246 of his _Letters_.] The cane-mill in the eighteenth century consisted merely of three iron-sheathed cylinders, two of them set against the third, turned by wind, water or cattle.

The canes, tied into small bundles for greater compression, were given a double squeezing while passing through the mill.
The juice expressed found its way through a trough into the boiling house while the flattened stalks, called mill trash or megass in the British colonies and bagasse in Louisiana, were carried to sheds and left to dry for later use as fuel under the coppers and stills.
In the boiling house the cane-juice flowed first into a large receptacle, the clarifier, where by treatment with lime and moderate heat it was separated from its grosser impurities.

It then passed into the first or great copper, where evaporation by boiling began and some further impurities, rising in scum, were taken off.

After further evaporation in smaller coppers the thickened fluid was ladled into a final copper, the teache, for a last boiling and concentration; and when the product of the teache was ready for crystallization it was carried away for the curing.

In Louisiana the successive caldrons were called the grande, the propre, the flambeau and the batterie, the last of these corresponding to the Jamaican teache.
The curing house was merely a timber framework with a roof above and a great shallow sloping vat below.