Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It Is
Very Rarely That One Of Those Great Yngenios Can Make 32,000 Cases Of
Sugar During Several Successive Years.
It cannot therefore be matter
of surprise that when the price of sugar in the island of Cuba has
been very low (four or five piastres the quintal), the cultivation of
rice has been preferred to that of the sugar-cane.
The profit of the
old landowners (haciendados) consists, first, in the circumstance that
the expenses of the settlement were much less twenty or thirty years
ago, when a caballeria of good land cost only 1200 or 1600 piastres,
instead of 2500 to 3000; and the adult negro 300 piastres, instead of
450 to 500; second, in the balance of the very low and the very high
prices of sugar. These prices are so different in a period of ten
years that the interest of the capital varies from five to fifteen per
cent. In the year 1804, for instance, if the capital employed had been
only 100,000 piastres, the raw produce, according to the value of
sugar and rum, would have amounted to 94,000 piastres. Now, from 1797
to 1800, the price of a case of sugar was sometimes, mean value, forty
piastres instead of twenty-four, which I was obliged to suppose in the
calculation for the year 1825. When a sugar-house, a great manufacture
or a mine is found in the hands of the person who first formed the
establishment, the estimate of the rate of interest which the capital
employed yields to the proprietor, can be no guide to those who,
purchasing afterwards, balance the advantages of different kinds of
industry.
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