Madeira’s sugar production was in decline due to Brazilian production, which had overtaken it.

In an attempt to increase the price of an arroba of sugar loaf, in 1496, the Portuguese king, Manuel I, limited Madeira ‘s sugar production to 120,000 arrobas per year, in order to control the availability of the product and therefore the sale and purchase prices. If the supply of the commodity decreased, prices would rise.

Of these 120,000 arrobas, according to a note by Furtado [2005], 40,000 arrobas were destined for Flanders, 16,000 for Venice, 13,000 for Genoa, 15,000 for Chios and 7,000 for England. These countries were the main consumers of Portuguese sugar.

1.1. Christopher Columbus planted the first sugarcane plantation in the Americas

In 1493, Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) returned to the New World, to the Caribbean Sea, where he had arrived a year earlier, believing that he was somewhere in the Indies, which is why he called the natural inhabitants Indians.

Columbus had ‘discovered’ the New World, the West Indies, the Americas on 12 October 1492.

On this return voyage, he was commissioned by the King of Spain to continue exploring other islands, because although the previous year Columbus had reached an island in the Bahamas that he had named San Salvador, on this second voyage he saw and visited other islands, but chose to land on a large island that was named in 1493 Hispaniola (‘little Spain’), today’s island of Santo Domingo, where the countries of the Dominican Republic and Haiti are located, which share the same island.

It was on Hispaniola that Christopher Columbus founded the town of La Natividad and planted the first sugar cane plantation in the Americas.

There was the first serious attempt at colonisation in the new Iberian possessions in 1502, led by Nicolás de Ovando; and the first American mill seems to have been set up in the Spanish Antilles in 1506.

By 1520, 20 mills had been set up; by 1550, around 40 were operating in Espaniola. After 1553, Mexico also began exporting sugar to the metropolis.

Despite this good start, due to the exodus of the islands ‘ populations to Mexico and Peru, the diversion of attention to the mining of precious metals, and the great struggles and revolutions that characterise the early days of the islands of the American Mediterranean, the sugar industry cooled down there, which only took off again in the middle of the following century, when there was a great boom and a considerable increase in demand for the article.’ (SIMONSEN, 1937, p. 146).

1.2. Sugarcane arrives in Brazil

On 22 April 1500, the fleet of twelve ships commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral (1467/1468 – 1520) sighted land, which they named Ilha de Vera Cruz.

After making contact with the indigenous people, a few days later the ‘discovered’ land was renamed Terra de Santa Cruz, and decades later it was called Brazil.

But in any case, from 1500 until 1532, Santa Cruz was not colonised; the Portuguese only took care of mapping the coast, making contact with the indigenous people, describing the fauna and flora, and extracting brazilwood, as gold and silver were not discovered at this time.

In addition, the spice trade in Asia was very lucrative and concentrated the Crown‘s political and economic efforts, after all, Cabral began his voyage with the initial mission of reaching India again, using the route discovered by Vasco da Gama (1460/1469 – 1520) in 1498.

In addition to this lucrative trade in oriental spices, Portugal also showed no interest in initially planting sugar cane in the New World, something that the Spanish did, as production in Madeira, the Azores, Cape Verde and the Algarves met their consumption needs.

Usually, in schools, we see that the first seedlings arrived in 1531 on the expedition of Martim Afonso de Sousa; however, there are indications that there were earlier attempts to cultivate sugar cane in Brazil, and they may have been successful.

Amaral [1958] points out that in 1516, the Casa da Índia, a Portuguese mercantile company that handled business in the Indies, considered sending some sugar cane producers to Santa Cruz (Brazil) to study the land and the possibilities of growing sugar cane.

The Brazilian historian Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen (1816-1878) revealed an interesting opinion on the Casa da Índia’s proposal:

‘We know that, in 1516, he ordered, by a charter, the overseer and officers of the House of India to give axes and enchadas and all the other tools to the people who were going to settle Brazil; and that, by another charter, he ordered the same overseer and officers to ‘seek out and elect a practical and capable man to go to Brazil to start a sugar mill; and that he be given his allowance, and also all the copper and iron and other things necessary’ for the manufacture of the said mill.’ (VARNHAGEN, 1858, p. 95).

In 1526, the Lisbon customs records already included a tax on sugar produced in Santa Cruz.

Amaral suggests that if there were sugar cane plantations at that time, they would probably have been either in Ilhéus, as Gabriel Soares de Sousa suggested, or in Itamaracá, where one of the most important trading posts in the colony was located.

For Amaral, the cane fields should have been in Itamaracá, as it was the trading post of Cristóvão Jacques, a Portuguese nobleman who arrived in Brazil in 1503.

Jacques returned in 1516 and stayed for three years, leading maritime patrols to fight French pirates from the coast of Rio Grande do Norte to the mouth of the River Plate.

It is known that he fought the French a few times on his voyages and took prisoners.

In 1521, he returned and founded a trading post in Itamaracá, which Amaral [1958] thought was the place where the sugar mentioned in the Lisbon customs records of 1526 came from; however, it is not certain whether the sugar really came from there or whether there were cane fields before 1532.

Sugarcane cultivation in the Northeast – one might add, in Brazil – seems to have begun in thelands of Itamaracá, on the edge of fresh water, as well as salt water; both waters at the same time. And when it was later regularised, with Duarte Coelho, it was to accompany the ‘neighbouring lands of the streams’’. (FREYRE, 1967, p. 20).

In 1527, Cristóvão Jacques was in Portugal and suggested to King João III the idea of returning to Brazil to begin colonisation, but the king refused to accept this request. Three years later, in 1530, he sent the expedition of Martim Afonso de Sousa with the aim of establishing a colony and starting the process of effectively colonising Brazilian territory. This expedition marked the beginning of a new phase in the Portuguese occupation of Brazil, focussing on the cultivation of sugar cane and the exploitation of natural resources.

It is important to mention that regular expeditions left Portugal for Brazil every year, with the aim of cutting brazilwood, exploring the coast and defending the land, mainly against the French, although the Spanish also passed through during this period.

In 1530, the king of Portugal, João III, appointed the nobleman and military man Martim Afonso de Sousa to an important mission in the Portuguese colony of Santa Cruz.

This expedition would mark a turning point in the history of Brazil, as the colony would only be officially called Brazil a few years later.

However, there were already unofficial references to the name Brazil among sailors, largely due to the trade in brazilwood, which had become one of the main products exploited at the time.

Martim Afonso de Sousa ‘s mission aimed not only to defend the territory, but also to organise the colony, create settlement centres and start growing sugar cane, which would become one of the new colony’s main economic activities.

Martim Afonso de Sousa ‘s mission was to protect the coast from French ships that were going to smuggle brazilwood, as well as carrying out new explorations by land and even choosing a place to start a small urban centre. This initiative was an important antecedent of the hereditary captaincies.

On 31 January 1531, Martim Afonso de Sousa and his expedition were in front of Cabo de Santo Agostinho, already off the coast of Pernambuco.

When they came across French ships, they hunted them down, capturing three: one was burnt, another was sent to the kingdom laden with brazilwood, and the third was incorporated into the armada, which was on its way to the Rio de la Plata.

In Bahia, they were welcomed by Diogo Álvares, the Caramurú, and Pero Lopes remarked that the Bahian women ‘were very beautiful and had no envy for those of Rua Nova, Lisbon’ (Diário de Navegação, ed. by E. de Castro, Rio, 1927, p. 154).

On their way to Rio de Janeiro (p. 174), where they stayed, they disembarked and explored the land: ‘the people of this river are like those of Baía de Todos os Santos, except that they are gentler people’, reports Pero Lopes (PEIXOTO, 1944, p. 86).

Martim Afonso de Sousa and his men continued on to the Rio de la Plata, but in 1532 they returned north and landed on the island of São Vicente (today off the coast of São Paulo).

There, he chose the place to found the colony’s first village, Vila de São Vicente. At the time, sugar cane seedlings were also planted and a sugar mill called ‘Engenho dos Erasmos’ was built.

In the same year, the town of Piratininga was founded with the support of João Ramalho, a Portuguese exile in the region, who became the son-in-law of the chief Tibiriça. The village of Piratininga was on the mainland, heading towards the plateau.

Years later, Vila de Santos and Vila de Santo Amaro were founded.

These foundations were important milestones in the expansion of Portuguese colonisation and the development of agriculture, especially sugar cane, which would become one of colonial Brazil’s main export products.

The sugar cane brought to Brazil, originally from Madeira (according to Gabriel Soares, it first came to the Ilhéus from Cape Verde ), was fundamental to the installation of the first sugar mill, the Engenho dos ‘Erasmos’.

This mill, which became prosperous, was owned by a firm of wealthy men from Flanders, led by Erasmo Schetz, whose overseers Anchieta refers to. In the future Vila de Santos, next to São Vicente, Braz Cubas established the first monjolo, or engenhoca, for processing cereals.

Two years after the founding of the town of São Vicente, King João III decreed the creation of the Hereditary Captaincies in Brazil. This decree divided the coast into 15 initial captaincies, which were given to grantees responsible for colonising the land, developing agriculture and livestock, as well as continuing to explore the forests in search of riches.

The grantees would be masters of their lands by right and inheritance, enjoying civil and criminal jurisdiction. The civil penalty was up to one hundred thousand réis, while the criminal penalty could be up to natural death for slaves, indigenous people, peons and free men. For people of a higher calibre, the penalty could be up to ten years’ banishment or one hundred cruzados.

For more serious offences, such as heresy (if the heretic was handed over by an ecclesiastic), treason or sodomy, the sentence was up to natural death, regardless of the quality of the defendant, and there could only be an appeal if the sentence was not capital.

The grantees had the power to found towns, with terms, jurisdiction and insignia, along the coasts and navigable rivers. They were also lords of adjacent islands up to ten leagues from the coast. The ombudsmen and public and judicial notaries were appointed by the respective grantees, who could grant land as sesmarias, except to their own wives or heirs (ABREU, 1907, p. 36).

This system of captaincies played a crucial role in the organisation of Brazilian territory, encouraging colonisation and economic exploitation, especially in the cultivation of sugar cane, which would become one of the main products of the colonial economy.

In 1535, the grantee of the Captaincy of Pernambuco, Duarte Coelho Pereira, founded the first sugar mill in his captaincy, called Engenho Velho. This sugar mill was established in the vicinity of the town of Olinda, which Duarte had founded a year earlier, in 1534.

Engenho Velho marked the beginning of large-scale sugar production in the region, consolidating Pernambuco as one of the main sugar centres in colonial Brazil.

The choice of Olinda as the location for the town was strategic, given its access to the sea and its privileged position in relation to the surrounding arable areas.

The foundation of this engenho was a significant step in the economic development of Pernambuco and played a crucial role in strengthening the Portuguese colonial system, which was based on the exploitation of natural resources and agricultural production, especially sugar cane, which would become the basis of the colonial economy.

See also History of the sugar mills of Pernambuco – Beginning and end

For Amaral (1958), the importance of Brazil as a new sugar hub was all too clear, to the point that in 1535, in the town of São Vicente, there were already more than three mills, just three years after the first one was founded.

‘Since the charter of King Manuel and afterwards, as João Lúcio de Azevedo observed, ‘the privilege granted to the grantee alone to manufacture and own mills and water mills denotes that the sugar plantation was the one especially targeted’.’

In the same vein, the regiments and laws relating to the colony were made: Tomé de Sousa‘s, which excluded mill owners from debt enforcement; and those of the governors of Pernambuco, ensuring privileges for those who built or rebuilt mills; the half nobility granted to those who became mill owners (AMARAL, 1958, p. 328).

In 1576, Pernambuco exported around 70,000 arrobas of sugar and in 1583 the figure rose to 200,000 arrobas.

‘At the beginning of the 17th century,’ says de Carli, ‘Brazil had 200 sugar mills and their production was between 25,000 and 35,000 boxes of sugar of 35 arrobas each. This is the golden age of sugar in Brazil‘’ (AMARAL, 1958, p. 329).

In Europe, between the end of the 16th century and the end of the 18th century, sugar was on the rise. Drinks such as tea and coffee began to spread throughout European countries, introduced by the Arabs.

As not everyone liked to drink tea or coffee straight, many preferred sugar or mixed it with milk. In addition, chocolate, which was beginning to be manufactured in Europe, required a lot of sugar to sweeten the bitter taste of cocoa.

Remember that chocolate was a luxury item for a long time; tea and coffee only began to become popular at the end of the 17th century in some countries, but in others it started in the 18th.

After the popularisation of chocolate, it was coffee, the use of which had been widespread since 1650, that was one of the products that most contributed to the expansion of sugar, and it is well known that the consumption of coffee is at least equal to that of sugar’ (SIMONSEN, 1937, p. 173).

To get an idea of how valuable sugar became between the 16th and 17th centuries, it’s worth highlighting two examples of international factors that influenced its relevance, especially before its decline in the 18th century.

The first example concerns the fact that in 1580, with the death of the king of Portugal, Henry I (1512-1580), the throne was left without heirs, since the king was a cardinal and had no children.

His predecessor, Sebastian, died young and also left no descendants, resulting in a vacant throne.

In this context, several candidates emerged to contest the throne, one of whom was the King of Spain, Philip II (1527-1598).

Philip II succeeded in being elected king of Portugal, becoming Philip I of Portugal, which made him the most powerful and wealthy king in Europe and the West.

He owned the prosperous silver mines of Potosí in Upper Peru (now Bolivia) and now controlled the lucrative sugar production of Brazil.

For 60 years, Portugal and its colonies remained under Spanish rule, a period known as the Iberian Union (1580-1640).

The second example occurred in the 17th century, when sugar became such a valuable commodity that the Dutch decided to create the West India Company (1621) to deal with business in the Americas.

In 1624, the Dutch attacked the city of Salvador, then the capital of Brazil, in an attempt to take it over. Although they initially managed to occupy the city, they failed after a year and ended up retreating, but they didn’t give up and returned five years later.

Between 1630 and 1654, i.e. for 24 years, the Dutch occupied part of north-eastern Brazil, controlling sugar production in Pernambuco, Paraíba, Itamaracá and Rio Grande, the main producers of this coveted ‘white gold’.

According to a report by the Dutchman Adriaen van der Dussen, completed in 1639 for the West India Company, he pointed out that Pernambuco, Itamaracá, Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte had at least 166 sugar mills.

Although today there are uncertainties about the accuracy of this calculation, Dussen’s report remains one of the best records of this period in Brazilian history.

Brazilian sugar dominated the sugar trade between 1600 and 1700, as Barlaeus recorded in his 1660 work, and at a time when it was the most important item in international maritime barter. The great transports of grain, fuel, manufactured goods and metallurgy had not yet taken place; the Industrial Revolution had not yet emerged’. (SIMONSEN, 1937, p. 179).

2. The development of sugar cane cultivation in colonial Brazil

Land, water and forest contributed to the development of sugar cane cultivation in Brazil.

Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) and the Jesuit priest José de Anchieta (1534-1597) went so far as to say that one of the main factors contributing to the development of sugar cane cultivation in Brazil was not exactly the tropical climate similar to that of South Asia, but rather the regularity of the rainfall and the fertile massapê or massapé soil.

Massapê soil is a dark, sticky soil (because it is rich in clay), rich in humus, something that gives it its fertility.

In geology, massapê, as it is called in Brazil, is the second most fertile, behind the so-called “purple earth, ’ although in reality it is reddish in colour. This soil is the result of millions of years of decomposition and sedimentation, mainly of basaltic origin.

Terra roxa and massapê are considered the most fertile soils in Brazil, and both have been exploited; the former mainly for sugar and the latter mainly for coffee.

Massapê is accommodating. It’s a sweet soil even today. It doesn’t have that crunch of the backlands sand that seems to repel the boot of the European and the foot of the African, the foot of the ox and the hoof of the horse, the root of the Indian mango tree and the crunch of the sugar cane, with the same disgust as someone who would repel an affront or an intrusion.

The sweetness of the massapê lands contrasts with the terrible rage of the dry sands of the sertões.’ (FREYRE, 1967, p. 7).

In the Northeast of sugar cane, water was and is almost everything. Without it, a crop so dependent on rivers, streams and rains would not have prospered from the 16th to the 19th century; so friendly with fat, damp land and the sun at the same time.’ (FREYRE, 1967, p. 19).

It is also important to mention that, in addition to the water-related factors mentioned above, Brazilian mills were powered by water or animal traction.

Although the Portuguese were already familiar with windmills, something brought by the Moors to Portugal and Spain centuries earlier, in Brazil such mills were not applied to sugar cane plantations.

Therefore, we see mills near rivers, streams or canals built to carry water to move the water wheel.

This meant thatthey had to transport a lot of cane, firewood and the goods they produced.

Given the difficulties of getting around and the risk of attacks by wild animals, they avoided moving away from the coast and established the mills preferably along the coastline, next to the small rivers, where they used boats for transport services; however, it soon became necessary to use the ox cart and to call in the firing squad.’ (SIMONSEN, 1937, p. 149).

‘Near the branch of the river they call Afogados, there are numerous sugar mills from where the Portuguese used to ship their crates of sugar in boats along the river or in carts to Barreta, from where they transported them in barges to Recife and Olinda.’ (NIEUHOF, 1682, p. 24).

Another factor was distance. The Northeast was closer to Africa, from where African slaves came to work in the fields, and at the same time it was closer to Portugal.

Although there were sugarcane plantations in Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro and São Vicente, these places were much further away from Portugal, which hindered the sugar trade. In addition, the soil there was less fertile than the dark massapê soil on the northeastern coast.

Therefore, sugar production in the south was more geared towards the domestic market, although it was also geared towards the African market, as it was closer to go to Africa than to go to Europe.

However, there were ships that, despite the distance, still travelled to Portugal carrying sugar.

The availability of wood was also important for the development of the plantations, something of an irony given that a large part of the Atlantic Rainforest was cut down or burnt to make room for the sugar cane plantations, but it was from these dense, green forests that the wood for the construction of the houses, chapels, mills, water wheels, mills, carts, tools, furniture, boats came from; as well as serving as firewood for the ovens.

‘The impoverishment of the soil in so many parts of the north-east, due to erosion, cannot be attributed to the rivers, to their eagerness to flow to the sea taking the fat from the land, but mainly to monoculture.

By devastating the forests and using the land for a single crop, monoculture allowed the other riches to dissolve in the water, to be lost in the rivers.

This is also linked to the destruction of the forests by fire and the axe, in which monoculture was so excessive. Thus disappeared that astringent vegetation on the banks of the rivers, which resisted the waters, the rainy season, not letting them take the marrow from the land: preserving the humus and the sap of the soil.’ (FREYRE, 1967, p. 22).

The drama that took place and is still taking place in the Northeast did not come from the introduction of sugar cane, but from the brutal exclusivism into which, out of greed for profit, the Portuguese settlers slipped, stimulated by the Crown in its already parasitic phase.

One of the cruelest aspects of this drama was the destruction of the forest, which led to the destruction of animal life and possibly to changes in the climate, temperature and certainly the water regime(FREYRE, 1967, p. 46).

3. Cane fields and slavery

So far we’ve seen the trajectory of sugar cane as it crossed half the world to arrive in Brazil, how this product was in evidence in modern Europe, which is why it was so demanded and profitable; how natural and geographical factors favoured the development of sugar cane, driven by a monoculture economic policy (called plantation by the English), which aimed for large estates with slave labour.

However, as we will see below, not all sugarcane plantations were large estates; there were small and medium-sized properties that planted sugarcane and took it to the mills to be crushed.

There was a relationship between these small and medium-sized producers and the mill owners, something that is not usually discussed in schools.

The donations were usually very large, with plots measuring many leagues. This is understandable: there was plenty of land, and the ambitions of those pioneers recruited at such great expense would clearly not be satisfied with small properties; it was not the position of modest peasants that they aspired to in the new world, but of great lords and landowners. Furthermore, and above all because of this, there is a material factor that determines this type of land ownership.

The cultivation of sugar cane was only economically suitable for large plantations.

Clearing the land properly (a costly task in this tropical and virgin environment, so hostile to man) required the combined efforts of many labourers; it was not a business for small, isolated landowners.

Once this was done, planting, harvesting and transporting the product to the sugar mills only became profitable when done in large volumes. Under these conditions, the small producer could not survive (PRADO JR, 1981, p. 19).

Prado Jr [1981] and Furtado [2005] pointed out that wage labour on these estates was not a viable economic condition for a number of reasons:

• Firstly, the Portuguese population was small, and a large part of those who could work in agriculture had to remain in the metropolis, or were on the islands, or were on duty in trade with Africa and Asia;
• Secondly, it would be necessary to hire labourers from other countries, but the wages would have to be very good to convince a farmer to leave his land and move with his family to the other side of the ocean, to a region considered ‘wild’ by the Europeans;
• Thirdly, the large amount of labour needed, together with the cost of travel and wages, would make the project unfeasible, as building a mill was quite expensive at the time.
• Fourthly, the settlers who went to Brazil were looking for enrichment and glory so that they could return home. Therefore, the final and most viable solution was to resort to slavery.

To work these estates, the Portuguese initially enslaved the Indians, but the latter, realising the true intention of the Portuguese, began to rebel.

The so-called ‘meek’ Indians ended up agreeing to work for the Europeans, but in other jobs; the more hardened ones preferred to flee into the forests, returning to their villages and fighting the Portuguese. In addition, the religious orders began to intervene in the government, protesting against the use of Indians in the sugar cane plantations, claiming that they should be catechised and used for other tasks.

Indigenous slavery in Brazil lasted until the 19th century, when hundreds of thousands of Indians were killed. As the Indians began to oppose forced labour in the fields and, moreover, had no experience of this type of work, the solution was to bring slaves from Africa.

They were even given weapons, including firearms, which was strictly forbidden, for understandable reasons.

In addition, if the Indian, by nature a nomad, had done more or less well with the sporadic and free work of extracting brazilwood, this was no longer the case with the discipline, method and rigours of an organised and sedentary activity such as agriculture.

Gradually it became necessary to force them to work, to keep a close eye on them and prevent them from running away or abandoning the task they were engaged in. From there to outright slavery was just one step.

It was not yet 30 years after the beginning of the effective occupation of Brazil and the establishment of agriculture, and already the slavery of Indians had become generalised and firmly established everywhere.

The Africans already had more experience with plantations and animal husbandry, and the system of slavery on the continent was more developed than among the indigenous people of Brazil.

Another factor was that the Portuguese had already been using Africans in the sugar cane plantations in Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and even Madeira and the Azores. However, contact between Portugal and some African nations, such as the Kongo, was already decades old; so it wasn’t difficult for the Portuguese to find slaves in Africa, as slavery was already being practised, and they were already aware of it. Although the treatment of slaves was different among the African peoples, the slavery imposed by the Europeans became more abusive and aggressive.

However, although there was an abundance of captives in Africa, transporting these men and women was not easy and made the journey costly, dangerous and, adding it all up, the price of a slave increased a lot. Depending on their age, physical size, appearance and location, the value of slaves varied.

The process of replacing Indians with blacks continued until the end of the colonial era. It would happen quickly in some regions: Pernambuco, Bahia. In others, it was very slow, and even imperceptible in certain poorer areas, such as the Far North (Amazonia), and until the 19th century in São Paulo.

There was a very strong argument against the black slave: his cost. Not so much because of the price paid in Africa, but because of the high mortality rate on board the ships that transported them.

Poorly fed, accumulated in such a way as to maximise the use of space, enduring long weeks of confinement and the worst hygienic conditions, only a portion of the captives reached their destination.

It is estimated that, on average, only 50 per cent arrived in Brazil alive; and of these, many were maimed and unusable.

The value of slaves was therefore always very high, and only the richest and most flourishing regions could afford them.’ (PRADO JR, 1981, p. 23).

Just as the Indians rebelled against slavery, the Africans did the same. The quilombos and mocambos, as well as some revolts and rebellions, were the response of these men and women to the abusive and harmful slavery imposed by modern Europeans. However, African slaves became the solution to the demand for labour in the colony.

African and indigenous slavery therefore became the mainstay of the colonial economy for four centuries. Because we have to think that in lands far from the main ports where African slaves arrived, access to them was difficult, so the option was to use Indians as slaves. In the Captaincy of São Vicente (now the state of São Paulo), indigenous slavery was superior to African slavery.

4. Types of Sugar Mills

1. Press or press-grip

• Driving force: Human
• Description: Used in small mills to make rapadura or brandy for domestic consumption. They could produce small quantities of sugar for home use.

2. Almanjarra, trapiche, molinote, atafona or of oxen

• Driving force: Animals (usually oxen or, in some cases, horses)
• Description: Used on large plantations, they were essential for milling sugar cane on a larger scale.

3. Water mill

• Driving force: Water (water wheel)
• Description: Considered the most efficient for centuries, due to their ability to operate continuously and in large volumes.

4. Bangle

• Driving force: Steam
• Description: Introduced in Brazil in the 19th century, they became a significant innovation in sugar production.

5. Entrosa

• Driving force: Human
• Description: Small mill powered by three sticks.

6. Seesaw

• Driving force: Human
• Description: Small manual wooden device with two cylinders.

7. Dead fire

• Description: A term used to refer to an inoperative fire engine.

Considerations

• Terminology: It is important to note that terms such as almanjarra, trapiche and banguê can have other meanings, so it is important to use expressions such as ‘engenho de trapiche’ or ‘engenho-banguê’ to avoid confusion.
• Availability of resources: The proliferation of water mills in Brazil was due to the abundance of rivers and streams, as well as the initial scarcity of cattle. The use of oxen required larger pastures and adequate corrals.

Quote

The quote by Antônio Vieira de Antonil emphasises the importance and complexity of sugar mills in sugar production, reflecting on human ingenuity and skill in the construction and operation of these systems.

Whoever called the workshops in which sugar is made ‘ engenhos ’ (sugar mills) really got the name right. Because whoever sees them, and considers with reflection that they deserve it, is obliged to confess that they are one of the main achievements and inventions of human ingenuity, which, with a small portion of the Divine, always shows itself to be admirable in its way of working… (ANTONIL, 1711, p. 13-14).

These observations reveal the intrinsic relationship between production techniques, available labour and environmental conditions in colonial Brazil.

In Brazil, it couldn’t be that way; the costs of the colonial installations were so great, in their virgin lands and in a hostile environment, with all the necessary equipment for defence, cultivation, transport and shipping, that in the early days it wasn’t justifiable to set up the so-called small mills.

Hence the early construction of medium-sized mills, producing more than three thousand arrobas a year, which then developed into facilities producing more than ten thousand arrobas.’ (AMARAL, 1958, p. 329).

5. Structure of a Sugar Mill in Colonial Brazil

In rural nomenclature, the word engenho came to refer both to the so-called Casa de Engenho, where sugar cane was ground and sugar, rapadura or aguardente was produced, and also to the entire farm itself, the entire agro-industrial complex involved in the cultivation of sugar cane and the preparation of sugar.

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Estrutura de um Engenho de Açúcar no Brasil Colônia

Its centrepiece is the engenho(sugar mill), i.e. the factory itself, where the facilities for handling cane and preparing sugar are gathered. The name ‘engenho’ was later extended from the factory to the entire estate with its land and crops: ‘engenho’ and ‘sugarcane estate’ became synonyms.’ (PRADO JR, 1981, p. 23).

The engenho represented a real settlement, requiring the use not only of many arms, but also the necessary land for sugarcane plantations, scrubland, pasture and supplies.

In fact, in addition to the mill house, living quarters, slave quarters and infirmaries, there had to be a hundred or so settlers or slaves to work some 1,200 tasks of massapê (900 square fathoms), as well as pastures, fences, vessels, utensils, iron, copper, yoke of oxen and other animals.’ (SIMONSEN, 1937, p. 149).

What would an engenho be in the century of discovery? The same thing described by Saint-Hilaire in the 19th century. Fernão Cardim describes it:

Each one of them is an incredible machine and factory; some are water mills, others water mills, which grind more and with less expense; others are not water mills, but grind with oxen, and are called trapiches; these have a much greater factory and expense, although they grind less, they grind all the time of the year, which the water mills do not have, because they are sometimes lacking.

In each of them, there are usually six, eight or more white dwellings and at least 60 slaves, which are required for ordinary service, but most of them have one hundred and two hundred slaves from Guinea and the land.

The mills require 60 oxen, which grind every 12 hours in turn; the work usually starts at midnight and finishes the next day at three or four hours after midday. For each task, they use a 12-layer firewood barrel and pour 60 moulds of white, brown, soft and high sugar. Each mould is just over half an arroba, although large arroba moulds are already used in Pernambuco.’ (AMARAL, 1958, p. 329).

Gilberto Freyre in his books Casa-grande & Senzala (1933), Nordeste (1937) and Açúcar (1939) pointed out that the main structures of a engenho (here in the sense of a farm) were:

1. big House
2. senzala,
3. engenho
4. chapel
5. In addition to the cane fields

1. Big house

The big house was the home of the plantation owner and his family. The name ‘casa grande’ was no coincidence, as they were real mansions, but they only started to become luxurious towards the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the big houses were not so luxurious, and were even made of mud, washed stone, lime, straw or thatched roofs. Freyre points out that, in the 19th century, we see more expensive and luxurious materials in the construction and decoration of these houses.

Being a senhor de engenho is a title that many aspire to, because it brings with it being served, obeyed and respected by many. And if you are, as you should be, a man of wealth and government, then being the lord of a sugar mill can be as highly esteemed in Brazil as the titles among the noblemen of the kingdom.

Because there are mills in Bahia that give the master four thousand loaves of sugar, and others a little less, with cane forced into the mill, of whose yield the mill gets at least half, as of any other that is freely ground in it; and in some parts, even more than half.’ (ANTONIL, 1711, p. 19).

2. Senzalas

The senzalas were the dwellings where black slaves lived. They were very poor and unhealthy places to live. In many cases, the slaves slept with their feet bound to avoid attempts to escape or fights between them, as slaves were expensive commodities.

The slave quarters were extensive, housing 20, 50 or more slaves, depending on the fortune of the plantation owner to buy labour. In general, the large mills had between 50 and 60 slaves.

There was no division of rooms; men, women and children slept in the same place. In front of the slave quarters stood the so-called tronco or pillory, a place used to chastise or ‘educate’, as it was called in the 16th century, the slaves.

3. Chapel

The chapel was a religious and governmental necessity, because, as Portugal was a Catholic nation, and its population massively Catholic – since the Indians and Africans were converted to Catholicism – it was necessary for Catholic Christians to attend Sunday masses, confess to the priest, have their children baptised, catechised, confirmed, married, take part in liturgical days, etc. As the farms were far from the towns and cities, it was necessary to take the word of God to the faithful; hence the large farms had chapels and chaplains.

The chaplains, as well as being the clerical representatives on these estates, were also responsible for educating the plantation owner’s children.

In the case of boys, when they reached adolescence, they would be sent to another school in the town or city or, if necessary, they would go to Portugal to study at the universities in Lisbon or Coimbra. However, this practice of sending boys to Portugal started to become more common in the 18th century; before that, we have few plantation owners sending their children to Europe, because, for them, what their children had to learn, they would learn there, so that they could manage the farm.

4. Beyond the sugar cane fields

In addition to the sugar cane fields, which were the main plantations of the engenho, there were other small crops, because you can’t live on sugar alone.

On the large estates, and even on the medium and small ones, we find crops or ‘ roçados’, using a Brazilian term for them.

The ‘ roçados ’ mainly cultivated manioc, from which flour was made (manioc eaten raw poses the risk of poisoning, hence the need to make flour to purge the poisonous substance).

Because for a long time there were no wheat plantations in the colony, only the rich could import wheat flour to make bread, cakes, pasta, etc. But even the rich who didn’t like the high prices of wheat flour had to make do with manioc flour. Manioc flour was the staple food of colonial society and was even used to feed slaves and animals.

These swiddens were created to guarantee food for the slaves, because initially there were no swiddens in the mills; therefore, the mill owners depended on buying food in the towns, cities or on other farms. However, with the passage of time, we can already see these plantations on the large estates.

These plantations, which not only grew manioc but also other vegetables such as pulses, beans, rice, corn, potatoes, bananas, oranges, lemons, pineapples, mangoes, jackfruit, potatoes, etc., were tended by slaves or free people.

In addition to the plantation owner, his family and the chaplain, there were other free men and women who did a variety of jobs, from working in the sugar industry, as will be seen below; they worked as foremen, supervising the slaves; they acted as artisans, blacksmiths, boatmen, fishermen, cowboys, shepherds, potters, etc., tended the fields, acted as messengers, informal doctors, etc.

On the farms, there were chicken coops, corrals, pigsties, stables, workshops, potteries, warehouses, and houses for free residents or for slaves who had obtained the right to start a family.

In the trapiche mills, the corrals were larger to house the oxen and cows used to move the mill. In addition, there was a need for pasture to feed the cattle, because in the large sugar cane fields, it was problematic to dedicate land for pasture, as well as having to keep an eye out to make sure the cattle didn’t eat the cane field.

Apart from this, the engenho represented an autonomous economy; for the slaves, cloth was woven right there; the family’s clothes were made in the middle of it; Food consisted of fish caught on rafts or, otherwise, oysters and shellfish caught on the beaches and in the mangrove swamps, game caught in the bush, poultry, goats, pigs for the south, and for the north, sheep, mainly raised at home – hence the ease of accommodating unexpected guests and the colonial hospitality, so characteristic even today of places that are little frequented.

Of dairy cows, there were corrals, few, because they didn’t make cheese or butter; little beef was consumed, due to the difficulty of raising rezes in places unsuitable for their propagation, due to the inconveniences for farming resulting from their propagation, which reduced these cattle to what was strictly necessary for agricultural service.’ (BRANDÃO, 1956, p. 6).

There weremills powered by water and oxen; served by carts or boats; located by the sea or further away, but not too far away, because the difficulties of communications only allowed for arcs of limited radius; there were enough to produce more than ten thousand arôbas of sugar and not enough to produce a third of that sum. Let’s imagine a schematic sugar mill for comparison – from the schematic, the existing mills differed more or less, as is natural.

It had to have large sugar cane fields, abundant and nearby firewood, a large slave population, capable cattle, various apparatus, mills, coils, moulds, purging houses, stills; it had to have trained staff, because the raw material went through various processes before being delivered for consumption; hence a very imperfect division of labour, above all a certain division of production.

The product was sent directly overseas; payment came from overseas in cash or in objects given in exchange, and there weren’t many of them: fine farms, drinks, wheat flour, in short, luxury objects.

By luxury, they were able to buy supplies from less well-off farmers, and this was usual in Pernambuco, so much so that among the grievances of the Pernambucans against the Dutch was that they were forced to plant a certain number of cassava plantations (BRANDÃO, 1956, p. 6).

Before moving on to the next part of this article, it’s important to note that mill owners could give part of their land to tenants, as well as receiving the produce of smaller farmers to be milled in their mills.

Although, as a rule, the owner exploits his land directly (as understood above), there are frequent cases in which he cedes parts of it to farmers who cultivate and produce sugar cane on their own account, but are obliged to mill their production in the owner’s mill.

These are called ‘ fazendas obrigadas’; the farmer receives half of the sugar extracted from his cane, and also pays a certain percentage of the rent for the land he uses, which varies according to the time and place, and ranges from 5 to 20 per cent.

There are also free farmers, who own the land they occupy and mill their sugar cane in the mill they want; they then receive the full share.

Although they are socially below the plantation owners, these farmers are not small producers in the category of peasants. They are slave masters, and their plantations, whether on their own land or leased, form, like the mills, large units.’ (PRADO JR, 1981, p. 23).

As Caio Prado Júnior pointed out, the mill owners co-operated with some farmers who exploited part of their land for them or, if they owned it themselves, provided sugar cane to be milled in their mills.

This was an old practice, since before the middle of the 17th century, the Dutchman Adriaen van der Dussen mentions in his aforementioned report that many of the mills had tenant businesses with these free farmers. In his report, he uses the terms ‘partido da fazenda “ and ”tarefa’.

The first term refers to the lord of the mill, while the second refers to the farmers who supply the mill with sugar cane.

In exchange for giving up their inns to grind other people’s sugar cane, the engenho ‘s lord kept a percentage of these ’tasks”. However, the farmers were responsible for transporting the cane to the mill and fetching the sugar.’

6. Sugar manufacture

1. Mill house
2. Boiler house
3. Purging house
4. Sugar drying process
5. Sugar Purging Recipe
6. Weighing and Boxing Sugar
7. Wage labourers involved in sugar production

The danger was doubled by the fact that the mill worked day and night, as already mentioned. Therefore, tired slaves, due to the arduous day, could fall asleep, hence the need to always keep several people on the premises to avoid such tragedies.

The most dangerous place in the engenho is the mill, because if by misfortune the slave who puts the cane between the shafts, either because of sleep, tiredness or any other carelessness, carelessly puts her hand further forward than she should, she risks being crushed between the shafts, if they don’t immediately cut off the caught hand or arm, having a machete for this purpose near the mill, or if they aren’t so quick to stop the mill, diverting the water that hurts the hubs of the wheel with the pejador, so that they can quickly give the sufferer a remedy in some way.

And this danger is even greater at night, when they grind just as much as during the day, even though they take turns putting in the cane for their teams, especially if those who do it are boorish or used to getting drunk.’ (ANTONIL, 1711, p. 54).

As has been pointed out, the most efficient mills were those powered by water wheels, although they were the most expensive. In the case of trapiche mills, several oxen were used to move the trapiche that turned the mill.

Depending on the mill, eight, ten or twelve oxen could be used at a time for each work cycle; Dussen [1947] and Amaral [1958] point out that sugar cane milling sometimes took all day, going into the night and dawn, as a way of saving time.

There were at least seven or eight female slaves needed for the mill, as follows: three to bring in the cane, one to put it in, one to pass the bagasse, one to fix and light the lamps, of which there are five in the mill, and one to clean the juice trough (which they call the ‘cocheira’ or ‘calumbá’) and the mill’s spigots and refresh them with water so they don’t burn, using the water parol under the wheel to take the water that falls into the spigot, as well as to wash the bundled cane; and another, finally, to dispose of the bagasse, either in the river or in the bagaceira, to be burnt in due course.

And if it’s necessary to put it in a more distant place, not just one slave will suffice, but another will have to help, because otherwise it wouldn’t flow in time and the mill would be hampered’. (ANTONIL, 1711, p. 54-55).

It’s important to emphasise that, depending on the era, the shape of the mills and their size varied. Therefore, we can’t talk about a homogeneous machine, as they were first made by hand, although they followed certain specifications in the proportions.

2. Boiler house

This was probably the most dangerous place to work, due to the risk of getting burnt or starting a fire, although Antonil disagrees with this opinion, as we have already seen.

Gilberto Freyre even said that in this part of the mill, the slaves worked under close observation and could even be chained up, as they might try to sabotage the production, spill the pots or start a fire.

The boiler room or furnace room has been likened to a ‘small volcano’ in Antonil’s words; in any case, it was a very hot and stuffy place. Some scholars prefer to separate the boiler house from the furnace house, as they point out that they were different places, but this depends on which period they are referring to.

This wing of the engenho housed the copper boilers, which were used to boil the broth. Dussen [1947], who wrote in the 17th century, mentions that the mills had 4, 5 or 6 large pots, and 3 to 4 smaller pots.

It was in the large pots that the broth was boiled, and in the smaller pots it was left to cool before proceeding to the next stage. These pans were imported from the Metropolis, as there were no smithies capable of producing such equipment in the colony.

In the boiler house there were several pots, as already mentioned, and we went through them to get to know them, as they were used stage by stage in the boiling of the sugar cane juice:

• Clarifying boiler: in the early mills, the juice was mixed with lime to help filter out impurities before boiling;
• Caldeira de caldo: pot where the juice from the mill house was received;
• Middle boiler: a pot where boiling began and the first and second foams were removed, which contained impurities such as pieces of leaves, stalks, cane bagasse, etc;
• Caldeira de melar (molasses boiler): boiling continued and the third foam was removed and taken to the escuma parol. Garapa was also made here;
• Parol de melar: after being boiled and having the foams removed, the broth was placed here to be strained;
• Parol de coar: receives the broth to be strained. The term seasoning is also used at this stage;
• Receiving pot: after being strained, the broth was stirred, skimmed, boiled and decocted, where water with ashes was added to help filter out the existing impurities;
• Porta pot: after the broth has had its foams removed, been strained and decocted, the broth continues to be boiled;
• Cooking pot: the broth continues to boil and here it reaches its ‘point’. This is the last stage of boiling, as from here the so-called molasses will be put in to start the resting and cooling stage;
• Beating bowl: the molasses is beaten with a whisk to crystallise it, making it more consistent and thick;
• Dividing bowl: After being beaten, the molasses was defogged, a term used to refer to the act of transferring the molasses from the previous rate to this one, where it would be taken to the cooler where it would rest and cool;
• Parol de escuma: the place where the foam from the three foams was deposited to be reused.

I’ve explained the main stages here, but depending on the era, we’ll see new stages and pots used to filter the juice, as the process has undergone new techniques throughout history.

In the boiler house worked some free men called boilermakers, who were responsible for checking the ‘ sugar point’, i.e. the exact boiling temperature.

Antonil [1711] mentions that in this section of the sugar factory most of the workers were men, but there was a slave woman called ‘calcanha’ who was responsible for cleaning the room, lighting the lamps, collecting the second and third foam removed and putting it back in a parol (a type of vessel), as this foam had other uses.

In addition to the pots, parols and kettles, other tools and containers used at this stage were:

• Beater: similar to the skimmer, but without the holes. It was used to beat the molasses after it had finished boiling.
• Caneca: container used to pass the broth from one pot to another.
• Ashtray: a square tank where hot water was mixed with ashes to be used in the decoada, the rate of receiving.
• Spoon: a large spoon with holes in it, used to stir the molasses after boiling.
• Concha: a long-handled iron ladle used for tasting the broth.
• Skimmer: a type of spoon with several holes, used to remove the foam.
• Fôrma: an earthenware vessel in which the molasses was placed to start the purgation process.
• Passadeira: large spoon used to transfer the boiling broth to the next pot.
• Picadeira: iron spear used to remove the remains of molasses that stuck to the pots, parols and boilers.
• Pomba or reminhol: large spoon used to remove the molasses from the last rate. It was also used to add water to the decoction.
• Cooler: a tank in which the molasses rested and cooled before being poured into moulds.

Such equipment and containers were commonly used in sugar production, however, by the 19th century, we have already found other utensils and machines such as centrifuges, filterers, frothers, evaporators, etc., used in this process, reflecting the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century.

After boiling, the juice, initially light green or yellowish in colour, becomes what is known as cane honey, sugarcane honey, boreal honey or molasses. A brownish substance rich in sucrose, carbohydrates, iron, etc.

As well as being used to make sugar, molasses is also used to make cachaça, rapadura, rum, broths, etc.

Clay jars, also known as ‘ fôrma’, ‘ pão-de-açúcar’ and ‘sino-de-mel’, were conical or pyramidal containers with a hole in the top. During the purging stage, the remaining molasses came out through this hole and was deposited in the ‘ jarra de castela’, a basin that collected this molasses to be reused.

‘The sugar moulds are clay pots burnt in the tile kiln, and bear some resemblance to bells, three and a half palms high, and proportionally wide, with a greater circumference at the mouth, and tighter at the end, where they are pierced, to wash, and purge the sugar through this hole’ (ANTONIL, 1711, p. 75).

In the space of 24 hours they make 20 to 30 moulds in an oxen mill , 40, 50 or 60 in a water mill and 40, 50, 60 or 70 and more moulds if the mill is capable of crushing a lot of cane and if it is rich in sugar, which depends, as has already been said, on the time and care taken in cultivation.

The mould holds one arroba of sugar if it is more or less good, if it is inferior, less. The best sugar weighs more and a mould can hold 40 or more pounds, up to 50 or 60’. (DUSSEN, 1947, p. 94).

The value of an arroba at the time Dussen refers to would be worth something like 14.688 kg today, which is approximately 25 pounds. So a clay pot weighing 2 arrobas, or 50 pounds, would be equivalent to almost 30kg of sugar.

3. Purging house

Antonil, writing in the 18th century, tells us that the purgar house (purgar means to remove impurities) was usually separate from the sugar mill, and was sometimes the largest room, as it was there that the sugar was stored to be purged, as will be seen below.

He tells us that in Bahia and Sergipe there were large purging houses made of stone, lime and maçaranduba wood. These houses would be more than 200 square metres in area and would be real sheds with several windows to allow good air circulation and light to enter, which would help the sun’s heat to dry the sugar more quickly.

In this large space there were rows of scaffolding where the sugar loaves were deposited. This account is interesting because, unlike Dussen and Barléu, who refer to Pernambuco, here we have an example from Bahia.

In the purging house there are shelves where the moulds fit and rest. On each shelf there are 10 to 12 moulds, 8 to 10 shelves next to each other, under each of which are the receptacles for the honey.

This is called scaffolding. Thus, each scaffold holds around 100 moulds and in a purging house there are 20, 25 and 30 scaffolds, allowing 2,000 to 3,000 moulds to be stored.’ (DUSSEN, 1947, p. 94).

As mentioned earlier, depending on the size of the mill and the motive power used to move the mill, sugar production varied. The example given by Dussen comes from a mill in Pernambuco that he visited in the 1630s, when the Dutch controlled the region.

These clay moulds had a conical or pyramidal shape to make it easier for the remaining molasses inside the container to escape, as this molasses gives the sugar a dark colour, something that is known as raw sugar, more commonly called brown sugar.

Brown sugar has a colour between caramel, light brown and dark yellow, and has a different taste to white sugar.

Inside the moulds, Dussen says that the sugar was left to rest for six to eight days, being beaten with a small hammer in order to compress it more and more, with the aim of squeezing out the rest of the molasses so that it came out through the hole at the bottom. Antonil [1711] mentions a period of 3 to 15 days to wait for the sugar to purge.

Antonil also says that sugar that hardened but did not become brittle was called ‘closed face’, while sugar that became brittle was called ‘broken face’. Therefore, more attention should be paid to jars of brittle sugar, as this meant that they hadn’t dried properly.

‘The hole in these moulds, covered at first, keeps the sugar curdled and moist; when it is opened, it lets the honey pass through to purge the sugar. Then the face of the mould is covered with clay, because it is believed that by repeating this operation several times, the impurities are expelled more completely and the sugar whitens more.’ (BARLÉU, 1940, p. 95).

In addition to this mechanical technique of compressing the sugar, a thin layer of clay was poured on, which slowly mixed with the sugar and, in turn, the clay absorbed the molasses. This stage was carried out on the purging counter and in the trough, where the tendal was located, the space used to lay the moulds.

‘In front of the door of the Purging House there is a porch on six pillars, eighty-two palms long and twenty-four wide, under which is the Mashing Counter; and on the other side there is the Trough for kneading the clay, which is put into the moulds to purge the sugar; and further on there is the Drying Counter, eighty palms long and fifty-six wide, supported by twenty-five brick pillars.’ (ANTONIL, 1711, p. 78).

Antonil tells us that four women worked in the purging house, responsible for preparing the clay moulds for the sugar, as well as washing them.

The four purging slaves first dig the already dry sugar with iron diggers in the middle of the mould’s face (which is the upper part), and then they equalise and trim it very well with mallets; then they put the first clay on it, taking it with a reminhol from the pots, which came full of it from their trough, being already kneaded in their account, and with the palm of their hand they spread it over the entire face of the mould, two fingers high.

On the second or third day, they put half a reminhol or a gourd and a half of water on the top of the same clay, and so that it doesn’t fall into the clay and make holes in the sugar, they take the water in their left hand, which is close to the clay, and put it on the whole surface with their right hand, and then with the palm of their right hand they lightly stir the clay, so that their fingers don’t touch the face of the sugar’. (ANTONIL, 1711, p. 83-84).

Dussen mentions that, depending on the case, two to three layers of clay were applied to make the sugar purer and whiter.

‘Once the sugar has been freed from its honey, it is brought out of the purifying house, removed from the moulds and dried in the sun on stretched out cloths, then the sugar that is still mixed with the honey is removed. This is what the Portuguese call ‘mascavar’, meaning that they remove the grey mask from the sugar, which is why they also call the greyish sugar ‘mascavado’.’ (DUSSEN, 1947, p. 95).

At the chewing counter there are two of the most experienced black women, whom they call the mothers of the counter, and with others they chew it and separate the inferior from the best, some black men who carry the moulds and take the sugar loaves out of them, and the kneader of the purging clay, who is also another black man.’ (ANTONIL, 1711, p. 79).

At the foot of the counter, which they call ‘ mascavar’, the moulds are placed on a leather, which means that they are shaken slowly with their mouths turned towards the leather, so that the loaves come out well. Then, when they are placed successively by a black man on an awning, which is stretched over this counter, by the hand of a black woman (whom they call the mother of the counter), all the badly puréed brown sugar that they have on the underside is removed with a machete, and this is called ‘ mascavar’, and this sugar is then called ‘ mascavado’.

In the meantime, another of her companions, who is one of the most practical, removes the wettest part of the mascavado with a small axe, which they call pé da forma or cabucho, and this is returned to the purging house in other moulds, until it has finished drying; and then other black women break up the clumps of mascavado on an awning, which will also go to the drying counter, with toletes.’ (ANTONIL, 1711, p. 87).

The sugar loaves were unmoulded on the aventador, a wooden shelf located on the moulding counter. As described by Antonil, the brown sugar was scraped and separated from the white sugar, the latter being sent to a final drying stage. The white sugar was taken to the area called the drying counter, where it would spend a few hours exposed to the sun.

According to Antonil’s description, some of the tools used at this stage were:

• Digger: Made of iron, used to dig up the sugar in order to place the clay.
• Knife: Used to scrape the brown sugar after the purging stage.
• Iron awl: Used to pierce the end of the sugar loaf, allowing the molasses to drain out during the purging phase inside the jars.
• Mallet: A kind of hammer used to punch and compress the sugar inside the jars.
• Hatchet: Used to scrape the brown sugar.
• Piece of leather: A piece of leather (usually cow leather) used to press the sugar into the jars.
• Squeegee: Used to stir the sugar when it is placed to dry on the awnings.
• Tolete: A kind of hammer used to break the sugar loaves. Due to its conical shape, it helps to divide the loaf into parts called ‘faces’, starting from the top to the tip.

Each ‘face’ of the sugar loaf had a different quality:

• Tapered Tip: Considered to be of lower quality, with more impurities and less pure sugar.
• Upper Faces: These were generally of higher quality, with greater purity and less molasses, and were more highly valued on the market.

Etapas de se desenformar o açúcar após este ter sido purgado.

At the foot of the counter, which they call ‘ mascavar’, the moulds are placed on a leather, which means that they are shaken slowly with their mouths turned towards the leather, so that the loaves come out well. Then, when they are placed successively by a black man on an awning, which is stretched over this counter, by the hand of a black woman (whom they call the mother of the counter), all the badly puréed brown sugar that they have on the underside is removed with a machete, and this is called ‘ mascavar’, and this sugar is then called ‘ mascavado’.

In the meantime, another of her companions, who is one of the most practical, removes the wettest part of the mascavado with a small axe, which they call pé da forma or cabucho, and this is returned to the purging house in other moulds, until it has finished drying; and then other black women break up the clumps of mascavado on an awning, which will also go to the drying counter, with toletes.’ (ANTONIL, 1711, p. 87).

The sugar loaves were unmoulded on the aventador, a wooden shelf located on the moulding counter. As described by Antonil, the brown sugar was scraped and separated from the white sugar, the latter being sent to a final drying stage. The white sugar was taken to the area called the drying counter, where it would spend a few hours exposed to the sun.

According to Antonil’s description, some of the tools used at this stage were:

• Digger: Made of iron, used to dig up the sugar in order to place the clay.
• Knife: Used to scrape the brown sugar after the purging stage.
• Iron awl: Used to pierce the end of the sugar loaf, allowing the molasses to drain out during the purging phase inside the jars.
• Mallet: A kind of hammer used to punch and compress the sugar inside the jars.
• Hatchet: Used to scrape the brown sugar.
• Piece of leather: A piece of leather (usually cow leather) used to press the sugar into the jars.
• Squeegee: Used to stir the sugar when it is placed to dry on the awnings.
• Tolete: A kind of hammer used to break the sugar loaves. Due to its conical shape, it helps to divide the loaf into parts called ‘faces’, starting from the top to the tip.

Each ‘face’ of the sugar loaf had a different quality:

• Tapered Tip: Considered to be of lower quality, with more impurities and less pure sugar.
• Upper Faces: These were generally of higher quality, with greater purity and less molasses, and were more highly valued on the market.

4. Sugar drying process

At the drying counter, the same two mothers from the counter, accompanied by up to ten companions, took care of rolling out the awnings and breaking the large chips and clumps of sugar into smaller pieces. The sugar, removed from the moulds, was placed on pilheiras (wooden platforms) to dry. Some of the sugar was dried on the piles, while some was spread directly on the awnings and exposed to the sunlight. This practice was also common when drying coffee and cocoa.

The slaves scattered the sugar on the awnings and used squeegees to turn it over, ensuring even drying. Each farmer was responsible for taking his awnings and slaves to dry his share of the produce. The sugar mill owner would often meet with tenants or farmers to supervise the sugar drying in the sun. The awnings were organised in rows to indicate the production of the ‘farm party “ and the ”tasks’.

5. Recipe for Purging Sugar

Barléu describes an alternative technique for purging sugar and making it whiter, using additional agents during the boiling process:

‘Thus, a lye of quicklime and egg whites is poured into the most impure sugar, and, stirring without stopping, the juice is darkened, cleansing it of impurities. When it boils and threatens to spill over, this is prevented by pouring in a little butter.

They then strain it through a coarse cloth or burlap, as soon as all the lye has been absorbed, to catch any faeces that may remain, and let it boil again until the lye is used up. Then they turn it over, as if reborn, in the moulds and cover the faces of the moulds with purer clay. When the clay dries to a crust, another clay is added a few more times, for the same purpose as before, and a thicker and more impure honey flows out again.’ (BARLÉU, 1940, p. 74-75).

6. Weighing and Boxing the Sugar

After this stage, while it was still drying, parts of the sugar were put on a scale to be weighed so that the sugar mill owner, the farmer and the cashier could quantify the parts. Antonil [1711] tells us about some of the instruments used in this phase of weighing and storing sugar in boxes:

In Weighing, scales, weights of two arrobas, and other smaller ones, such as tare weights; shovels, and panacûs. In the Caixaria, pestles, squeegees, baking bread, which some call moleque de assentar, and others judge, hoes, augers, hammers and nails.

A goat’s foot to remove nails from the boxes, and the gastalho that is used to put together the split or open boards, by putting two wedges between the sides of the board, and the teeth, gourds of the gastalho that hugs the top, and goes down the sides, and the iron marks, with which the quality of the sugar is marked, and the number of arrobas, and the officer of the Engenho is declared.’ (p. 80).

After being weighed, the sugar was loaded into the boxes with shovels, which were lined with clay and banana leaves were placed on top. If there were farmers involved in the process, they took their carts and slaves to collect their sugar after it had been weighed by the cashier. As well as white sugar being weighed and divided, brown sugar also went through this process. And in the midst of this division, there was also a third part, the Church tithe, where a specific official called the tithe contractor would collect the 10 per cent of production from both the ‘farm party’ and the ‘tasks’.

Antonil [1711] draws attention to the fact that when the sugar was being deposited in the boxes, something that was called ‘box face’, that is, the sugar ready to be sold, the sugar was not beaten to compact it in the boxes, as this could be used as a decoy, where sugar of inferior quality could be placed in the bottom of the box and covered with good sugar, however, the gross weight of the ‘box face’ would be bad sugar.

After the boxes had been filled, a stick, called a “pau de assentar “ or ”moleque de assentar ’ as Antonil has already mentioned, was used to pound the sugar so that it would fit properly inside the box and the lid could be nailed on. All the lids were closed with nails.

After the boxes were closed, they were labelled with the type of sugar, because as we’ve heard, in addition to white and brown sugar, there were other variations, called “caras ’ (I’ll come back to this later). Antonil left us some details about this:

• Male white sugar – a B was marked on the box.
• White beaten sugar – two BBs were marked on the box.
• Brown sugar male – one M was marked on the box.
• Beaten brown sugar – one MB was marked on the box.

In addition to these marks to identify the type of sugar, there were three other marks that were engraved with a hot iron or in ink.

• Arrobas mark: engraved on the lid with a hot iron, it identified the weight of the box.
• Marca do engenho (mill mark): this was hot-ironed and placed in the bottom right-hand corner of the lid. It designated the mill where the sugar was manufactured. In the case of a religious or mercantile organisation, the seal or initials of that order or organisation were used.
• Mark of the master or merchant: it could be hot-ironed or painted. It was marked in the centre of the lid if it was hot-ironed, and on the side of the box if it was inked, where the name of the owner or buyer was written.

Once all the boxes had been marked, they were taken to the harbour. The royal mills had rivers available to transport the crates by barge, but in general ox carts were used to transport these crates, which weighed up to six arrobas, or 150 pounds, or 90 kilos.

However, Amaral [1958] reports that throughout colonial history there were variations in the weight of the sugar boxes, with boxes weighing from six to fifty arrobas. Mello [2012] says that in the first half of the 17th century, the average weight of sugar boxes was between 30 and 35 arrobas (equivalent to 450 to 525 kilograms).

7. Wage labourers involved in sugar production

Although slaves carried out various activities, there were certain trades that were carried out by free people. Some of these have already been mentioned, but I will now focus on those specifically linked to sugar production:

• Feitor-mor: was responsible for managing the sugar mill. He was responsible for overseeing all activities at the mill, from cutting the cane to loading the sugar. He checked the stocks, ensured that all the slaves were doing their jobs properly and, if necessary, reassigned them to other activities. If a slave fell ill, the overseer would send him for treatment and put another one in his place. He also had to report everything that was happening in the plantation to the master. The other overseers were subordinate to him. Antonil (1711) mentioned that the feitor-mor had a salary of sixty thousand réis a year, but it is important to remember that this figure refers to the beginning of the 18th century and may not reflect the same amount over time.
• Mill foreman: was responsible for overseeing the harvest, the transport of the cane and its milling. While the cane was being crushed, he had to ensure that the slaves didn’t get hurt in the process and control the process to prevent there being too much juice, which could spoil while it was waiting to boil. Antonil (1711) indicated that the mill foreman’s salary ranged from forty to fifty thousand réis a year, again, a figure from the early 18th century.
• Feitor or foreman: responsible for watching over and punishing the slaves, protecting the estate and the sugar cane fields, and keeping control of the slaves, preventing fights, runaways or idleness.
• Sugar master: tasked with checking the quality of the soil and the location for plantingsugar cane, he had to be able to distinguish where the best and worst quality cane was growing. In the boiler house, he was responsible for keeping all the employees working properly and controlling the quality of the product, as the juice sometimes needed to be boiled longer or strained again. In the purging house, he also assessed the work of the slaves and employees in this sector. In large sugar mills, Antonil (1711) mentioned that the sugar master’s salary was around 130,000 réis a year, but could vary around 100,000 réis.
• Banqueiro or soto-mestre: the sugar master’s assistant, the banqueiro replaced the master in his absence and kept control of sugar production in the boiler house. He was assisted by the ajuda-banqueiro or soto-banqueiro. The banker’s salary varied between 30 and 40 thousand réis a year.
• Ajuda-banqueiro or soto-banqueiro: the banker’s assistant, he had a great deal of responsibility in the manufacturing process and had to be vigilant at all times to avoid delays, loss of raw materials and accidents. Antonil noted that these positions were not necessarily held by free people; they could be held by slaves or mestizos, who, even with a white parent, sometimes did not receive a salary, but rather a reward. They were also responsible for supervising the despatch of sugar loaves to the purging house.
• Boilermaker and potter: they worked in the boilers and pots, controlling the boiling temperature and the process of purifying the juice. They were responsible for checking the ‘point’, the exact temperature at which the broth should be boiling.
• Purger: worked on purifying the sugar in the purging house, checking the purging process and the quality of the clay used. He helped organise the loaves on the scaffolding and ensured the cleanliness of the room, ordering the collection of molasses in the jars for storage or reuse. According to Antonil, the purgador’s salary varied according to the amount of production; for example, if he produced 4,000 loaves in one batch, he would receive 50,000 réis annually, but smaller amounts would be proportional to production.
• Caixeiro de engenho(sugarmill clerk): responsible for weighing the sugar before it was boxed and marked, he separated and accounted for the production of the sugar mill owner and the farmers, passing on the tithe to the Church. He also supervised the loading of the sugar into the crates and helped with the transport to the port, checking that the product had been shipped. The coffin maker’s salary ranged from 30 to 50 thousand réis a year, depending on the size and production of the sugar mill.
• City clerk: differed from the mill clerk in that he acted more as an accountant, contractor, attorney and custodian, taking care of the mill’s finances, negotiations, contracting ships and buyers. He received an annual salary of around 40 to 50 thousand réis.

7. Kinds of sugar

It has already been mentioned that there were different types of sugar, because when the ‘faces’ of the sugar loaf were divided, each ‘face’ had a different quality. Brown sugar also had its own types.

There are different nomenclatures for this type of sugar; however, here I will describe the terms used by the Portuguese, because the Spanish, Italians, Dutch, French, English, etc., use other terminology.

1. White sugar

Although it is similar to the sugar we normally use today, in the Modern Age there were some differences. Antonil [1711] said that white sugar was classified according to its quality:

• Fine: it was the whitest, closed and heaviest, coming from the first ‘face ’ of the sugar loaf. It was considered the best quality.
• Round: it was lessround and heavier, usually coming from the second ‘face’, and was also considered second quality.
• Low: it was brownish in colour and came from the third ‘face’. Despite its colour, it was still considered to be of relatively low quality.
• Whipped white: this was made from the molasses drained during the purging phase, where it was boiled again and whipped. Antonil says that it sometimes became white and very full-bodied, which is why it was called ‘whipped white’.

White sugars of the fine, round and low type were called macho sugar, because they were well purged, pure and of excellent quality.

2. Brown sugar

This was also called brown sugar, pés and cabucho. It was considered to be of lower quality than white sugar. Brown sugar, as we have seen, is brownish in colour, has a greater amount of honey and is neither well puréed nor refined. It was used to prepare food and even to make rapadura, garapa, cachaça, rum, etc.

• Macho: made from the leftovers of macho sugar. When the sugar was removed from the mould, it had its crust scraped off, which separated it from the white sugar, and this crust was brown sugar.
• Beaten: resulting from the leftovers of beaten white sugar.
• Honey: brown sugar made from purgehoney. It was also used to make beaten brown sugar or to make garapa and cachaça.
• Remel: the result of purging honey from beaten white sugar. If it was beaten, it could become beaten brown sugar, and was also used to make garapa and cachaça.

3. Scum sugar

This was made from the foams resulting from the boiling phase of the broth. It had a dark colour and was used to make garapa, as well as being fed to slaves and animals.

• Neta: made from the first foam.
• Rescuma: made with the second foam.
• Nata: made from the third foam. It was beaten and crystallised.

4. Sugar by region

Gaspar Barléu, writing in the 17th century, pointed out that depending on where the sugar came from, it was given certain names. Here we have another type of nomenclature:

• Madeira: from the island of Madeira.
• Canary Islands: from the Canary Islands, an archipelago owned by the Spanish.
• Meli: from a small island off the west coast of India under Portuguese control.
• São Tomé: from the island of São Tomé, a Portuguese possession in Africa. Barléu tells us that this sugar was of inferior quality and was used to make syrups, preserves, medicines, etc.
• Antilles: from the Antilles in the Caribbean Sea. In this case, it was produced by the Spanish, Dutch or French, depending on which island it came from.
• Azores: from the Azores.
• Cape Verde: from Cape Verde.

There were other places, but I’ll mention the most important ones. However, you won’t find the nomenclature Brazilian sugar or Brazil in the books I used for this text.

5. Other types of sugar

• Mixed Sugar: this was formed from the mixture of different sugars that were transported in boxes in an inappropriate way.
• Pan sugar: the syrup that ran off during the boiling process was collected in pans and not purged. It was of poor quality and dark in colour. It got its name because it was sold in pots.
• Candi or Cande sugar: refined, crystallised white sugar used to sweeten drinks, food and prepare medicines.

Here I have presented some types of sugar and their nomenclature used between the 15th and 18th centuries. In the 19th and 20th centuries, we see new nomenclatures, but as the focus here is on sugar production in Brazil’s colonial period, I’ll stick to these examples.

8. Definition of Sugarcane Juice, Garapa, Rapadura and Cachaça

1. Sugarcane juice

• Definition: Sugarcane juice is the raw material used to produce sugar and other derivatives and can be consumed straight.
• Consumption: Traditionally, the juice is extracted by cutting the cane and can be easily found in cafeterias in Brazil and other Latin American and Asian countries. It is rich in sucrose and has a nutritional profile that includes vitamins and minerals.

2. Garapa

• Definition: A regional term that, in some parts of Brazil, refers to sugar cane juice, but historically referred to a sweet, low-quality drink made from the foams of the sugar-making process.
• Historical use: Consumed by slaves and low-income populations, garapa was mixed with water and sometimes cashew leaves, making it an energising drink, often used at parties.

3. Rapadura

• Definition: A sweet made from sugar cane molasses, with a flavour similar to brown sugar and rich in minerals such as iron and calcium.
• Origin: It is believed that rapadura was invented in the 16th century and became popular, especially in the north-east of Brazil, as an energising and long-lasting food.
• Varieties: Today, there are many versions of rapadura, including different flavours such as milk and chocolate, increasing its acceptance and consumption.

4. Cachaça

• Definition: Cachaça is a spirit made from the fermentation of sugar cane juice and is considered to be Brazil’s national drink.
• Origin of the name: The term ‘cachaça’ can be derived from ‘cachaço’, referring to a low quality drink, or from ‘cachaza’, a low quality wine consumed in the Iberian Peninsula.
• Production: Initially made from foams and molasses, the quality of cachaça improved with the introduction of distillation techniques in the 16th century, leading to its popularisation among all social classes.
• Historical impact: Cachaça began to be used as currency, especially in the slave trade between the Portuguese and some African populations.

Final considerations

Sugarcane juice and its derivatives not only play an important role in the Brazilian economy, but are also an integral part of the country’s food and social culture.

Products such as garapa and rapadura represent a link between agricultural production and everyday life, while cachaça stands out as a symbol of national identity and a reference in beverage culture.

Understanding these products provides a broader view of the cultural and historical practices surrounding sugar cane in Brazil.

9. Origin of Rum

Rum originated in the Caribbean islands around the 16th century. The exact location is still a matter of debate, with some suggestions including Barbados, Cuba, Jamaica, among others. Initially, rum was discarded or fed to animals or slaves. Once its potential as an alcoholic drink was discovered, investment in its development began.

The oldest words to refer to this drink come from the English and French languages. From English, there was the expression ‘kill-devil’, because at the time rum was presented by some as a kind of medicine, supposedly capable of purging evil spirits.

This is an interesting fact, because if the reader remembers that sugar itself was once used as a medicine, this aspect is not at all strange. The French called it ‘rumbullion’. Other terms were guildive and tafia. The word ‘rum’ started to become more common after the middle of the 17th century, when the drink had become popularised. The first official mention dates back to a Jamaican document from 1661, issued by the then governor of the island.

Like cachaça, rum came to be used as a barter currency, being used to trade slaves in Africa, and even to trade with the Amerindians, exchanging rum for food, animal skins, wood, etc.

Rum became not only an appreciated drink and supposedly a medicine, but also a valuable currency throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries, to the point where it was smuggled. Pirates became famous for smuggling it, hence the association of pirates with this drink.

Rum was originally made from the fermentation of sugar cane juice, which, after being fermented, was distilled, giving it its high alcohol content and transparent colour. Later, a technique was developed to produce rum from molasses. Pure rum is transparent or slightly yellowish or whitish in colour.

The more yellow, caramel and brown colours come from the ageing of the drink or the addition of colourings. Today there are several types of rum, and it is used as a base to produce some types of drinks and there is even rum syrup, used to make cakes and sweets.

Important notes

1. Drinks made with sugar cane juice or molasses did not appear in the Modern Age, as there are reports of some types of drinks made in India and China, where sugar cane was the base.
2. In Brazil, cachaça is the base ingredient for the famous drink called ‘caipirinha’.
3. Gaspar Barléus briefly mentions in his book that the Romans learnt about sugar cane during their trips to the Middle East, and already mentioned the medicinal use of this substance, although they were not interested in cultivating it.
4. At the beginning of the 18th century, cachaça and rum were banned in some countries and colonies because they were outstripping the metropolises’ wine production. However, due to smuggling, the ban was lifted.
5. Another element that can be produced from sugar cane is ethyl alcohol or ethanol, used mainly in the car industry as a fuel.
6. In Brazil, sugar mills lasted until the beginning of the 20th century, when they began to be replaced by mills. However, modern mills can still be found producing sugar, cachaça and rapadura.
7. In 1660, the Cachaça Revolt took place in Brazil, in which mill owners protested against the abusive increase in taxes on the drink.

10. National Sugar and Alcohol Museum

A significant part of the history of sugar cane processing, until today one of the pillars of Brazilian agribusiness, can be seen and learnt about in Pontal, in the Ribeirão Preto region.

The first stage of the National Sugar and Alcohol Museum, run by the Biagi family’s Engenho Central Institute, has been open to the public since December and is already attracting visitors.

The collection is displayed in the Engenho Central, built in 1906, a year before the municipality was emancipated.

The museum ‘s collection includes machinery produced in Europe between 1876 and 1888, such as seeding machines, supply pumps, barrels for processing and purifying sugar, containers for transporting brandy, stamps for identifying sugar sacks and the clock that stood in the mill’s tower.

The Engenho Central belonged to farmer Francisco Schmidt, the King of Coffee, who produced sugar for export to the German company Theodor Wille, based in Hamburg. Before belonging to the mill, the machines belonged to another farmer, Henrique Dumont, father of the aviator Santos Dumont.

The Biagi family bought the farm in the 1960s and the mill continued to produce until 1974.

When Maurílio Biagi died, his son, Luiz Biagi, decided to keep the mill and create the Institute to give shape to the museum.

The installation was supported by cultural incentive laws.

The museum is open from Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 4pm and admission is free.

Bahia, Salvador and the Northeast Tourism and Travel Guide

History of the emergence of the sugar mill in colonial Brazil – The Origin of Sugarcane and the History of Sugar Mills in Colonial Brazil