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76 chapter viii y Furnaces, Their Equipment, the Required Firewood, and the Ash Used for Leaching Next to the milling house, which is also called the building for the mill, is the building for the furnaces. These are actually consuming mouths that inhale wood from the countryside, black holes of perpetual fire and smoke giving lively images of the volcanoes of Mounts Vesuvius and Etna. One might almost say the furnace looks like Purgatory or Hell. Near the furnaces there are those condemned to work them, which are the slaves with yaws19 and those with an imbalance in their humors that ties them to this tiring work in order to purge themselves by their prodigious sweat of the acidic humors filling their bodies. Other slaves can be seen there, the wicked and perverse, locked in long and heavy iron chains in this demanding work. They pay for their wicked excesses with little or no hope of mending their ways. On the royal mills, there are usually six furnaces and numerous additional assisting slaves called firewood stokers. The openings for the furnaces are ringed with iron. This is not only to give more support for the bricks but also to prevent the stokers from causing an accident when they feed the fire. At its mouth, each furnace has two holes that are vents allowing the fire to puff and blow. The pillars between them have to be very strong, made of brick and baked lime, but the body of the furnace is made from bricks with clay to better resist the intense heat of the fire. Neither baked lime nor hard stone will do this. The cauldrons are a bit larger than the kettles. The source for the fire is wood. Only Brazil, with its vast stretches of countryside, can supply the needs of so many furnaces. It has done this for many years and will do so for many more in the future. How many furnaces there are on the mills of Bahia, Pernambuco, and Rio de Janeiro that operate day and night, six, seven, eight, and nine months of the year! To understand how abundant 77 Furnaces and Their Equipment this countryside is, just the region around Jaguaripe provides sufficient firewood for the many mills along the coast of the Recôncavo of Bahia.20 In reality, it supplies almost all those in that region. They begin to cut firewood in Jaguaripe in July because the mills in Bahia start milling in August. Each slave must cut and pile daily a measure of wood seven palmas high and eight long. This is also the size of a cart, and eight carts makes one tarefa. Cutting the wood, arranging, transporting, and loading it onto the boat are tasks for the wood seller. Arranging it on board is the responsibility of the sailors. There are boats able to haul five tarefas; some carry four, some three, and each tarefa costs 2,500 réis when the master of the mill sends his boat to seek it. If the seller brings the wood in his boat, then the cargo charges are added according to the distance from the port. A royal mill in production eight or nine months from one year to another spends 2,000 cruzados for firewood. There was one year when the Sergipe do Conde Mill spent more than 3,000 cruza­ dos because it milled longer than usual and the price of the firewood was higher. The firewood is transported in sailboats, with four sailors and the boat master. For the smooth operation of the mill, the master should have two boats, since when one arrives, the other can depart to collect more firewood. The best mix of firewood is half big, thick logs and cross-pieces, which are smaller, and the other half small pieces. The big pieces feed the furnaces and cook the sugar in the cauldrons, where it is necessary to have a hotter fire for the sugar to coagulate. The medium-size pieces feed the fires made from the bigger pieces, while the smaller pieces are used under the kettles where they skim the caldo. In order to clean out the dregs from the caldo, it is necessary to have continuous flames. For that reason, the big pieces are called “cauldron firewood” and the smaller pieces are called “kettle firewood.” After the firewood has arrived at the dock for the mill, it is stacked in a pile. It is always a good idea to...

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