POSSESSIONS IN THE STRAITS OE MALACCA. 
143 
selves out on the estates and are more prised for various kinds of 
plantation works than as cane cultivators. 
"Both in Province Wellesley and at Singapore sugar is manufac- 
lured by Europeans after the West India process. Almost every 
estate is provided with steam or water power to express the cane, 
and the juice is concentrated in coppers oi various forms placed in 
ranges under which the dried expressed canes are used as fuel, llum 
is also made as in the West Indies. 
Neither the plough, the harrow, nor any other agricultural helps, 
are in general use ; the hoe being the’only implement of husbandry em¬ 
ployed by Chinese, or Malay or Kliiig coolies in the Straits, with the 
exception only of one estate where European implements are used,—- 
and hence the great number of labourers employed on a comparatively 
small extent of canes. Two and a half acres is the most that a Chi¬ 
naman cultivates in the year, and even this little is only obtained by 
hard driving, if working on monthly wages for a European. 1 he 
returns from which would be about forty piculs of dry sugar, whilst 
in Louisiana, in the United States, where implements of husbandry 
adapted to this culture are freely used and notwithstanding the mi¬ 
niatured condition of the canes when cut,—which, owing to the cold 
season are obliged to be manipulated before they are ten months 
old,—each hand, or labourer on the estate, men, women and children, 
able to work, produces from five to seven Hhds. of Sugar ot about 
one thousand pounds each, according to the returns made to and 
published by the Congress. A quantity truly enormous considering 
that from twenty five to thirty per cent of the labourers on a sugar 
plantation are either idlers so called (persons employed at various 
works out of the fields) or disabled by sickness. But the contrast 
between Louisiana and Java, in the extent of production accoid- 
ing to the number of labourers, is still greater than here, for, accord¬ 
ing to “ Temminck’s General view of the Dutch Possessions in the 
Indian Archipelago, ” not less than 2,440 men are variously employ¬ 
ed in producing a cx'Op of 0,000 piculs of Sugar on an estate oi 400 
Balms or Bovuvs, which is about equal to an English acre. 1 he 
same writer states the price of field labour at ^ of a Dutch fibrin. 
