Nature's Evil

In Venice there was a Hemp Guild which controlled both the quality of hemp produced and the middlemen who traded in it. Having founded the English Royal Navy, Henry VIII in 1533 laid every farmer under the obligation to set aside some land for hemp production. Elizabeth I raised this hemp tax and increased the punishment for non-payment. In 1611 London asked the colonists in Jamestown to sow hemp alongside their tobacco crop. The obedient deputies of the colonial assemblies in Virginia, then Maryland and Pennsylvania, copied these decisions. The British government offered a subsidy for every acre sown with hemp. Ten of the thirteen American colonies followed suit. In Virginia, if a household couldn’t manage the required consignment of hemp, it paid a fine of 1,000 lb of tobacco. Clearly, the farmers preferred growing wool and tobacco for the mass market to growing hemp for the government’s benefit. Then a myth arose that the English climate was unsuitable for hemp growing. In 1808 the government asked the East India Company to implement the production of hemp in India. The empire was permanently short of hemp and its by-products. The reasons had little to do with climate: hemp grew everywhere, and it grew in England. It was the processing that needed certain environmental conditions. There was no similar problem with any other raw material – with grain or wool or cotton; if there was a shortage of them, prices rose and then production increased, even though with delay. 6

Unable to impose hemp on their farmers, the British Empire and its American colonies depended on Russian hemp. The eminent historian Alfred Crosby wrote his first book about America’s resource dependence on imperial Russia. Hundreds of American ships plied back and forth across the Atlantic and the Great Lakes. Each vessel had sails, ropes and rigging lines, and nearly all of them were made out of North European, for the most part Russian, hemp and linen; a mere 2 per cent of the hemp which they used in ships’ rigging was home-grown in America. For example, the three-masted, 44-cannon frigate Constitution , which left the Boston shipyard in 1794 and is still afloat today, had about a hundred tons of rigging; every rope was made out of imported hemp. Such a frigate needed two sets of sails, each containing about an acre of linen canvas, and this too had been sourced from the ports of Northern Europe. Every few years the rigging and sails had to be replaced. ‘Russian hemp’ was considered the most robust and reliable. Linen from Silesian flax was finer than Russian, and this quality was prized for underwear and clothes. But Russian linen made the best sails and Russian hemp made the best ropes.

The unusual processing shaped the history of hemp: turning plants into a commodity needed competent, honest and prolonged labour. The long filaments of the hemp plant are joined together by a sticky tar which has to be removed before the splitting and cleaning process can begin. The Americans used natural ventilation to do this. After the harvest, the hemp stalks were left lying on the ground for about a month and occasionally turned over. This got rid of the unwanted tar but damaged the fibres, which became coarse and partly lost their ability to curl up. These fibres were suitable for making sacks but made poor-quality ropes; the American sailors refused to use them, even though they were cheap. The Russian method began by drying the stalks in sheaves, but then the stalks were strewn in water and pressed under wooden frames. The purer the water, preferably running water, the better the fibre produced. Depending on its intended use, the hemp was soaked for anything from two weeks to three years. In some cases the water was heated up. Then the fibre was dried, and only after this was it scutched and combed. As a result, commercial hemp, suitable for rigging, was only ready for sale two years after the crop had been cut in the fields. This method of retting never lent itself to mechanisation or to slave labour; the production process needed knowledge, experience and patience. Much of this work was done by women, and probably by children too.

The main buyers of Russian and Baltic linen and hemp were the English, who needed them for sails, ropes, fishing nets, underwear, tablecloths and cheap clothing. The Admiralty established the production of canvas and hemp in Scotland and Ireland, but the British fleet still depended on supplies from abroad. The prices for hemp and canvas constantly increased, especially during times of war, but the production of hemp and linen in England declined. It was a paradox of mercantilism that, while the British economy made its profits by processing American cotton, which was used largely for decorative purposes, the Royal Navy sourced its vitally important fibres from continental Europe and distant Russia – independent and frequently hostile countries.