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The pods are known to be ripe by their colour, some being green, 

 others red. It is not easy to say at first when they are quite ripe, but 

 the men employed soon gain experience and are enabled to tell by the 

 appearance. 



When the pod is cut open it is easy to tell whether it is ripe, as in a 

 ripe pod the beans are separated from the shell, but they adhere to it 

 before ripening. 



The Cocoa gatherers leave the pods upon the ground where they fall. 

 Women are employed to collect them into baskets. 



The women deposit the pods into large heaps at different parts of the 

 plantation. 



Breaking Cocoa. — This consists in cutting open the pods and remov- 

 ing the beans. A planter told us that it improved the quality of the 

 Cocoa to leave pods a few days in the heaps on the ground before 

 " breaking," but he said that he always had the Cocoa broken as soon 

 as it was gathered, to prevent it being stolen in the night. 



In the other plantations we visited it was generally left three or four 

 days in the heaps on the ground before " breaking." 



If the Cocoa is left too long in this manner, it will ferment and go 

 mouldy. 



When " breaking" the Cocoa the men take a short knife {i.e. a ma- 

 chette with the end taken off) and cut the pod in two throwing the top 

 half on one side and the bottom half (to which the placenta with the 

 beans is attached) into a basket. The beans are removed from the bot- 

 tom half of the pods by means of little wooden spoons and put into 

 large wicker baskets. 



This part of the process is performed by women. 



These baskets are emptied into the panniers of the ponies which take 

 the Cocoa to the sweat boxes. Whilst breaking on the best estates the 

 black and decayed beans are put on one side and not mixed with the 

 good Cocoa. 



'Sweat Boxes. — These on one estate were large wooden troughs with a 

 cement bottom some 6 feet square and 4 feet deep arranged in sets of 

 j 2 under one roof, there being an opening between the top of the boxes 

 and the roof, and sufficient space between the bottom of the box and the 

 ground to allow of the juices liberated during fermentation to escape. 

 A rack is put at the bottom of the box and when it is filled with Cocoa, 

 banana leaves are spread over the top with sometimes a lid over all and 

 most of the sweat Doxes we saw were arranged on the same principle. 

 Some had fewer divisions. 



The boxes on another estate that they were using held from 30 to 40 

 bags of Cocoa. 



On another the fermenting troughs were arranged somewhat differently. 

 There were 6 side by side with a door opening into each box. 



Fermentation. — The method of fermentation was the same all over 

 Trinidad with some slight differences. The difference between an 

 estate mark and a common Trinidad is mainly in the fermentation, the 

 better Trinidad Cocoa being fermented the longest of all. 



One planter only fermented 5-8 days. The Cocoa on another estate 

 was fermented 10-12 days, being turned over two or three times. Dur- 

 ing fermentation the white pulp which surrounds the beans is largely 



