Many types of speculation have long been rife as to the conditions of slavery in T&T. Relatively little documentation exists on this matter and it is left to historians to piece together scraps of evidence to arrive at the truth. With the decimation of the native Amerindian population from European diseases, a small group of hapless Guinea natives were imported into Trinidad in 1701 to provide forced labour for the small cocoa plantations which then comprised the entire economy. In 1783 a wily Frenchman named Philippe Roume de St Laurent, with the support of the Spanish crown, introduced a Cedula of Population which offered lands to Catholic settlers in proportion to the number of slaves they owned, with the allocation halved for coloured proprietors. As a result thousands of slaves from the French Antilles came to the island. In 1786 Picot de Lapeyrouse planted the first sugar cane crop in the area of the cemetery which still bears his name, and the sugar plantocracy was born.
In Tobago, a long period of conflict between the European metropoles that lasted from the 1630s to 1762 culminated in the first permanent British settlement at Georgetown, which is present-day Studley Park. Eight years later, from the shadow of Fort Granby, Godney Clarke shipped the first load of sugar from the island which had been cultivated by slave labour. Although living memory associated work in the sugar cane fields as characteristically “Indian,” it must not be forgotten that for almost a century prior to the introduction of indentured labour, slaves watered the cane with blood, sweat and tears. The early 19th century saw a rapid expansion of the sugar industry in Trinidad, whilst that of Tobago was already well-developed with almost all the arable lands on the island being under waving fields of cane. The lack of cultivation in Trinidad meant that the new sugar lands were almost all clothed in dense forest that had to be cleared.
Some areas, like the Caroni Plain, were mosquito-and caiman-infested swamps which had to be drained. This river was used as a highway to the sea and the Guiseppi family of Valsayn set their slaves to carve a channel through a sandbar which obscured the mouth. Once the brute toil of clearing the forests was done, the work of planting began. Fields were dug by hand and laid out in rows and furrows. Holes were delved at intervals and slips of cane planted in them. Though sugar cane can be allowed to ratoon (grow from established rootstock) for several years after propagation, a profitable estate would see a total repeat of the hole-ing or replanting every three years to avoid loss of sucrose content. The growing canes had to be weeded and manured with animal waste. It was at the beginning of the dry season, however, that the truly arduous labour began.
Fields were fired to clear them of trash and cut. Very few estates had a steam engine mill before 1840 and thus canes were fed by hand into windmills, watermills or animal-mills where mules or cattle were tethered to a turntable of two huge stone crushers. This was dangerous work and pulverised limbs were common. The extracted cane juice had to be boiled. In those days sugar was the muscovado type—sort of like a wet lump—and crystals would not be seen until the vacuum pan system was introduced in the 1860s. Slaves would be compelled to work in boiling houses, over large copper basins (many of which still survive as garden ornaments) that were mounted in brick stoves over roaring fires. The boiled juice had to be ladled by hand in a series of stages until clarified and reduced enough to be packed in hogshead barrels to cool. Scalding was common and work at the boiling house was on a 24-hour basis until all the sugar cane had been cleared and milled.
After the crop had been processed, a crop-over festival was held, although this innocent pleasure was often subject to the will of the planter. In Tobago, the massa would be expected to give a young bull for the feast as well as some of the rum distilled on the plantation, whilst the slaves brought in ground provisions. Although this tradition died out in Trinidad with the coming of Indian indentured labour (and the post-emancipation move of Afro-Trinidadians away from the canefields), it remained part of Tobago life until the middle of the 19th century.