ABSTRACT
Sugar cane wants warmth and moisture. From the Canary Islands, Madeira and the Azores, sugar cane travelled with Columbus rst to Hispaniola, where it was planted and grew with awesome rapidity and yield, and then on various Portuguese explorer vessels to other islands of the Caribbean and to the coasts of South America. e remarkable burgeoning of sugar cane initiated a growing demand for human labour, since its cultivation requires intensive toil and fast milling a er harvest; it needs to be boiled quickly before the sugar content can diminish.3 Neither the European discoverers and their audacious entourages nor the indigenous populations of the Caribbean islands could provide an adequate number of sturdy hands, and thus, slave labour was instituted in the Caribbean through large-scale imports of people from Africa. Pioneers were the Portuguese, soon to be copied by many seafaring and colonizing nations.4 And although many British abolitionists protested against this development the best way they imagined they could, namely by refusing to add sugar to their tea, an inhumane system of organized exploitation and eradication was established.5
