Key Text: Mémoire sur un nouvel équipage de chaudieres a sucre

by Moreau de Saint-Méry, M. L. E. (Médéric Louis Elie), and M. Belin de Villeneuve.

 

Mémoire sur un nouvel équipage de chaudieres a sucre : pour les colonies, avec le plan dudit equipage. Se trouv [sic] a Paris : Chez Hardouin et Gattey, libraires, au Palais Royal, Arcades, no. 13 et 14, 1786.

[Trans.] Memoir on a new crew* of sugar boilers; for the colonies, with a plan of said equipment. 

*a “crew” is five sugar boilers as opposed to four or fewer 

 

The two digital images of engravings we include fall within a larger scientific text on a sugar refinery and a design for a five-boiler operation invented by M. Belin de Villeneuve, whose family owned the plantation where Makandal was most likely injured. 

The thirty-page plan published in 1786 on the details of Belin de Villeneuve’s invention of a grouping of five boilers or a “crew” of boilers, is written by M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, another lawyer and agronomist who wrote about Makandal in context of his discussion of the same mill and refinery about ten years later in Description Topographique de la partie francaise.  The scientific document accompanying these engravings is about thirty pages long and concludes with a brief message of thanks and praise from M. Belin de Villeneuve to his friend, Moreau de Saint-Méry, for producing them. 

The scan of the engravings include numbered parts at the bottom but are illegible from scan quality. The titles on the two engravings are translated below, and we have reproduced and translated a sign that was, according to this author’s later 1796 text, written on the central chimney where slaves would have labored. Moreau de Saint-Méry writes:

“* We read on the mantel of the chimney of M. Belin's sugar factory, these four lines which it inspired in M. de la Borde, ensign of the ship, who perished in M. de la Pérouse's journey around the World.

The active man has goods (property), the idle man has evils,

All work has its reward,

And the sweetest here makes up for

The bitterness of our work.” 

                                                                          -Description 651-52

 

The Engravings are the last two pages of Mémoire sur un nouvel équipage de chaudieres a sucre

 

First Engraving  

Translation of text:

Plan of a sugar refinery and a sugar boiler crew 

Invented by M. Belin and run on his plantation and run in partnership with Mr. Raby.

Au Bas Limbé, 

Ile S’Domingue

Plan pris au dessus de Chaudieres

 

Second Engraving

Parts - Sections of the refinery and of the crew of boilers
Invented by M. Belin and run on his plantation and run in partnership with Mr. Raby.

Au Bas Limbe

Isle St. Domingue.