Hello!
I can't understand the bold part of following sentence:

Quote :

A hogshead at this time probably contained 475 to 500 pounds of tobacco. Cutting as many plants in an hour “as well would have imployed twenty men a Summers tendance to have perfected,” in Gloucester alone these plant-cutting rioters destroyed 200 plantations in the first week of their campaign

What's that "Summers tendance": were they cutting in a particular dicetion? At a rythm used in Summer? Really no clue.
It's the account of a riot in seventeenth-century Virginia, where the planters destroyed tobacco plants in protest.

I am sure it is crystal-clear for you —or so I hope, because otherwise I will feel forced to "eat" that part…  

Thanks a lot for your help, as always.

CM

ComicMonster wrote:

I am sure it is crystal-clear for you —or so I hope, because otherwise I will feel forced to "eat" that part…  

I hope you're hungry as it certainly isn't crystal clear to me.

However while I do not know, I'd guess it just means something like temporary summer work, as in it would have employed twenty men "to be in attendance" every day to get that much tobacco cut before it spoiled. I wonder if "summer tendance" was a specific term referring to this type of employment practice; taking on extra hands to get the harvest in, the work lasting just a few weeks or maybe even days.

Such work practices are still often used in France (emploi saisonnier) to employ extra people - often students, many perhaps foreign students hoping for a short outdoors working holiday where they can get a suntan and also practice their French, or local people wanting to earn a little extra cash - for just the few weeks of the grape harvest (the vindange) or for other critical manpower-intensive harvest periods such as for cherries, peaches and apricots. Grapes in particular require very little attention throughout most of the year, however as they can only be cut by hand, for just a couple of weeks at harvest time a large estate will require hundreds of workers, working dawn til dusk while the weather holds. It's hard manual work with long hours outside in hot September weather, but they get paid and there is usually a big social aspect too, with hearty meals and drink thrown in, usually eaten communally and with do-it-yourself entertainment, and with simple bunkroom accommodation too if needed. I'm sure you have the same set up in Spain.

Of course if there's an underlying grievance, then bringing a lot of temporary workers together at a time when they hold a degree of power because their labour is so desperately needed, might well be a recipe for a riot.

Summers tendance.
A summer tending to the plants seems likely. From what little I know of tobacco, I think the plants need the mature leaves picking repeatedly - more like a tea garden than a vineyard.

The vindange used to be mimicked in parts of the UK by the hop pickers (cf Orwell, "A clergyman's daughter"), a mix of itinerant (often gypsy) workers and urban families having a paid holiday, but that's mostly mechanised now. Mention of riots and other troubles remind me of Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath".

Good point GG, and linguistically 'tending to the plants' would also make more sense of the word 'tendance'.

Regarding the cultivation of tobacco, wiki says:
Tobacco is cultivated annually, and can be harvested in several ways. In the oldest method, still used today, the entire plant is harvested at once by cutting off the stalk at the ground with a tobacco knife; it is then speared onto sticks, four to six plants a stick, and hung in a curing barn. In the 19th century, bright tobacco began to be harvested by pulling individual leaves off the stalk as they ripened. The leaves ripen from the ground upwards, so a field of tobacco harvested in this manner entails the serial harvest of a number of "primings", beginning with the volado leaves near the ground, working to the seco leaves in the middle of the plant, and finishing with the potent ligero leaves at the top. Before harvesting, the crop must be topped when the pink flowers develop.

I wonder how it was harvested in 17th-century Virginia.

Hi Meles meles and Green George,
from your explanations and the wider context I understand with no doubts (OK: almost) that the sentence refers to a rythm of work. I guess that in summer, when the plants (that is, leaves) get to their sequential maturity point, the plant cutters would be forced to work at top speed. Here being a riot, they decide to destroy the plants, and they do that at such a speed that they eliminate ten thousand hogsheads (e. g. barrels), each weighing between 450 and 500 pounds —which, I guess, is a fast rythm, since they seem to have done it in the first week of their campaign. By the same stroke, they finished also with the glut of tobacco markets that was reducing the prices of the product to ridiculous levels.

Thanks for your answers. I see the meaning of "vendange" as "harvest" (a "summer" or maybe fall collection of grapes —not of "wrath" in the literary sense but of real wrath, as much as the one the poor whites running for promised California oranges were feeling in the wake of 29 crash. Very interesting.
I go again to my onions…

Thanks again to all. Take care.

CM

This might be actual riot Comic Monster mentioned in the OP. It was an attempt to drive up prices by reducing the supply.

Tobacco in Colonial Virginia


 At the same time, the First and Second Anglo-Dutch Wars also interfered with the tobacco trade (the Crown had placed restrictions on trading with the Dutch), and prices sank even lower. In 1682, a group of frustrated planters in Gloucester, Middlesex, and New Kent counties cut down tobacco seedlings at several hundred plantations in an attempt to raise prices. The plant-cutting riots were put down, and afterward prices rose briefly, but in 1688 a bumper crop of about 18 million pounds of tobacco was produced in Virginia—the highest yield ever—causing prices to fall to a penny a pound.

Hi Triceratops,
yes, you are absolutely right. This is the riot. Prices were effectively an issue, as was the land grabbing of big shots that received hundreds and thousands of the best acres of land when "importing" bond laborers from britain and Ireland, or "black chattel" from Africa, to receive the grant of 50 or more acres per head by virtue (by vice, I should say) of the headright system.

That comes from a really interesting book, as you know: The invention of the white race, of Theodore W. Allen.

All the best,

CM