His answer was botanical science and agricultural monopoly. Britain and France were already sending scientific missions around the world. They were already collecting specimens in Africa and Asia. Spain, which had a reputation among the European empires for backwardness, was eager to dispel the notion through an aggressive science program.
Men would begin dabbling and collecting, surveying and testing.
Cheap labor required cheap fuel. Captain Cook thought he found the answer in Polynesia, in the form of a big fibrous ball of a fruit. His botanist, Sir Joseph Banks urged King George III to send somebody on a mission to collect and grow the fruit in the Antilles.
It came from New Guinea, it grew in the Malay Peninsula, it flourished in Micronesia. The Polynesians seeded it throughout the Pacific, the Hawaiians brought it to Samoa. It's called breadfruit, and it tastes like drywall.
And that's precisely where Captain Bligh comes in.
Captain Bligh was ordered to transport twelve hundred breadfruit tree seedlings into the Caribbean and create instant carbohydrates. Breadfruit was the key to cheap sugarcane, and Bligh's mission was to get them to the sugarcane plantations.
He had already been successful in bringing a shipload of the trees to Jamaica. Those in port had referred to his ship as a floating forest. Although this time, pissed off with the prospect of enduring a breadfruit mission from the Pacific to the Atlantic, his crew declined. And, rather than leave their Tahitian mistresses, sent him and the willing half of the crew off in a launch. They, enduring one of the most amazing navigation feats in history, journeyed 3,700 miles to Batavia, in Indonesia - the capital of the nutmeg trade.
Fortunately for the breadfruit, Bligh's original shipment had taken hold, and breadfruit would flourish throughout the islands.
Unfortunately for the slaves, the starchy fibers of this beautiful tree were disgusting. They wanted plantains. They wanted fried bananas. Eventually, they would get them, and the botanical future of the Antilles would again take a bizarre turn.
Sugarcane was being planted the way pretty much anything was being planted in the old world. Potatoes. Apple trees. Olive trees. You basically propagate it by taking cuttings from the stalks of the healthiest plants. You force a speedy evolution. You don't wait for the seeds. You hack at a bit of the giant grass and plant it.
