Cane production has all the advantages of an ancient industry whose details have long been reduced to an exact science. Its recorded history goes back to the fifth century, so that we can reckon that there have been fourteen centuries of experiment in cane culture. A native of Bengal, sugar was in cultivation in the fifth century along the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates; the conquering Moors took it into Spain in the eighth century, and during the following six or seven centuries its cultivation on a limited scale proceeded on the shores of the Mediterranean. In the fifteenth century when Portugal re-found and colonized Madeira and the Azores, sugarcane was introduced into these islands, flourished there, and yielded sugar to the home market in Lisbon. That it was an exotic luxury in Europe generally is proved by its price: a hundredweight sold in London in 1842 fetched £55. Twenty-five years later the price had dropped to ten pounds for a like quantity, but by that time larger supplies were coming in. After the discovery of the West Indian Islands by Columbus cane was introduced into Hispaniola and Cuba by the Spanish settlers, but cultivation was strongly discouraged by the home government, who chiefly aimed at the stimulation of gold-mining. Brazil, whose gold-deposits were luckily not discovered until the seventeenth century, became in contrast to New Spain an agricultural country from the time when the first _capitanias_ were allotted: she began shipping sugar in the visiting Portuguese caravels in a few years after first settlement. Thenceforth for over a century and a quarter Brazil became the main source of sugar supplies to Europe; when placer gold and diamond-bearing gravels were found by the _bandeirantes_ everyone rushed to the General Mines taking slaves along, until the coast plantations were denuded both of masters and labourers. Consequent languishing of sugar production made it worth while for both England and France to develop cane growing in the West Indian isles which they had seized from Spain. It was in 1662 that the British “Company of Royal Adventurers of Africa” agreed to deliver three thousand slaves a year to the British West Indies, and sugar production in Jamaica, Barbados, etc., began to attract wealthy planters: whole fleets of high-prowed sailing ships came into Caribbean waters to take away sugar, rum and molasses in those palmy days, enduring until Napoleon started the beet-sugar industry and Great Britain, not long after, abolished the slave trade.