Riding the "Jamaica Train"

Riding the "Jamaica Train". The Operation of the Sugar House. Getting sugar out of the sugar cane was very hard work. Not only did slaves have to cut the cane exactly when it was mature, they had to crush it and boil the juice as soon as possible in order to get the most and best sugar out of the crop. During sugar-making season, everyone worked around the clock to make sure the job was done right., Here at the sugar house, my slaves placed cut cane on a conveyer belt that carried the stalks to the rollers to be crushed. Cane juice was gravity fed into clarifiers and then into a series of kettles heated by a furnace under the smallest kettle, the batterie. We called this system the "Jamaica Train." My slaves ladled boiling juice from kettle to kettle until it finally granulated in the batterie. Then they "struck" the juice and removed it into vats to cool., Thomas Tryon, a Barbados colonist, wrote this in 1700: , "the Servants night and day stand in great Boyling Houses, where there are Six or Seven large Coppers or Furnaces kept perpetually Boyling; and from which with heavy Ladles and Scummers they Skim off the excrementitious parts of the Canes, till it comes to its perfection and cleanness…” , (caption) Workers in the sugar house.