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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According To This Estimate Of Mr. Stewart, One Hectare Would
Yield 1760 Kilogrammes Of Coarse Sugar; For Such Is The Quality Of The
Sugar Furnished For Commerce At Jamaica.
Reckoning in a great
sugar-fabric of the Havannah 25 caballerias or 325 hectares for a
produce of from 32,000 to 40,000 cases, we find 1130 or 1420
kilogrammes of refined sugar (blanco and quebrado) per hectare.
This
result agrees sufficiently with that of Jamaica, if we consider the
loss sustained in the weight of sugar by refining, in converting the
coarse sugar into azucar blanco y quebrado) or refined sugar. At San
Domingo a square (3403 square toises = 1.29 hectare) is estimated at
forty, and sometimes at sixty quintals: if we fix on 5000 pounds, we
still find 1900 kilogrammes of coarse sugar per hectare. Supposing, as
we ought to do when speaking of the produce of the whole island of
Cuba, that, in soils of average fertility, the caballeria (at 13
hectares) yields 1500 arrobas of refined sugar (mixed with blanco and
quebrado), or 1330 kilogrammes per hectare, it follows that 60,872
hectares, or nineteen five-fourths square sea leagues, (nearly a ninth
of the extent of a department of France of middling size), suffice to
produce the 440,000 cases of refined sugar furnished by the island of
Cuba for its own consumption and for lawful and illicit exportation.
It seems surprising that less than twenty square sea leagues should
yield an annual produce of more than the value of fifty-two millions
of francs (counting one case, at the Havannah, at the rate of
twenty-four piastres). To furnish coarse sugar for the consumption of
thirty millions of French (which is actually from fifty-six to sixty
millions of kilogrammes) it requires within the tropics but nine and
five-sixths square sea leagues cultivated with sugar-cane; and in
temperate climates but thirty-seven and a half square sea leagues
cultivated with beet-root.
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