WINDMILLS
Long before I met my husband, I was fascinated with Barbados. As a voracious reader, I had come across descriptions of this beautiful island in several books and wondered if I would ever visit there! But imagine my surprise when, after marrying this interesting man, I learned that one of the symbols on the country’s crest was the windmill. This was remarkable to me because my father and his family had immigrated from the Netherlands and I was proud of my Dutch heritage! I learned that, at the height of the sugar cane industry in Barbados, it was second only to the Netherlands, in the whole world, in the number of windmills per square mile. At its greatest number, the count was a little more than 500 windmills in Barbados to the approximately 9,000 at the peak in the Netherlands.
The sugar cane industry began in 1637 because the former crop of tobacco was said to yield only one third of the profit per acre than sugar cane. The canes were first brought to Barbados from Brazil by a Dutchman, named Pieter Blower, along with the idea of wind-propelled mills, rather than using animals, to turn gears which moved the millstones for grinding the cane to a pulp. The first in both cane growing and use of a windmill at his plantation was Colonel James Drax, of Drax Hall in the parish of St. George. He built the first windmill the design of the Dutch and processed nearly eight tons of sugar can a day on his plantation!
The Dutch, on the other hand, made multiple uses of windmills, from the best known use of pumping water off land to reclaim it from the sea for farming, to sawing wood, grinding grain, and others. Unlike Barbados, the mill keeper in Holland usually lived in the multi-storied structure. Barbados was the trend setter for the West Indies, and not many other islands have windmills. Those that did (or do) never embraced them for industry to the extent that Barbados did. Barbados and Antigua are known for the tourist attraction of the old structure, some having been rebuilt as part of their national treasures, but with the dwindling cane industry, the mills are no longer in active service. Instead, the resurgence of harnessing the ever-present ocean breezes has led to a new type of windmill – the wind turbine to generate much needed power for the small nations of the archipelago of the Caribbean islands.
By Jeanne