Men, Women, Mules and Oxen… Old Plantation Days – January 2016
The images used in this months issue of the Paradise Post are from a Stock Certificate from Hutchinson Sugar Company in Ka’u. The art work is a beautiful representation of daily Plantation life.
When reviewing this pen amd ink scrimshaw like depiction I started thinking about the absence of vehicles and more modern methods of transportation. Take a journey back in time and imagine your life without a car, a truck, how about no airplanes…the first flight by the Wright Brothers had not taken place yet! Transportation between islands was by steamship and sail craft. The luxuries of modern transportation and life in the 21st century sure is nice isn’t it. To get from point A to point B it was by the use of Horses, Mules, and Oxen.
These two depictions of life at Ka’u was likely dated about the start of the company in 1867 or so. Note the wagon carts being stacked by hand. No cranes or tractors anywhere in sight…that’s because gasoline, diesel, and internal combustion engines were not even invented yet. The oil industry was a WHALE oil industry!
The other significant interpretation from the art is the employment of women in the workforce. Perhaps it could be said that Hawaii and the Sugarcane industry here was decades ahead of equal opportunity employment for women. Likely not so equal between the sexes when it came to pay, but the mere fact of many photographs of women in the plantation workforce goes back to the earliest days of sugarcane plantation days. The companies NEEDED these women, and without them on the workforce, the plantation would have failed. A magnified look at the artwork shows women lifting cane, but also harvesting and cutting cane in the back-round.
The mills and boiling houses of the early plantations were fired by wood or imported coal. The clearing of forests and trees for new sugarcane fields was ever expanding. Soon the plantations of that era ran into a situation that is current today. Back then it was “Peak Firewood”, today its “Peak Oil”. The plantations of the past were starting to run out of trees to harvest and turn into fuel for the mill and boiling house. Today we are starting to run out of petroleum oil to make into Gasoline and Diesel. What will be the next transitioning element for mankind’s need for fuel? Is it Hydrogen, is it solar and batteries, will it be Fusion??? One hundred and 50 years ago wood and whale oil for fuel was replaced by a brand new source of fuel, Black Petroleum Oil.
It is odd how history keeps repeating itself, in mankinds need to improve its quality of life, we quickly exploit a resource, then through ingenuity and invention we solve a need by creating a new technology that supplies the demands of society. The increasing loss of petroleum resources on this dinky little planet is unavoidable, stress will come from it, but I look forward to next fascinating invention that will change our lives and that of our grandchildren. 150 years from now they will look back and say, “What ancient archaic fuels and machines they used in the 20th century, how could they have ever lived that way!!”