Antigua's old mills turn with new winds.

• Author: Sletto, Bjorn
• Position: Sugar mill restorations - Cover Story

On a gentle rise above Hatton, Antigua, stands a broken sugar mill. It looms in weary silence, lichen and mosses spreading like an ancient plague across its limestone walls, vines burrowing through fissures in its crumbling mortar. No sails are left to turn, no wind shaft left to crank. The giant cast-iron rollers and pinion gears slowly turn to dust, one insidious flake of rust at a time. Only the trade winds persist, whistling ceaselessly through the gaping doorways, carrying the sounds of village life and a salty whiff of ocean from beyond the ridge to the south.

It wasn't always so. Once, the mill at Hatton was a miracle of power and engineering, its sails turning at a stately, inexorable four-to six revolutions a minute, its rollers capable of crushing two acres of sugarcane each day and any human body part that got too close. Mills such as this were the heart and soul of the giant sugar estates that for almost three hundred years dominated the low-slung, windswept island nation of Antigua and Barbuda, as well as many of the other Leeward Islands.

Today, most of the one hundred or so remaining sugar mills scattered through the Antiguan countryside are abandoned or in ruins--the mossy, conical stone towers strange anachronisms in a nation filled with bright and modern cinder-block houses, whitewashed resorts, and speedboats. But about a dozen sugar mills are restored or adapted to other uses by private individuals, companies, and even the government, which owns most of the mills. It has become one way for Antiguans to come to terms with their horrific heritage of slavery, the monster that spawned and fed the wealthy sugar estates.

"People ask me, `why do you do this,"' says Jerry Pardoe, the Falmouth shipwright who rebuilt the north mill on the Betty's Hope Estate, once the nation's richest sugar estate. "`It only reminds us of the history of slavery.' But to that I say, `history is history. You can't make it go away.' It's better to confront the past, to tell our children what it was like back then, than to avoid talking about it."

The Betty's Hope Estate restoration aims to do just that. The project began in 1988, when a group of Antiguans and foreign citizens formed the Betty's Hope Trust, a nonprofit organization devoted to restoring and operating the decrepit sugar estate. After the last sugarcane was processed at Betty's Hope, some time in the mid-1920s, the estate was looted, the limestone removed and used for houses elsewhere on the island, the tools, machinery, and household items long gone. The only buildings left standing were the stable, which had been in use until recently, and the twin sugar mills.

The challenge for the Trust was to rebuild as many of the buildings as possible and turn the site into an open-air history center all with limited funding and sometimes lackluster support. After pilot studies and fund-raising efforts--which resulted in grants from UNESCO, the investor Paul Mellon, and the German government--work began in 1990. Volunteers cleared brush and trash from the site, local contractors rebuilt the stable into a visitor's center, and Pardoe began the painstaking restoration of the north mill.

"We killed a lot of tools on this job," chuckles Pardoe, as he gazes up the main shaft to the housing and the wallower, three stories up. "We used twelve-inch-thick greenheart, a hardwood we bought in Guyana, and drilled it with ship's augers. Greenheart is one of the hardest woods on earth. It's just massive."

Once, Pardoe recalls, he had three men working in shifts for two weeks to cut through a fifteen-inch cast-iron shaft. He needed to salvage the cross--the part where the sails attach to the mill--and transfer it to a shaft donated by the owner of another, derelict Antiguan mill. "If we couldn't get the cross off," he says, "we wouldn't have a mill. The tooth...