(I) In 1493, when Christopher Columbus started his
second voyage to the Americas, he took sugar cane
with him. (II) He planted the continent's first sugar cane
in Hispaniola, the site, not coincidentally, of a great
slave revolt a few hundred years later. (III) Within
decades mills producing sugar proliferated in Jamaica
and Cuba, where rainforest had been cleared and the
native population had been eliminated by disease or
war, or enslaved. (IV) Tobacco and cotton were also
grown in the 1700s on Barbados Island plantations by
the slaves. (V) The Portuguese created an effective but
brutal model, making Brazil into an early boom colony,
with more than 100,000 slaves producing tons of sugar