Vol. VIII. No. 86. 
IMPERIAL INSTITUTE JOURNAL. 
[February, 1902.] 
45 
LECTURES AND PAPERS. 
PLANTERS AND PLANTING IN TROPICAL GREATER BRITAIN/’ 
(By R. Hedger Wallace, Esq. A 
Sir Edward Noel-Walker presided on the 2nd December at a lecture delivered a 
the Institute by Mr. R. Hedger Wallace, entitled “Planters and Planting in Tropical 
Greater Britain.’’ The Chairman, in his introductory remarks, said that having served for 
many years in tropical portions of the Empire, he had had abundant opportunities of 
making friends with planters, in those parts of the world, and of becoming acquainted with 
tropical matters of various binds. He should, therefore, listen with great interest to what 
Mr. Pledger Wallace would have to say, and trusted that the audience would at any rate 
learn something of the resources and industries of the tropical colonies. The subject was at 
the present time one of considerable importance as, owing to the keenness of the com- 
petition that now prevailed, the days had gone by when people could go to our colonies 
and confidently expect to make fortunes with little or no effort on their part. Mr. Hedger 
Wallace was well fitted to speak on the subject, as he had had practical experience in 
India and in Australia, where he had been employed as an expert by the Government. 
He had also travelled in many other parts of the Empire. 
Emigrants from these shores who went abroad to earn their own living by means of 
agricultural pursuits might, said Mr. Hedger Wallace, be divided into two classes : — those 
going to countries where the climate was temperate and where they intended to permanently 
reside or become “settlers”; and planters: those going to tropical countries, who regarded 
themselves more or less as exiles, trusting some day to be able to return to their native land. 
Climate, of course, was the reason of this. The planter’s work might lie in the unhealthy 
wet coast jungle land, or in lire wet condensation forest uplands of the interior, or in the 
monsoonial area between the two. lie was thus compelled, on account of climate, to place 
a premium on his health varying with the salubrity of the place to which he went. On the 
other hand, tropical regions, suitable for cultivation, were much more productive than similar 
areas in the temperate zones, so that a planter had a reasonable expectation of making money 
much faster than the settler. 
A planter did not, as a rule, himself perform any of the actual manual work or labour ; 
that was all done by hired native labour — negroes, peons, and coolies. His business was to 
control and direct this labour so that the cost of production might lie economical and the out- 
turn profitable. 
With many economic plants, and their products, the planter was responsible not only 
for the labour- force, the extension of the plantation, and for the growth of the plant, from the 
seed in the nursery until it was in full bearing in the plantation, Hut also for the manufactured 
product. The tea-planter, for example, was responsible for the growing of the plant, and for 
the harvesting and gathering of the produce, and also for all the details of its manufacture 
into the commodity to be retailed. The coffee-planter’s duties were as extensive, and the 
sugar -cane-planter had also to take up one or two of the processes of manufacture and 
refining in addition to growing the crop. 
This practice, however, was not universal ; some planters, by a system of advances, got 
the plant, or crop, grown for them by natives and their responsibility, in such cases, did not 
lie so much with the growing crop as with the methods, or processes, of curing, extracting, 
or manufacturing it into the marketable commodity. 
The qualifications desirable on the part of the prospective planter, as could be readily 
understood, were exceedingly varied. A young man might go out to an Assam tea-plantation 
and be successful, while if he had gone to a Nyassaland coffee plantation he might not have 
been regarded as at all a suitable assistant ; the duties expected of him in the two places 
being very different. In Assam the workmen he would supervise would be, in their way, 
skilled and with long accumulated experience to rely on, and he would merely have to 
see that they did their work ; while in Nyassaland, on the other hand, the young planter 
would have to teach his labourers how to do everything required of them — to make bricks, 
to build sheds, to de carpentering and iron work, to look after live-stock, etc., etc. — in fact, 
he would have to teach them their trade as well as supervise their work. 
The managers of, and assistants on, plantations were generally drawn from the English 
middle-classes and were usually men of good education, although without specific training 
for their vocation. Men of the artisan class — such as gardeners— had been tried, but they 
had not appeared to have shown themselves possessed of any qualities that made them better 
fitted for the work that the young public-school man, in fact they did not do as well — 
possibly because so much of a planter’s business consisted in managing and directing, 
M r. Wallace was of opinion that planters would still continue to be drawn from the middle 
classes, although in future they would have to obtain some preliminary training for the work 
expected of them. 
At present the system carried out was purely a form of apprenticeship. When a young 
man joined a plantation, his services were of no value. In time, as he worked out his first 
agreement, he began to pick up the rudiments of his calling, experience being his great 
master. In the present circumstances the character, ability and zeal of the manager, under 
whom he served as an assistant, were very important elements in influencing and establishing 
the future prospects of a young man. Anyone who had been among planters in the East or 
West Indies, and America, would have noticed how men from certain plantations were in 
demand, and others were passed over, owing simply to the reputation which the plantations 
and gardens had gained under the managers in charge. 
What was very desirable, with a view to making planters more progressive, was that 
before leaving the old country they should get a general training for the work that lay before 
them. Under the present regime they were exceedingly conservative and perpetuated old 
systems, methods and processes, simply because these had been the ones learned by them 
when they had first began their planting life as junior assistants. 
Throughout the lecture Mr, Hedger Wallace frequently referred to this point : the 
necessity of young planters receiving some sort of training before leaving home. The hap- 
hazard way in which parents sent their sons to the tropics, wishout troubling themselves to 
see that the young men were properly Gained and equipped for the life that lay before them, 
was remarkable. Of course the embryo planter could not, in the United Kingdom, obtain 
the experience, as cultivator or manufacturer, which must underlie successful work, and 
which could only be gained from a knowledge of local conditions. But the views and 
opinions of those who had gained local experience, in various parts of the world, could be 
noted, formulated, and correlated, to form the groundwork of the Principles of Commercial 
Crop Cultivation .• and the future planter, before leaving home, could then thoroughly study 
these details. He should also obtain a fair idea of commercial geography, some insight into 
office routine, a fair grasp of the principles of book-keeping, and if possible some knowledge 
of machinery in a mechanical workshop. 
This last qualification was sometimes of the utmost importance, as, in some countries, 
the planter had to be his own engineer and mechanic ; while in others, although he might 
only have to exercise supervision, yet he would have to accept full responsibility for the 
proper working of the machinery and appliances. 
Before leaving England a young man should know how to take care of his health in a 
tropical country, where the climate and general conditions were so different to those at home. 
This question of tire health of the white man in hot countries was, of course, now receiving a 
great deal of attention. The sudden change from a land of rain, fogs, east winds, and little 
sunshine, to a country where the sun’s rays were vertical, the rain violent, and the mean 
temperature fully 20 degrees higher than at home, was apt to be trying even to those in 
h ft ** 
the best of health. People in this country often failed to appreciate the fact that there were 
local differences of climate within the tropics and to think of, say, India as a country of but 
one climate. In the tropics one could meet with hot, cold, and wet seasons. In some areas 
the temperature was so moist that there was no evaporation from the skin, and in others the 
air was so dry that no moisture remained on the skin. The conditions that affected climate 
in the tropics were distribution of land and water, nature of the soil and vegetation, and 
position in respect of elevation or depression. 
The temperate zones were rapidly being filled up by the white races, hut the richest and 
most productive portions of the earth were situated in the tropics, from whence were obtained : 
sugar-cane, tobacco, tea, coffee, indigo, cocoa, cinchona, cotton, jute, ground nuts, cocoa- 
nuts, drugs, dye-stuffs, rice, teak, mahogany and other woods. It had been estimated that 
about one-fourth of the whole British Trade was in tropical produce. 
Although the settler possessed a great many advantages over the planter, still the life and 
work of a planter was not without its attractions to those who from early youth had been 
removed from the conditions that affected the artizan and labouring classes. 
The power of management, direction, and control, appealed to the planter’s class 
instincts. The life might be lonely and yet it could be made pleasant, provided the work was 
to a man’s liking and he took care of his health. He might feel that he was exiled from old 
and familiar scenes and surroundings, yet, when he returned to them, the days of his sojourn 
abroad were, to the old planter, generally days of pleasant memory. 
Mr, Hedger Wallace showed an excellent series of slides illustrating the methods of 
cultivation of a number of the chief economic products of the tropics, pointing out their main 
characteristics. Among others were views of ; tea-planting in Assam, coffee-planting in 
Nyassaland, the tobacco and spice plantations of North Borneo, lime cultivation in Dominica, 
cocoa cultivation in Trinidad, and banana- and pine-growing in Jamaica. 
Sir Edward Noel-Walker, in proposing a vote of thanks, said that he was glad to find 
himself in general agreement with what had been said in the lecture, especially with regard to 
the necessity of young men, who were going out to the colonies, understanding beforehand a 
little about the nature of their future employment, He was of opinion that a considerable 
change would shortly take place in the planting world, and that the effect of the present keen 
competition would be to bring about a separation of those various kinds of work now per- 
formed by the planter. For example, central factories would be established for the 
manufacture of sugar, and the cultivation of the cane would be left to smaller cultivators. 
This change would hring about a revolution in the present social standing of the planter, the 
tendency probably being to lower his position ; on the other hand, however, the transference 
of the growing of the plant to smaller cultivators would benefit the artisan class. He also 
referred to the difficulties with which the planter had to contend, as compared with the settler, 
in regard to climate, recreation, transport and labour. The question of how to induce some 
of the coloured races to work still remained unanswered, although it had received consider 
able attention ever since the abolition of slavery some sixty years ago. 
“THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA.” 
(By H. T. Thomas, Esq.^l 
Sir Henry Norman presided on the 9th December at a lecture given at the Institute 
by Mr. II, T. Thomas, Inspector of the Jamaica Constabulary, entitled “The Maroons 
of Jamaica.” In his introductory remarks the chairman said, for the information of those 
of the audience who were not acquainted with Mr. Thomas, or who had not been present 
at the lecture given by him at the Institute a few weeks before, that the lecturer had been 
for twenty-three years an officer in the Jamaica Constabulary, that he was now at the 
head of the constabulary in the parish, or county, of St. Mary, a district covering about 
230 square miles, that he had travelled in various parts of the island, and that he had 
paid particular attention to this somewhat curious people. 
Only as recently as 1S9S a considerable amount of space had, said Mr. Thomas, 
been devoted in one or two of the London papers to particulars of a disturbance, the 
importance of which, however, had been much exaggerated, created by the Maroons in t he 
I neighbourhood of the town of Annotto Bay on the north-west coast of Jamaica. The 
impression then created in this country — which corresponded in some measure to that 
obtaining in the island itself — was that the Maroons were a separate and distinct race of 
people, inhabiting the inaccessible forest regions of the mountainous interior of the island, 
and more or less independent of British rule— an impression which in many respects was 
quite inaccurate. 
When the Spaniards settled in Jamaica, on its discovery by Columbus in 1494, they 
found it inhabited by a tribe of Arawak Indians, people of a gentle, peaceable disposition, 
living exclusively in settlements on the coast or its immediate neighbourhood, and 
subsisting, almost entirely, on fish, eked out with two or three kinds of vegetables, of which 
the chief was the cassava. 
These Indians the Spaniards either exterminated outright, or enslaved and put to 
agriculture. In order to escape these alternatives the best and strongest of the aborigines 
left their settlements on the sea-shore and took refuge in the mountains of the interior, 
which hitherto they had never dared to penetrate. As the settlement and cultivation of 
the island proceeded, these Arawaks died out or escaped to the woods, and the Spaniards 
provided against the increasing demand for labourers by importing negro slaves from the 
West Coast of Africa, the strongest and most resolute of whom, in their turn, likewise 
escaped to the woods and joined the fugitive remnant of the Arawaks, whose numbers were 
thus constantly augmented by the very pick of the negro slaves from the plantations. The 
two races intermingled, and physical traces of this fusion persisted in certain individuals 
and families to the present day, although all the original Arawaks must have disappeared at 
least two centuries ago, while the element of negro blood constantly increased year by 
year and now completely preponderated. 
The hair of the Indian was long and straight, and his complexion of a coppery red, 
while the negro’s hair was short, crisp, and tightly curled, and his complexion black. 
I11 some of the blue-blooded families of this mixed race, at the present day, the skin was of 
a distinctly coppery tinge, and the hair, much longer than that of the ordinary negro, 
presented the appearance of having been highly frizzed. 
This mixed people, being entirely cut off from such influences of civilisation as might 
have trickled to them from the Spaniards, and having no resources of their own in that 
direction, remained in a condition of savagery; indeed, it was beyond all question that the 
lower and more degraded African element among them by degrees introduced the practice 
of cannibalism, which was indulged in by them up to comparatively recent times. Also the 
African form of superstition known as obeah became practically their religion, and was 
believed in by them now to a greater extent than by the ordinary negro population. 
In the years 1635 to 1637 the negroes, taking advantage of the military operations 
between the Spanish and British, abandoned the plantations wholesale, and joined the 
fugitives in the mountains in such numbers that together they became a serious menace to the 
English themselves ; and it was possible that some of the more ambitious among them, men 
who had probably held exalted rank among their own tribes in Africa, had visions of a 
negro king being established in Jamaica by driving into the sea both the opposing nation- 
alities of whites who were then contending for the possession of the island. 
Mr. Thomas here gave an interesting account of the measures adopted by Major-General 
Sedgwick, the first administrator of the island, appointed by Cromwell, and of his successor 
D’Oyley, in subduing this people. Their subjection, however, was far from complete, and 
