WOOL AND COTTON.
WOOL.--What is Wool?--Chemical Composition--Fibre--Antiquity
of Shepherd Life--Varieties of Sheep--Introduction into
Australia--Spanish Merino--Wool Wealth of Australia--Imports
and Exports of Wool and Woollen Produce--Woollen Manufacture.
COTTON.--Cotton Plant in the East--Mandeville's Fables about
Cotton--Cotton in Persia, Arabia, and Egypt--Columbus finds
Cotton-yarn and Thread in 1492--In Africa--Manufacture of Cloth
in England--The American Cotton Plant.
WOOL.
What is wool? 'The covering of the sheep, of course,' replies somebody.
Yes; but what _is_ it? Let us ask Professor Owen. 'Wool,' he says, 'is a
peculiar modification of hair, characterised by fine transverse or
oblique lines from two to four thousand in the extent of an inch,
indicative of a minutely imbricated scaly surface, when viewed under the
microscope, on which and on its curved or twisted form depends its
remarkable felting property.' At first sight this definition seems
bewildering, but it will bear examination, and is really more tangible
than, for instance, Noah Webster's definition of wool: 'That soft curled
or crisped species of hair which grows on sheep and some other animals,
and which in fineness sometimes approaches to fur.' It is usually that
which grows on sheep, however, that we know as wool, and the number of
imbrications, serratures, or notches indicates the quality of the fibre.
Thus, in the wool of the Leicester sheep there are 1850--in Spanish
merino, 2400--in Saxon merino, 2700, to an inch, and the fewer there are
the nearer does wool approach to hair.
[Illustration: Wool-sorters at Work.]
Here is a still more minute description by Youatt, a great authority on
wool: 'It consists of a central stem or stalk, probably hollow, or at
least porous, and possessing a semi-transparency, found in the fibre of
the hair. From this central stalk there springs, at different distances
in different breeds of sheep, a circlet of leaf-shaped projections. In
the finer species of wool these circles seemed at first to be composed
of one indicated or serrated ring; but when the eye was accustomed to
them, this ring was resolvable into leaves or scales. In the larger
kinds, the ring was at once resolvable into these scales or leaves,
varying in number, shape, and size, and projecting at different angles
from the stalk, and in the direction of the leaves of vegetables--that
is, from the root to the point. They give to the wool the power of
felting.'
This is the estimate of the chemical composition of good wool: Carbon,
50.65; hydrogen, 7.03; nitrogen, 17.71; oxygen and sulphur, 24.61. Out
of a hundred parts, ninety-eight would be organic, and two would be ash,
consisting of oxide of iron, sulphate of lime, phosphate of lime, and
magnesia. What is called the 'yolk' of wool is a compound of oil, lime,
and potash. It makes the pile soft and pliable, and is less apparent on
English sheep than on those of warmer countries, the merino sheep having
the most 'yolk.'
The fibre of wool varies in diameter, the Saxon merino measuring 1/1370
of an inch, and the Southdown, 1/1100. Lustrous wool, it is said, should
be long and strong; but if it is very fine it is not long. Strong wool
may be as much as twenty inches in length. The wool of the best sheep
adheres closely, and can only be removed by shearing; but there are
varieties of sheep which shed their wool, as, for instance, the Persian,
which drop the whole of their fleeces between January and May, when
feeding on the new grass.
This, then, is wool, the first use of which for cloth-making is lost in
antiquity. There is no doubt that the pastoral industry is the oldest
industry in the world; for even when the fruits of the earth could be
eaten without tillage and without labour, the flocks and herds required
care and attention. The shepherd may be regarded as the earliest pioneer
of industry, as he has been for centuries the centre of fanciful
romance, and the personification of far from romantic fact. The old
legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece is in itself evidence of the
antiquity of the knowledge of the value of wool; and much as the
mythologists make out of the legend, there are some who hold that it
merely is meant to record how the Greeks imported a superior kind of
sheep from the Caucasus and made money thereby.
Australia is now the land of the Golden Fleece, and millions of money
have been made there out of the docile sheep. It is not indigenous, of
course, to the land of the Southern Cross, where the only mammal known
when Europeans discovered it was the kangaroo. Mr James Bonwick, a
gentleman well known in Australian literature, gathered together many
records of the introduction of the sheep into Australia, and of the
marvellous development of the pastoral industry there in his very
interesting book, _The Romance of the Wool-trade_.
But, first, as to the different kinds of sheep. The Bighorn is the
wild-sheep of Kamchatka, and it may be taken for granted that all
species of the domestic sheep were at one time wild, or are descended
from wild tribes. When the Aryan Hindus invaded India, it is recorded
that they took their flocks with them; but whether the wild-sheep still
to be found on the hills of Northern India are the descendants of
wanderers from these flocks, or descendants of the progenitors of them,
we do not pretend to say.
Chief among the domesticated sheep of the British Isles is the
Southdown, whose characteristics used to be--although we are told they
are changed somewhat now--thin chine, low fore-end, and rising backbone,
a small hornless head, speckled face, thin lips, woolled ears, and
bright eyes. The wool should 'be short, close, curled, fine, and free
from spiry projecting fibres.' Then there are the Romney Marsh, the
Cotswold, the Lincoln, the Leicester, and the Hardwick sheep, each with
its distinctive marks and value. The Welsh sheep have long necks, high
shoulders, narrow breasts, long bushy tails, and small bones; the wool
is not first class, but the mutton is excellent. The Irish native sheep
are of two kinds, the short-woolled and long-woolled; but Southdowns and
Leicesters have been so long crossed with them that their idiosyncrasies
are no longer marked. The Shetland sheep are supposed to have come from
Denmark, but have also been crossed with English and Scotch varieties.
In Scotland, the Cheviot and the Blackfaced are the two ruling types.
The Cheviot is a very handsome animal, with long body, white face, small
projecting eyes, and well-formed legs. The wool is excellent, as the
'tweed'-makers of the Border know, but is not so soft as that of the
English Southdowns. The Blackfaced is the familiar form we see in the
Highlands, supposed to have come originally 'from abroad,' but now
regarded as the native sheep of Scotland. It is a hardy animal,
accustomed to rough food and rough weather, with a fine deep chest,
broad back, slender legs, attractive face, and picturesque horns. The
wool is not so good as that of the Cheviot variety, but the mutton is
better. Of course, English varieties have been largely crossed with the
two native Scotch kinds; yet these still remain distinct, and are easily
recognisable.
As long ago as the time of the Emperor Constantine, the wool of English
sheep had a high reputation, and had even then found its way to Rome. Of
English monarchs, Edward III. seems to have been the first to endeavour
to stimulate the pastoral industry by the manufacture of woollen cloths
and the export of raw wool. But Henry VIII. thought that sheep-breeding
had been carried too far, and the farmers were making too much money out
of it; so he decreed that no one should keep more than two thousand four
hundred sheep at one time, and that no man should be allowed to occupy
more than two farms. In the time of Charles II. the export of both sheep
and wool was strictly prohibited. As late as 1788, there were curious
prohibitory enactments with reference to sheep; and the date is
interesting, because it was the date of the settlement of New South
Wales. There was a fine of three pounds upon the carrying off of any
sheep from the British Isles, except for use on board ship; and even
between the islands and the mainland of Scotland, or across a tidal
river, sheep could not be transported without a special permit and the
execution of a bond that the animals were not for exportation. Indeed,
no sheep could be shorn within five miles of the sea-coast without the
presence of a revenue officer, to see that the law was not evaded.
It is not surprising, then, that the first sheep settled in
Australia--the only great pastoral country that has never had a native
variety--did not go from England. It is very curious that in Australia,
New Zealand, and Tasmania, where now lies a great portion of the
pastoral wealth of the world, there never was any animal in the
smallest degree resembling a sheep until some enterprising Britons took
it there.
The first sheep introduced into Australia were from the Cape and from
India. The ships which went out with the convicts of 1788 had a few
sheep on board for the officers' mess, which were presumably consumed
before the Cape of Good Hope was reached. There, some animals were
procured for the new settlement. The Cape at the time was in the hands
of the Dutch, who had large flocks of sheep and immense herds of cattle.
The sheep they had were not imported from Europe, but were the native
breed they had found in the hands of the aborigines when the Dutch
colony was founded one hundred and thirty years previously.
The native African sheep is of the fat-tail kind. Wool was not then an
item of wealth in the Dutch colony; but the fat tails were appreciated
as an excellent substitute for butter. All over Africa and over a large
part of Asia, varieties of the fat-tail species are still to be found.
In Tibet they abound; and the Turcomans have vast flocks of them. But
Tibet has also other varieties, and notably one very like the llama of
Peru, with a very soft and most useful fleece, providing the famous
Tibetan wool. In Palestine and Syria the fat-tail sheep is abundant; and
of the Palestine breed it is recorded that they 'have a monstrous round
of fat, like a cushion, in place of the tail, which sometimes weighs
thirty or forty pounds. The wool of this sheep is coarse, much tangled,
and felted, and mixed with coarse dark-coloured hair.'
Although the first sheep taken to Australia were from the Cape, the most
important of the earlier consignments were from India, the nearest
British possession to the new colony. Indeed, for over thirty years
Australia was ecclesiastically within the see of the Bishop of Calcutta,
and letters to England usually went by way of the Indian capital.
The Bengalee sheep are described as 'small, lank, and thin, and the
colour of three-fourths of each flock is black or dark gray. The quality
of the fleece is worse than the colour; it is harsh, thin, and wiry to a
very remarkable degree, and ordinarily weighs but half a pound.' Not a
very promising subject, one would think, for the Australian pastures,
but the flesh was excellent; and climate and crossing of breeds work
wonders.
That which gave value to the Australian breed of sheep, however, was the
introduction of the Spanish merino, which in time found its way to the
Cape, and thence to Australia. There is an old tradition that the famous
merino sheep of Spain came originally from England; but it appears from
Pliny and others that Spain had a reputation for fine wool long before
the Roman occupation. The Spanish word merino originally meant an
inspector of sheepwalks, and is derived from the Low Latin _majorinus_,
a steward of the household. Some writers believe that the merino came
originally from Barbary, probably among the flocks of the Moors when
they captured Southern Spain. The merinos are considered very voracious,
and not very prolific; they yield but little milk, and are very subject
to cutaneous diseases. Youatt describes two varieties of them in Spain,
and the wool is of remarkable fineness.
About the year 1790, the Spanish merino began to be imported into the
Cape, and a few years later a certain Captain Waterhouse was sent from
Sydney to Capetown to buy stock for the colonial establishment. He
thought the service in which he was engaged 'almost a disgrace to an
officer;' but when he left the Cape again, he brought with him
'forty-nine head of black-cattle, three mares, and one hundred and seven
sheep'--arriving at Port Jackson with the loss of nine of the cattle
and about one-third of the sheep. Three cows, two mares, and twenty-four
of the sheep belonged to that officer, and with this voyage he founded
not only his own fortune, but also the prosperity of the great
Australian colony. Further importations followed; and a Captain
Macarthur, early in the present century, went home to London to
endeavour to form a company to carry on sheep-rearing on an extensive
scale. He did not succeed, and returned to Port Jackson to pursue his
enterprise himself. Eventually he obtained the concession of a few
square miles of land, and thus became the father of Australian
'squatting.' He located himself on the Nepean River, to the south-west
of Sydney; and to his industry and sagacity is attributed in great part
the origin of the immense wool-trade which has developed between the
colony and the mother-country.
And what is now the wool wealth of Australasia? In 1820 there were not
more than ten thousand sheep of 'a good sort' in New South Wales; and in
the same year, wool from the colony was sold in London at an average of
three shillings and sevenpence the pound. This led to the circulation of
fabulous reports of the profits to be made out of sheep; and there was
quite a run for some years on the squatting lots. In 1848 some
Australians started sheep-running in New Zealand; and by 1860 the sheep
in these islands had increased to 2,400,000. In 1865 the number there
had grown to 5,700,000; in 1870, to 9,500,000; and in 1894, to
19,000,000.
In 1886 the pastoral wealth of the whole of the Australian colonies
consisted of 84,222,272 sheep. At only ten shillings per head, this
represents a capital of over forty-two millions sterling, without
counting the value of the land. The number of sheep in 1894 was over
99,000,000.
But now as to the yield of the flocks. The value of the wool for 1884
was L20,532,429.
The total importations of wool into England in 1885-86 were 1,819,182
bales, of which no fewer than 1,139,842 bales, or nearly three-fourths
of the whole, came from Australasia. The rest came from the Cape and
Natal, India, the Mediterranean, Russia, other European countries,
China, and the Falkland Islands. The imports in 1894, from all quarters,
consisted of 705 million pounds, of a value of L25,000,000.
It would transcend the limits of our space to attempt to sketch the
history and growth of the woollen industry in the manufacture of cloths.
It is an industry, if not as old as the hills, at least very nearly as
old as the fig-leaves of Eden; for we may assume as a certainty that the
next garments worn by our forefathers were constructed in some way from
the fleecy coats of these bleating followers. We exported woollen and
worsted yarns of a value of over four million pounds sterling in 1894,
and of woollen and worsted manufactures, a value of 14 millions
sterling.
In the middle ages all the best wool was produced in England, and the
woollen manufacture centred in Norfolk, although both the west of
England and Ireland had also factories. There are in existence specimens
of cloth made in these medieval days which show that the quality of the
wool employed was not equal to that which we now use. The art of weaving
is supposed to have been brought from the Netherlands; at any rate there
were strong political alliances between the English sovereigns and the
weavers of Bruges and of Ghent. In these old days, when Norwich,
Aylsham, and Lynn had the lion's share of the woollen trade, the great
mart for English and foreign cloths was at Stourbridge, near Cambridge,
where a fair was held which lasted a month every year.
There were 2546 woollen and worsted mills in the United Kingdom in 1890.
The chief seats of the wool manufacture in England in the 14th century
were Bristol, London, and Norwich. Now Wiltshire and Gloucestershire are
famous for broadcloths, while the towns of Leeds and Huddersfield in
Yorkshire are important centres. Galashiels and Hawick are noted for
their tweeds.
COTTON.
The Father of History, in writing about India--'the last inhabited
country towards the East'--where every species of birds and quadrupeds,
horses excepted, are 'much larger than in any other part of the world,'
and where they have also 'a great abundance of gold,' made the following
remarkable statement. 'They possess likewise,' he said, 'a kind of
plant, which, instead of fruit, produces wool of a finer and better
quality than that of the sheep, and of this the natives make their
clothes.' This was the vegetable wool of the ancients, which many
learned authorities have identified with the byssus, in bandages of
cloth made from which the old Egyptians wrapped their mummies. But did
Egypt receive the cotton plant from India--or India from Egypt--and
when? However that may be, there is good reason to believe that cotton
is the basis of one of the oldest industries in the world, although we
are accustomed to think of it as quite modern, and at any rate as
practically unknown in Europe before the last century. As a matter of
fact, nevertheless, cotton was being cultivated in the south of Europe
in the 13th century, although whether the fibre was then used for the
making of cloth is not so certain. Its chief use then seems to have been
in the manufacture of paper.
The beginning of the Oriental fable of the Vegetable Lamb is lost in the
dateless night of the centuries. When and how it originated we know
not; but the story of a Plant-Animal in Western Asia descended through
the ages, and passed from traveller to traveller, from historian to
historian, until in our time the fable has received a practical
verification. Many strange things were gravely recorded of this
Plant-Animal: as, that it was a tree bearing seed-pods, which, bursting
when ripe, disclosed within little lambs with soft white fleeces, which
Scythians used for weaving into clothing. Or, that it was a real
flesh-and-blood lamb, growing upon a short stem flexible enough to allow
the lamb to feed upon the surrounding grass.
There were many versions of the marvellous tale as it reached Europe;
and the compiler and concocter of the so-called Sir John Mandeville's
travels, as usual, improved upon it. He vouched for the flesh-and-blood
lamb growing out of a plant, and declared that he had both seen and
_eaten it_--whereby the writer proved himself a somewhat greater
romancer than usual. Nevertheless, he has a germ of truth amid his lies,
for he relates of 'Bucharia' that in the land are 'trees that bear wool,
as though it were of sheep, whereof men make clothes and all things that
are made of wool.' And again, of Abyssinia, that mysterious kingdom of
the renowned Prester John, he related: 'In that country, and in many
others beyond, and also in many on this side, men sow the seeds of
cotton, and they sow it every year; and then it grows into small trees
which bear cotton. And so do men every year, so that there is plenty of
cotton at all times.' This statement, whencesoever it was borrowed, may
be true enough, and if so, is evidence that, eighteen centuries after
Herodotus, cotton was still being cultivated, as the basis of a textile
industry, both in Western Asia and in Africa. It is said that in the
Sacred Books of India there is evidence that cotton was in use for
clothing purposes eight centuries before Christ.
The expedition of Alexander the Great from Persia into the Punjab was a
good deal later, say, three hundred and thirty years before Christ. On
the retreat down the Indus, Admiral Nearchus remarked 'trees bearing as
it were flocks or bunches of wool,' of which the natives made 'garments
of surpassing whiteness, or else their black complexions make the
material whiter than any other.' The Alexandrine general, Aristobulus,
is more precise: he tells of a wool-bearing tree yielding a capsule that
contains 'seeds which were taken out, and that which remained was carded
like wool.' And long before Pliny referred to cotton in Egypt--'a shrub
which men call "gossypium," and others "xylon," from which stuffs are
made which we call xylina'--Strabo had noted the cultivation of the
plant on the Persian Gulf.
At the beginning of the Christian era we find cotton in cultivation and
in use in Persia, Arabia, and Egypt--but whether indigenous to these
countries, or conveyed westward during the centuries from India, we know
not. Thereafter, the westward spread was slow; but the plant is to be
traced along the north coast of Africa to Morocco, which country it
seems to have reached in the 9th century. The Moors took the plant, or
seeds, to Spain, and it was being grown on the plains of Valencia in the
10th century; and by the 13th century it was, as we have said, growing
in various parts of Southern Europe.
Yet, although the Indian cloths were known to the Greeks and Romans a
century or two before the Christian era, and although in the early
centuries Arab traders brought to the Red Sea ports Indian calicoes,
which were distributed in Europe, we find cotton known in England only
as material for candle-wicks down to the 17th century. At any rate,
M'Culloch is our authority for believing that the first mention of
cotton being manufactured in England is in 1641; and that the 'English
cottons,' of which earlier mention may be found, were really _woollens_.
And now we come to a very curious thing in the Romance of Cotton.
Columbus discovered--or, as some say, rediscovered--America in 1492; and
when he reached the islands of the Caribbean Sea, the natives who came
off to barter with him brought, among other things, cotton yarn and
thread. Vasco da Gama, a few years later than Bartholomew Diaz, in 1497
rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached the Zanzibar coast. There the
natives were found to be clothed in cotton, just as Columbus found the
natives of Cuba to be, as Pizarro found the Peruvians, and as Cortes
found the Mexicans. These Europeans, proceeding from the Iberian
Peninsula east and west, found the peoples of the new worlds clothed
with a material of which they knew nothing. Cotton was king in America,
as in Asia, before it began even to be known in Western Europe.
Not only that, but cotton must have been cultivated in Africa at the
time when the mariners of Prince Henry the Navigator first made their
way cautiously down the west coast. It is, at any rate, upwards of four
hundred years since cotton cloth was brought from the coast of Guinea
and sold in London as a strange barbaric product. Whether the plant
travelled to the Bight of Benin from the land of Prester John, or from
the land of the Pharaohs, or across from the Mozambique coast, where the
Arabians are supposed to have had settlements and trading stations in
prehistoric days, who can now say? But it is curious enough that when
Africa was discovered by Europeans, the Dark Continent was actually
producing both the fibre and the cloth for which African labour and
English skill were afterwards to be needed. The cotton plantations of
Southern America were worked by the negroes of Africa in order that the
cotton-mills of Lancashire might be kept running. And yet both Africa
and America made cotton cloth from the vegetable wool long before we
knew of it otherwise than as a traveller's wonder.
Even in Asia, the natural habitat of the cotton plant, the story has
been curious. Thus, according to the records above named, cotton has
been in use for clothing for three thousand years in India, and India
borders upon the ancient and extensive Empire of China. Yet cotton was
not used in China for cloth-making until the coming of the Tartars, and
has been cultivated and manufactured there for only about five hundred
years. This was because of the 'vested interests' in wool and silk,
which combined to keep out the vegetable wool from general use.
To understand aright the romance of cotton we must understand the nature
of the plant in its relation to climate. It has been called a child of
the tropics, and yet it grows well in other than tropical climes. As Mr
Richard Marsden--an authority on cotton-spinning--says: 'Cotton is or
can be grown (along) a broad zone extending forty-five degrees north to
thirty-five degrees south of the equator. Reference to a map will show
that this includes a space extending from the European shores of the
Mediterranean to the Cape of Good Hope, from Japan to Melbourne in
Australia, and from Washington in the United States to Buenos Ayres in
South America, with all the lands intermediate between these several
points. These include the Southern States of the American Union, from
Washington to the Gulf of Mexico, and three-fourths of South America,
the whole of the African Continent, and Southern Asia from the Bosphorus
to Pekin in China. The vast area of Australia is also within the cotton
zone, and the islands lying between that country and Asia.'
The exact period at which the manufacture of cotton was begun in England
is not known with absolute certainty. But as we have said, the first
authentic mention of it occurs in 1641; and it is in a book called
_Treasure of Traffic_, by Lewis Roberts. The passage runs thus: 'The
town of Manchester, in Lancashire, must be also herein remembered, and
worthily for their encouragement commended, who buy the yarne of the
Irish in great quantity, and weaving it, returne the same again into
Ireland to sell. Neither doth their industry rest here; for they buy
_cotton-wool_ in London that comes first from Cyprus and Smyrna, and at
home worke the same, and perfect it into fustians, vermilions, dimities,
and other such stuffs; and then return it to London, where the same is
vended and sold, and not seldom sent into foreign parts, who have means,
at far easier terms, to provide themselves of the said first materials.'
But here it should be explained that from the first introduction of the
cotton fibre into this country, and until about the year 1773, in the
manufacture of cloth it was only the weft that was of cotton. Down to
about 1773, the warp was invariably of linen yarn, brought from Ireland
and Germany. The Manchester merchants began in 1760 to employ the
hand-loom weavers in the surrounding villages to make cloth according to
prescribed patterns, and with the yarns supplied by the buyers. Thus
they sent linen yarn for warp, and raw cotton--which the weaver had
first to card and spin on a common distaff--for weft. Such was the
practice when, in 1767, James Hargreaves of Blackburn inaugurated the
textile revolution by inventing the spinning-jenny, which, from small
beginnings, was soon made to spin thirty threads as easily as one. The
thread thus spun, however, was still only available for weft, as the
jenny could not turn out the yarn hard and firm enough for warp. The
next stage, therefore, was the invention of a machine to give the
requisite quality and tenuity to the threads spun from the raw cotton.
This was the spinning-frame of Richard Arkwright, the story of which
every schoolboy is supposed to know.
Here, then, we reach another point in our romance. The manufacture of
cotton cloths in England from raw cotton is older than the cotton
culture of North America. It is, in fact, only about one hundred years
since we began to draw supplies of raw cotton from the Southern States,
which, previous to 1784, did not export a single pound, and produced
only a small quantity for domestic consumption. The story of the
development of cotton-growing in America is quite as marvellous as the
story of the expansion of cotton-manufacturing in England. In both cases
the most stupendous extension ever reached by any single industry in the
history of the world has been reached in less than a hundred years.
And yet Columbus found the Cubans, as Pizarro found the Peruvians, and
Cortes found the Mexicans, clothed in cotton. Was it from the same plant
as now supplies 'half the calico used by the entire human race' (as an
American writer has computed)? This estimate, by the way, was arrived at
thus: In 1889-90 the cotton crop of the world was 6094 millions of
pounds, and the population of the world was computed at 1500 millions.
This gave four pounds of raw cotton, equal to twenty yards of calico,
per head; and the proportion of raw cotton provided by the Southern
States was equal to eleven and a half yards per head. The raw cotton
imported by Great Britain in 1894 had a value of nearly 33 million
pounds sterling; the exports of cotton yarn and manufactured goods
amounted to about 66 millions sterling.
There are several species of the cotton plant; but those of commercial
importance are four in number. Herbaceous Cotton ('Gossypium
herbaceum') is the plant which yields the East Indian 'Surat' and some
varieties of the Egyptian cotton. Its habitats are India, China, Arabia,
Egypt, and Asia Minor. It is an annual: it grows to a height of five or
six feet, it has a yellow flower, and it yields a short staple. Tree
Cotton ('Gossypium arboreum'), on the other hand, grows to a height of
fifteen or twenty feet, has a red flower, and yields a fine silky wool.
Its habitats are Egypt, Arabia, India, and China. Hairy Cotton
('Gossypium hirsutum') is a shrub of some six or seven feet high, with a
white or straw-coloured flower, and hairy pods, which yield the staple
known as American 'Upland' and 'Orleans' cotton. Another variety, called
'Gossypium Barbadense,' because it was first found in Barbadoes, grows
to a height of about fifteen feet, and has a yellow flower, yielding a
long staple, and fine silky wool known as 'Sea Island' cotton. This now
grows most extensively on the coasts of Georgia and Florida; but has
been experimented with in various parts of the world, notably in Egypt,
where it has succeeded; and in the Polynesian islands, where, for some
reason or another, it has failed.
The cotton plant of the American cotton plantations is an annual, which
shoots above ground in about a fortnight after sowing, and which, as it
grows, throws out flower-stalks, at the end of each of which develops a
pod with fringed calyces. From this pod emerges a flower which, in some
of the American varieties of the general species, will change its colour
from day to day. The complete bloom flourishes for only twenty-four
hours, at the end of which time the flower twists itself off, leaving a
pod or boll, which grows to the size of a large filbert, browns and
hardens like a nut, and then bursts, revealing the fibre or wool encased
in three or four (according to the variety) cells within. This fibre or
wool is the covering of the seeds, and in each cell will be as many
separate fleeces as seeds, yet apparently forming one fleece.
Upon the characteristics of this fleece depends the commercial value of
the fibre. The essential qualities of good and mature cotton are thus
enumerated by an expert: 'Length of fibre; smallness or fineness in
diameter; evenness and smoothness; elasticity; tensile strength and
colour; hollowness or tube-like construction; natural twist; corrugated
edges; and moisture.' The fibre of Indian cotton is only about
five-eighths of an inch long; that of Sea Island about two inches. Then
Sea Island cotton is a sort of creamy-white colour; and some kinds of
American and Egyptian cotton are not white at all, but golden in hue;
while other kinds, again, are snow-white.
Although the term 'American Cotton' is applied to all the cotton
produced in the United States of America, it really applies to a number
of different varieties--such as Texas, Mobile, Upland, Orleans,
&c.--each one known by its distinctive name. The differences are too
technical for explanation here; but, generally speaking, the members of
the 'hirsutum' species of the 'Gossypium' tribe now rule the world of
cotton.
They are the product of what is called the 'Cotton-belt' of the United
States, an area stretching for about two thousand miles between its
extreme points in the Southern States, which are North and South
Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas,
and Texas. Over this area, soil and climate vary considerably. The
'Cotton-belt' lies, roughly speaking, between the thirtieth and fortieth
parallels of north latitude. As an American expert says: 'Cotton can be
produced with various degrees of profit throughout the region bounded on
the north by a line passing through Philadelphia; on the south by a line
passing a little south of New Orleans; and on the west by a line
passing through San Antonio. This is the limit of the possibilities.'
The cotton plant likes a light sandy soil, or a black alluvial soil like
that of the Mississippi margins. It requires both heat and moisture in
due proportions, and is sensitive to cold, to drought, and to excessive
moisture. The American cotton-fields are still worked by negroes, but no
longer slaves, as before the war; and, in fact, the negroes are now not
only free, but some of them are considerable cotton-growers on their own
account. On the other hand, one finds nowadays little of the old system
of spacious plantations under one ownership. Instead, the cultivation is
carried on on small farms and allotments, not owned but rented by the
cultivators. Large numbers of these cotton farmers are 'financed' by
dealers, by landowners, or even by local storekeepers.
The cotton factor is the go-between of the grower and the exporting
agent in Galveston or New Orleans, or other centre of business. After
the crop is picked by the negroes--men, women, and children--and the
harvest is a long process--the seeds are separated from the fibre by
means of a 'gin;' and then the cotton-wool is packed into loose bales
for the factor, while the seeds are sent to a mill to be crushed for
cotton-seed oil and oil-cake for cattle-feeding. The loose cotton bales
are collected by the factors into some such central town as Memphis,
where they are sorted, sampled, graded, and then compressed by machinery
into bales of about four hundred and forty pounds each, for export. In
calculating crops, &c., a bale is taken as four hundred pounds net.
The cotton then passes into the hands of the shipping agent, who brands
it, and forwards it by river-steamer to one of the Southern ports, or by
rail to New York or Boston, where it is put on board an ocean steamer
for Europe. The beautiful American clippers with which some of us were
familiar in the days of our youth are no longer to be seen; they have
been run off the face of the waters by the 'ocean liner' and the
'tramp.' Arrived in Liverpool, cotton enters upon a new course of
adventures altogether, and engages the thoughts and energies of a wholly
new set of people.
[Illustration: Cotton Plant.]
[Illustration]