The Eastern Stars by Mark Kurlansky Read Free Book Online

area went by various names. The original settlement was and is still called Punta de Pescadores, Fishermen’s Point. But just as pragmatic and illustrative was another name, Mosquito or Mosquitisol, named for the other creatures besides fish for which the marshy area was known.
    Soon after independence in 1844—some say in 1846, others insist not until 1858—the town started to be called San Pedro de Macorís, after both Saint Peter, the patron saint of fishermen, and the Macorixes, the original Taino fishermen. The people were for the moment free of the Spanish, and Taino names were starting to come into fashion: throughout Dominican history, Taino names have become in vogue whenever anti-Spanish sentiment or Dominican nationalism is popular.
    San Pedro de Macorís, with its sheltered riverfront and its short sea voyage to the capital, became a commercial port for local products, especially fish and plantains. In fact, there was a period in the late 1860s and 1870s when the town was referred to as Macorís de Plántanos. Other crops, such as corn and beans, were also shipped from the port. But Macorís de Plántanos was about to undergo a dramatic change.
    The booming Cuban sugar industry started to spread to San Pedro, which had the flat, humid tropical land suited for growing cane, was close to the capital, and had its own seaport. The return of Spanish government in 1861 brought in Spanish and Italian entrepreneurs looking for opportunities and interested in sugar.
    Then, on October 10, 1868, in Cuba, a wealthy Cuban landowner from Yara named Carlos Manuel de Céspedes made a speech from his farm, forever after known in Cuban history as the grito de Yara , in which he renounced both Spanish rule and slavery. He set his own slaves free. Thirty-seven other planters around Yara also freed their slaves and formed an army. So began a failed war of independence known as the Ten Years’ War. Since this was largely an agricultural war—in fact, historians often attribute the movement’s failure to its inability to attract support from Havana—wealthy Cuban landowners fled. Many of them were sugar producers who went to the Dominican Republic.
    The Dominican Republic, which did not have slavery, was not competitive with Cuba and Puerto Rico until the 1870s, when the practice began to be abolished in Spanish colonies. In 1876 a Cuban, Juan Antonio Amechazurra, began exploring the possibilities of sugar production in San Pedro, and on January 9, 1879, just north of town, he opened the first ingenio , a steam-powered sugar mill named Ingenio Angelina. The ingenio —the word means “ingenuity”—was a modern wonder—state-of-the-art technology for its day in the Dominican Republic—and became the name of both the machine and the entire sugar mill. Until then, cane had been fed to a grinder powered by oxen or other livestock, a machine known in Spanish as a trapiche .
    In both the U.S. and Europe, sugar was losing its luxury status and becoming a basic food for the working class, an important market in the Industrial Revolution. In November 1880 the government facilitated a San Pedro sugar industry by granting permission for San Pedro de Macorís to become an international port. The following year another Cuban, Santiago W. Mellor, founded Ingenio Porvenir on the edge of town. In 1882, Puerto Ricans started a mill and two different Dominican companies founded Ingenio Cristóbal Colón and Ingenio Consuelo, which was sold to a Cuban in 1883. By 1884, five years after the first San Pedro mill had opened, six modern steam-powered sugar mills were operating in San Pedro and shipping their sugar abroad from the port in town. Another, Quisqueya, opened in 1892 and an eighth, Las Pajas, in 1918.
    In a town of a few thousand people, millions of dollars were spent on infrastructure: the port facility, the mills, bateys for the workers, train lines to carry the cane from the field to the mills . . .
    Throughout the nineteenth century,