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identified as the place where sugar cane was first cultivated because one of the original species found in later hybrid canes is still growing there. The other components of the hybrid cane appear to have come from India, and botanists assume that the New Guinea cane was carried and traded all the way to India, where the first hybrid canes came into being. The rest of the argument is complex botany, but suffice it to say that for half a century, botanists have regarded sugar cultivation as a New Guinean invention.
    So why did the cane travel so far in early times? Even when they lack a common language, humans develop ways of communicating, of synthesising what linguists call creole languages and lingua francas, capable of transmitting complex ideas—and traders will happily transmit the idea that this sort of stick is nice to chew on, and so worth trading. Even in New Guinea, where people in neighbouring valleys often speak entirely different tongues, marrying-out occurs—this is a polite way of saying that women are ‘traded’, married off into other clans and tribes—and so methods and ideas travel from village to village.
    A few men travelled more widely as traders of feathers, stone blades or other essentials of life. As they went, they would also help to spread new ideas about the sweet stick that grew when bits were poked into the ground. And that, of course, might have been the trigger to make other New Guineans start poking sticks in the ground, to see if they grew in the same way. Soon everywhere that sugar cane was found, people would have known the trick of putting bits in the ground. More importantly, sugar was being found in new places, as some of the extra bits were traded further afield, along with the key knowledge. And down in the lowlands, longer trading trips along the coast were possible using a creole language that has since blossomed as Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia, from Malaysia to the western half of New Guinea.
    The word ‘creole’ appears many times in the story of sugar. A creole language has a mixed but brief set of words which must often carry multiple meanings, and a recognisable syntax. These tongues arise whenever different racial groups come together. The Pidgin English of New Guinea uses words from many languages, but clearly has an Austronesian syntax, like Bahasa Indonesia. Creole languages also developed in Hawaii and many other sugar-growing regions. The wealthy planters of the Caribbean were called Creoles; the sugar cane that came to the Caribbean from the Mediterranean, the variety widely used across the world until the late 1700s, was called ‘Creole’; and so were some of the mixed-race groups which arose in sugar-growing areas.
    Somewhere, sometime later, perhaps in India, perhaps somewhere else, somebody found that if you boiled cane juice in a metal pan, added some ash or other alkali, scooped off the skin on the surface and boiled the juice some more, sweet crystals formed. The art of making sugar had been discovered, and a new industry was invented.
    THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SLAVE LINE
    Just a teenager, I stood on a slight rise, watching the labour lines trudging across undulating ground. They were planting teak roots in a cleared patch of jungle on the coastal plain of Papua, setting the trees out in close rows. The procedure was simple and labour-intensive: lines of five men walked between stakes placed eight feet apart at each end of the ground they were filling that day. The stakes marked the rows where the trees were to go.
    Each leader measured eight feet from the previous point, using his precisely cut pole, made a scratch and moved on to measure the next pole-length. Walking behind, the second man swung a pick to make a small hole and the next man, carrying a sack of teak roots cut early that morning, dropped a root beside the hole for the fourth man to poke into the ground. At the tail of the line, the last man