The Evolution of the Sugar-Cane Mill

In a Paper read before the Newcomen Society, in London, on Wednesday, October 9, 1940. Mr. Noel Deer, F.C.G.I., and Alexander Brooks. A.M.I.Mech.E., showed that the habitat of the sugar cane was in the South Pacific whence at some remote period it traveled, by way of the bridge of islands linking south-eastern Asia to Australia, to Indo-China and to India. The first denite mention of sugar is that of Nearchus, a general of Alexander the Great, who in 325 B.C. in western India met with "honey not made by bees." From India the cane traveled to Persia, arriving there in the Euphrates-Tigris delta about 500 A.D., whence, in the Seventh Century, Arab expansion carried it throughout the littoral and islands of the Mediterranean. What sugar reached western Europe came from this area till 1425, when Dom Henry the Navigator caused the cane to be taken to Madeira. This was soon followed by extensions to the Canaries, the Cape Verde Islands, and to the equatorial island of Sao Thome, in all of which, especially the last named, a lucrative industry developed. To the New World the cane was taken by Columbus in his second voyage, but it was not till 1516 that the industry became established there, when Miguel Balestro and the brothers Christoval and Francisco Tapia built near the Rio Nizao, in Hispaniola, the first "ingenio".