Hawaii: Today in History 7/26
7-26-1835 1st sugar cane plantation started in Hawaii
Sugar cane was already present when Captain James Cook discovered the Hawaiian Islands in 1778. His journal notes that, even before landing, “… we could observe several plantations of plantains and sugar-canes…” After going ashore on Kauai, Cook recorded, “… spots of sugar-canes, or plantains…are planted generally as a square or oblong…” Anthropologists believe the Polynesians brought sugar cane, along with other food plants, when they voyaged to Hawaii from other islands to the south, probably about 1000 years ago. Hawaiian and other South Pacific people did not make sugar as we know it; they simply chewed the sweet stalks.
The first recorded planting of sugar cane in Hawaii for the purpose of extracting sugar was in Manoa Valley on Oahu in 1825. The plantation failed two years later.
The first successful sugar cane plantation was started in 1835 by Ladd and Company at Koloa, Kauai. Some of those lands continued to grow sugar cane until 1992 when McBryde Sugar Company gave up its lease with the Grove Farm Company due to the damage caused by Hurricane Iniki.
When the first small sugar cane plantations began to prosper, other businessmen became interested in sugar as an exportable product to bring in income for the Kingdom’s economy. The first recorded export of Hawaiian sugar was in 1837, when two tons were exported with a value of $200.
Sugar cane plantings increased rapidly from the first 20 hectares (50 acres) on Kauai in 1835, to 40,400 hectares (100,000 acres) in 1900 and 89,000 hectares (220,000 acres) in 1980.
As the early sugar planters became more involved in the production of sugar, they recognized that they faced mutual problems on all four sugar islands of Hawaii where they were growing, harvesting and milling their crops.
Many people believe Hawaii has the “ideal” climate all year round because it is sunny and warm without being uncomfortably hot.
The Hawaiian Islands are in a tradewind zone where winds blow much of the time from northeast to southwest. These tradewinds, which pick up moisture as they travel over the ocean, hit their first land in thousands of miles when they reach Hawaii.
Sugar cane is a thirsty crop and takes two thousand pounds of water to produce one pound of sugar.
By 1980 fourteen plantations and about 550 independent sugar growers in Hawaii used about 89,000 hectares (220,000 acres) of land for growing sugar cane and they were producing about a million tonnes (1,100,000 tons) of raw sugar each year. Most of this raw sugar was sent to the continental United States where it was refined and sold as C & H Sugar (California and Hawaii) primarily to the western and mid-western states.
Hawaii supplied about one-tenth of the sugar used by the 215 million people in the United States in 1980.
7-26-1979 Mageina Tovah, American actress (Joan of Arcadia), born in Honolulu, Hawaii
Tovah was born Mageina Tovah Begtrup in Honolulu, Hawaii, where her father was a US Army psychiatrist in the Green Berets, and her mother was an Army physical therapist. Her family later settled for a time in Clarksville, Tennessee before moving to Nashville. Mageina attended Martin Luther King Junior Magnet High School in Nashville. She skipped a year of high school, taking both her Junior year of honors English and her Senior year of AP English at the same time. She graduated from high school at the age of 16. For college, Mageina started at The California Institute of the Arts, and graduated magna cum laude from USC in three and a half years. She later moved to New York City and Los Angeles. She is Jewish.
