Sugar house

The boil house, or sugar house, is indicated by nr 1. On the bottom right it is possible to see nr. 8, and behind the door there is a very faint nr. 11. referring to the “furnace” where a series of four fires heated big kettles, and pots were partially below ground. As sugar cane grows in areas with a tropical climate, it is not hard to imagine how incredibly hot the work space for the enslaved man (nr. 8) would be as he tended to the fire. As more and more liquid evaporated, the thickening substance was scooped into increasingly smaller containers.

Ladling the foamy substance from one pot to another was the task of the enslaved man behind the door (nr. 11). By the end, the syrup was ready to be stored in upside down cones made from clay. After the syrup cooled down and hardened, the outer cone was removed, leaving the typical ‘sugar loaf’ shape. It was this shape that inspired the name for the Sugarloaf mountain near Rio de Janeiro, and it was the shape in which it arrived on the European consumer market. Lower quality sugar was further processed in refineries in Amsterdam and Hamburg, important centres in Europe in the seventeenth century.