The pilot comes aboard our sugar ship at five o'clock in the morning. He steers the ship, and three hours later it is tied up beside a big sugar factory (refinery) in Brooklyn. The hatches are opened, and a hundred men swarm over the ship, moving sacks of sugar into the big tall building. Brown sugar, coarse-ground but sweet, goes into the refinery. It comes out as white sugar, granulated, powdered, or in lumps. At the back of the refinery, freight cars are loaded with barrels and sacks of sugar for shipment to many towns in New England and the Middle Atlantic States. On the water side of the refinery, a barge is loaded with sacks of refined sugar. To what cities might it go? 252. The sugar every body likes sugar. We grow a lot of it in the United States (Secs. 127 and 172), but we also import so much of it that we spend more for our imported sugar than for any other of our imports. There is a great trade in sugar, for many countries grow it, and many countries import it. (Fig. 259.) It used to be very scarce and costly, but new inventions,—steam mills, steamboats, and trains,—have made it so cheap that schoolboys have more of it now than kings did when Columbus crossed the ocean. Before the World War it cost only two cents per pound to grow sugar in Cuba.
The greatest sugar exporter in the world is the island of Cuba. That island is ten times as big as Porto Rico, and has level plains and rich soil. Cuba is independent, with a president of its own. Many Amer ican sugar companies have large planta tions there, with big mills and many Span ish and Negro workers. After the sugar harvest, a whole fleet of steamers sails away with sugar for New Orleans, Balti more, Philadelphia, New York, and Bos ton, and some even for Europe.
Another sugar-growing region is far away from Cuba and the United States. Out in the Pacific Ocean there are two groups of islands, Hawaii and the Philippines, which belong to the United States. Both send unrefined sugar to San Francisco where it is refined. The Hawaiian Islands offer one of the finest places in the world to grow sugar cane, because the soil is so very rich. How does this happen? Because these islands were made by volcanoes.
253. The volcanic volcano is a place where melted rock, called lava, rises through a break in the earth's crust and runs out on the ground, as water would from a leaking pipe under the ground. The hot lava soon cools, and piles up around the hole from which it flows, finally making a mountain. (See Fig. 266.) The Hawaiian Islands were built up from the bottom of the sea by the lava from the volcanoes now to be seen on these islands. The largest of these volcanoes, Mauna Loa, has an opening or crater big enough to hold a city.
Melted, white hot lava boils and splashes around in the crater. At night it lights up the sky brilliantly. Every few years it overflows, and the stream of lava runs slowly down the mountainside, cover ing fields, burning forests, and sometimes even running into the sea, where it makes a terrible boiling and makes the island larger after it has cooled.
After many years, the lava decays, and forms the richest of soil, on which splendid crops of cane are grown. Many American
companies have sugar plantations on this lava soil, and hire Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese people to work in the fields. Volcanoes have made rich soil in many other parts of the world.
Often when a volcano is active, there are great explosions which blow up the lava into such clouds of dust that it covers the country like snow for miles and miles around. How does this happen? Some times there is water mixed with the lava, down deep in the ground. The heat of the lava turns the water to steam, just as the water in an engine boiler is turned to steam, and as the steam gets near the surface of the ground, it blows up as engine boilers sometimes do. In this way the lava is blown into fine pieces and sent up into the air. The big pieces of lava fall close to the opening, or crater, and help build up the mountain. The fine pieces form great clouds which look like clouds of smoke, but finally fall as dust. Sometimes, after this dust falls, it is called ashes, because it looks like ashes. The explosions can sometimes be heard at a distance of a•hundred miles or more.
254. Sugar from the East long way east of Hawaii, on across the Pacific Ocean (Fig. 40) near Asia, are the Philippines, the second group of Pacific islands belonging to the United States which send sugar to us. It was here that we saw Emilio, the coconut grower. The people there speak Spanish, because these islands belonged to Spain for three hun dred years. The people are almost all Malays, brown in color. They first learned Spanish from their rulers, but now, in their schools, they are learning English from American teachers. For a long time sugar has been one of the chief exports of these islands.
Java, one of the Dutch East Indies, is another island famous for its sugar cane growing. This island is south of the Philippines (Fig. 40) and, like them, and like Hawaii, has volcanic soil. That small island has more people on it than all of. the United States west of the Mississippi River. The people live in villages, in houses made of bamboo and palm leaves or of grass. They have fine fields of sugar, rice, and beans. The people of Java are Malays, but the people of Holland rule them and own the sugar mills and many of the ships that carry the sugar. The sugar that they produce is shipped to us in big cases of palm-leaf basketwork, holding six hundred pounds each. (Fig. 258.) Sugar cane is grown in many other places in the warm parts of the world where there is plenty of rain but most of it comes from these five moist islands that we have just talked about.
255. Sugar cane in the United States.— You remember that sugar cane is also grown in the rich delta soils of southern Louisiana, but it costs more to grow it there than it does in the warmer countries. Louisiana has frost every winter, and the canes do not have such a long season in which to grow. It must also be planted oftener than in the warmer lands, where it lives for many years without replanting.