THE ISLE OF HONEY 23 



that time are necessarily broken and scanty ; but 

 it is certain that honey, with its products, had 

 become an important article of diet among all 

 classes, high and low. It is difficult — here in the 

 present time, when cane and beet-sugar, and even 

 chemical sweetening agents, are in constant and 

 universal use — to realise that, from the remotest 

 times down to the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 

 turies, there was practically no other sweet-food 

 of any description, except honey, in the world ; 

 and to estimate, therefore, what a prominent place 

 in the industries of each country bee-keeping must 

 then have occupied. There was nothing else but 

 honey for all purposes, and it is constantly men- 

 tioned in the old monkish chronicles and the 

 curious manuscript cookery-books that have sur- 

 vived from the Middle Ages. 



It is true that the sugar-cane was known as far 

 back as the first century a.d. Strabo, writing just 

 before the commencement of the Christian Era, 

 relates how Nearchus, who was Admiral of the 

 Fleet to Alexander the Great, made an important 

 voyage of discovery in the Indian Ocean, and 

 brought back news of the wonderful "honey- 

 bearing reed ," which he found in use among the 

 natives of India. There is a record that the 

 Spaniards brought the sugar-cane from the East, 

 and planted it in Madeira early in the fifteenth 

 century. Thence its cultivation spread to the 

 West Indies and South America, during that and 



