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.p. 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 
