A Rich Man's Fortune or Folly
Part 4 in a series
Excerpts from "Divers Information on The Romantic History of St. Croix" by Florence Levisohn, 1963, St. Croix Landmarks Society.
The actual physical requirements for running a sugar plantation were somewhat staggering. In St. Croix, the initial investment was low in comparison to the other islands in which sugar was well established. The Danes wanted quick colonization and quick returns for their West India and Guinea Company and surveyed the island in 1735.
The island was divided into rectangles of 150 Danish acres each, known as Matriculens. The price was $500 for one of these plantations good enough for sugar cane. There was also a seven year tax exemption for newcomers who took up the "patents" on new plantations.
There were newcomers at these bargain prices, and no wonder that most of them were nearby British islands where land prices were high. Bryan Edwards, who was a British planter in Jamaica and one of the best known early economic historians of the Caribbean says that it required no less investment than 30,000 pounds sterling minimum just to get a 900 acre plantation set up. (This amount equaled some $120,000 in U. S. dollars at the 1800 exchange rate).
In St. Croix, the planters used about three-fourths of their land for sugar growing and the factory area. The other one-fourth was for houses, pasture and timber. There are no figures on the cost of a Greathouse which depended upon the plain or lavish taste of the owner. In any case, they were built with slave labor, as was the estate village where the workers lived.
In St. Croix, the 300 acres bought for 1,000 Danish rigsdalers in 1734, sold some 15 years later for about 3,400 West Indian rigsdalers v.c. (Special rigsdalers issued in Denmark for island currency. The v.c. meant value current, which fluctuated). It cost nearly 17,000 rigsdalers v.c. to set up a plantation in the earliest years, but later this price must have doubled. Many things contributed to the rise, including the higher land prices and the need for more slaves to work an established plantation. To set up a 900 acre sugar plantation on a British island, Bryan Edwards warned, "the man that engages in the business of sugar planting must engage deeply. There is no medium and very seldom the possibility of retreat."
When the hard work was done, the plantation a going business, and the planter ready to loll at his ease at sundown with a planter's punch resting on the arm of one of those old planters' chairs, this is what he could expect, according to historian Edwards:
"The produce of such a plantation is approximately 200 hogsheads of sugar of 16wt, at 3,000 pounds sterling; 130 puncheons of rum at 1,300 pounds sterling which makes a gross return of pounds sterling 4,300.
"But the reader is not to imagine that all this, even the sugar alone, is clear profit. The annual disbursements are first to be deducted, with the charges within the island and the annual supplies amounting to some 2,150 pounds sterling, leaving no more clear profit to the planter than seven per cent. And this is without charging, however, a shilling for making good the decrease of the negroes, or for the wear and tear of the buildings, or making allowance for dead capital.
"In short, with these and other drawbacks, to say nothing of the devastations which are sometimes occasioned by fires and hurricanes, it is not wonderful that the profits should frequently dwindle to nothing, or rather that a sugar estate, with all its boasted advantages, should sometimes prove a millstone about the neck of its unfortunate proprietor, which is dragging him to destruction."
Just how hard the planter worked for his seven percent gross return will be seen in the process he had to go through to make the sugar and the rum.
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