The tradition of making charcoal was once a major economic activity in Seychelles and is now becoming a thing of the past. When I was young, there were charcoal traders in most villages but only a very few are now left. There is currently quite a high demand from restaurants and hotels for charcoal and it is increasing, much of that charcoal is being imported. Although some charcoal is still being produced by the Island Development Company (IDC) on the island of Coëtivy from casuarinas trees, it is not enough to satisfy the local market. A short film at the end of this post shows how charcoal is produced on that island.
Charcoal Burning-Sarbon
What is Charcoal?
Charcoal is made by heating wood or other organic materials, including coconut shells above 400° C in an oxygen-starved environment. In this post, we will discuss how charcoal is made from timber, how coconut shell charcoal is made, as well as the importance of charcoal in the early years of settlement.
Traditional Use of Charcoal.
Charcoal is one of the oldest commodities in the world. Traditionally, it was used in Seychelles for indoor cooking and ironing and currently for barbeques. The reason why it was used for indoor cooking is that it does not produce any smoke.
When used for indoor cooking the charcoal was placed in a reso, which is a traditional piece of equipment, also known as coal pot. It is in effect it is a small portable stove used to boil water or cook small dishes. It offers more of a slow-cook meal experience, enabling the deep, rich flavours and nutrients of your dish to shine through. The earthy, smoked flavour from the coals provides a nice added bonus.
A Old Style Kettle Sitting on a Trivet on a ‘Reso‘
The reso was also used for ironing. The hand iron, or karo, was placed on the hot charcoal or at time on a trivet over the embers. When it was ready to use it was cleaned by using a piece of green banana leaf. The iron was pressed and twisted on the leaf before the ironing started. This cleaned the iron and added natural oil underneath the iron that assisted in getting the iron to glide easily on the material being ironed.
Charcoal making methods
Traditionally, there are two main methods of making charcoal in Seychelles. The pit and earth mound kilns. The pit kiln involves digging out a pit, putting in the wood and covering the whole with excavated earth to seal and insulate the chamber. A similar method is used in Island Coëtivy. The other is to cover a pile of wood on the ground with earth, sand, and leaves. This cover forms the necessary gas-tight layer behind which charcoaling can take place. In Seychelles, it is the earth mound method that was and is still popular.
This short video below shows how the pit method is used in charcoal production on Coetivy Island by IDC
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=208296691176279
How is the earth mound kiln made
Find the location
To save transportation costs, the small-scale charcoal-maker produces his charcoal at the place where he collects the raw material. He looks for an open space which must be far from residential area as the burning creates a lot of smoke. He makes sure that the surface is flat, preferably on high ground to allow for easy drainage should it rain. The area is cleaned up and anything that could catch fire is removed. These include dried leaves, grass, small branches etc. These are not thrown away because they will be used to place on the mound when the time comes.
A charcoal Mount Burning ( Seychelles News Agency) Photo License: CC-BY
Gather the wood
The next step is to gather enough dry hard wood and cut into logs of approximately ½ to 2/3 of a meter in length and separate the large ones from the small ones.
Types of wood used
Only hard wood is used for charcoal making and this includes casuarina (Casuarina equisetifolia), and takamaka trees (Calophyllum inophyllum) . This is because hard wood is slow burning and your charcoal lasts longer.
One of the trees that were widely used for a while for charcoal making in Seychelles in the early 1920s was the rubber trees or kaoutsou ( hevea Brasiliensis). Rubber trees were introduced at the turn of the century and by 1911 nearly 800 acres had been planted, mainly on large estates. The trees were tapped for the milk sap which formed the basis for commercial rubber and considerable quantities were exported up to 1928. But rubber growing proved to be uneconomical, so that rubber trees were phased out, and were cut down and used in charcoal making.
Building the mound
Place a center wooden pillar upright firmly into the ground. Arrange the wood logs at an angle against the pillar, placing them fairly tightly but not too tight, you require space for the minimum air that will be in the mound. Bigger logs are placed at the bottom. Build up the timber on top of each other to form a tent or dome shaped structure.
A Small Sketch of a Cross Section of a Charcoal Mound
Two critical things are required when building the mound. In the middle of the mound, you require a flue like space going all the way from the bottom to the top of the mound. You also require a tunnel-like space that reaches horizontally from the outside to the center of the mound joining the bottom of the flue. That space which is like a ‘door’ is where you would place the fire, and the flue is required initially to allow the smoke to escape.
Once the mound has reached the required height, it is covered with leaves, grass, preferably green (less tendency to burn) and once this is complete, the whole mound is covered and sealed with soil and sometime with mud, if available.
Why the leaves and soil cover?
The whole idea behind covering the mound with leaves and soil is to minimise the air flow and the presence of oxygen in the mound. If the timber is exposed to too much oxygen, the timber will burn into ash. Furthermore, it traps the heat that is required for the carbonising process.
Once the mound is complete and sealed with leaves and soil, a fire is lit and inserted into the side ‘tunnel’. The fire is allowed to start burning some of the timber in the mound and smoke will start to appear in the ‘flue’. Once the fire has started, the little hole to the side ‘corridor’ as well as the flue are blocked with soil.
The timber burns at around 600° C. Once the timber in the mound starts to burn the smoke will appear through tiny gaps in the cover and it will be white, which is the steam produced from the timber. After a few hours the smoke becomes thicker which is the result of the burning wood and all the chemicals in it.
Keeping watch
The burning mound must be watched 24 hours. This is because, as the wood burns, the mound may start to collapse and may develop holes that will allow oxygen into the mound. These holes must be covered immediately because any oxygen that enters the mound will burn the wood inside and turn it into ash. Blocking these holes is the job of the person watching the mound. The challenge faced by the people keeping watch is falling asleep.
A local charcoal trader next to his burning site, keeping Watch. ( Seychelles News Agency) Photo License: CC-BY
The one-legged stool
This challenge is managed by having at least two people keeping watch, so that at least one is awake while the other is taking a nap. Sometimes the second person may not be available, so the one-legged stool came into play.
One-legged Stool
Some landowners came up with the idea of the one-legged stool to be used mainly at night. The person watching is allowed to sit on the stool and as the tool is unstable, if he doses off, he will fall, and this hopefully will wake him up!
When is the charcoal ready?
When the smoke starts to turn blue the coal is ready, and the burning has to be stopped. Some holes are created in the mound with a shovel and water is poured into them. With sudden exposure to oxygen the coal may catch fire and burn into ash. Great care here is required to ensure that enough water is available and that the burning is stopped. Sometimes, in the absence of fresh water, especially on the outlying islands, seawater is used.
Collecting the charcoal
Once the charcoal is cooled down, it is gently scattered and allowed to cool completely. It is then bagged in gunny bags or bal sarbon, transported to a shed and kept in a dry store until required. Wet charcoal is of no use!
Charcoal Bags- Bal Sarbon
How was it sold
Traditionally charcoal was sold in bwat ferblan and bal . Bwat ferblan ( fr. boite en fer-blanc) is a large square biscuit tin. It was also sold in demi-ferblan. Bal is a jute or hessian bag, commonly known as a gunny bag, or goni, in which sugar, rice and some other dry goods were imported.
CHARCOAL with coconut shells
As mentioned earlier, charcoal was also made from coconut kernel shells of matured coconuts. It is called Sarbon kafoul koko (coconut shell charcoal). It is now not produced anymore but was produced mainly in the outlying islands where coconut trees are abundant and where hardwood, apart from the casuarina, was limited. The coconut shells were obtained as a biproduct of copra production. It was made by burning the shells of fully matured coconuts in a limited supply of air sufficient for carbonisation but not for the shells to become ash. Shell charcoal was used as a domestic fuel such as to cook food and also at times by blacksmiths. It was easier to make than wooden charcoal and had a nicer appearance. It was produced by using the pit method. Salt water was used to extinguish the fire.
Cococnut Shell Carcoal- Sarbon koko
Coconut shell charcoal is still a popular type of charcoal but now made efficiently by modern machinery and sold in briquettes form.
Importance of coal in the early years of settlement
I reproduce below an article from The Nation Newspaper written by Tony Mathiot describing the importance of coal to the Seychelles economy in the early years of settlement….
“Can you imagine that? Long before electricity, kerosene, gasoline and liquefied petroleum gas became mundane features and yet necessities of life, our sources of fuel were … our forests. They provided us with timber and firewood. Lots of timber and lots of firewood.
The first inhabitants who arrived in Seychelles in 1770, and settled on the island of Ste Anne did not take for granted, the valuable importance of wood as fuel, because it was an essential factor in the establishment and development of the settlement which anyhow, due to colonial inertia was abandoned only a couple of years later.
In 1778, when Charles Routier de Romainville (1742-1792) arrived with his contingent of soldiers and a group of slaves to create the first settlement on Mahé – L’Etablissement du Roi, he must have seen, in the vast, verdant, forested mountains of Mahé, an inexhaustible supply of fuel. Limitless. Abundant.
Indeed, during the years of French occupation, when the arrivals of African slaves increased the population of inhabitants, cooking fires consumed great quantities of trees which were felled with quotidian frequency and unscrupulous indiscrimination.
Fish, turtle meat, plantains and cassava were cooked with capucin, bois mapou, bwa-d-fer, takamaka, and with perhaps even bwa gayak. In the evening, the commandant’s residence was lit with candles and paraffin lamps.
In 1810, when the British took possession of the Seychelles, the lowland forests of Mahé still provided the almost 4,000 inhabitants with their sole source of fuel. At that time, Mahé was the typical 19th century colonial outpost struggling to establish the foundations of its prospective agricultural economy, and L’Etablissement du Roi had expanded, with the gradual construction of more buildings and basic amenities, being the noble accomplishments of French commandant Jean-Baptiste Quéau de Quincy (1748-1827).
In 1841, when the town was renamed Victoria, commissioner Charles Etienne Mylius (1795-1873) initiated the building of a jetty with a grant of £50 from Mauritius, of which Seychelles was by then a dependency. The jetty which projected 200 feet towards the sea was a start in a bid to make Victoria an important seaport. A lighthouse was erected in 1872 when ships of the British East India Company and those of the Messageries Maritime were arriving at regular intervals to bring mail and cargoes of goods and to take away the country’s export produce, which was mainly coconuts and coconut oil. Those ships were of course steamers that ran on coal, and it soon became temptingly apparent that provisioning those ships with their fuel requirements would be a lucrative business for the colony. Mahé could produce many tons of coal.
The Coal Warf at the end of The Long Pier
In 1875, Hodoul Island was leased to Dr Henry Brooks (1831-1920) the chief medical officer, for the establishment of a coal business. The place had the capacity to hold 2,000 tons of coal.
In 1876, the chief civil commissioner Charles Spencer Salmon (1832-1896) made a proposal to the colonial secretary for the construction of a coal depot at a cost of £ 300. Felix Desiré Cheyron (1840-1896) who was the French Consular agent from Marseilles, had expressed his intention to rent the place for Rs. 200 per annum.
The depot known commonly as the coal Wharf was basically a square at the end of the jetty measuring 91 feet in width and 91 in depth. There existed also, about 50 yards from the end of the pier, an islet measuring 73 feet by 86 feet which was also leased to Cheyron for Rs. 50 per annum. It eventually became known as Coal Shed Island. The jetty which Mylius had started, and which had, over the succeeding years and during the administrations of various commissioners and administrators been lengthened, was now 3,179 feet long by 21 feet wide.
Coal was produced on a weekly basis from the forests of Le Niol and Sans Soucis. Many households on Mahé began to prefer the convenience of coal for cooking, especially when those cast-iron cooking pots (Marmites) were used.
It is not a surprising fact nor an appalling truth that, if coal was an exceedingly remunerative business for the few who engaged in it, for the ‘charcoal burners’ of Le Niol and Sans Soucis, it was not a gainful occupation but merely a way to earn their livelihood. The constant demand for the fuel kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves while the forests which supplied the logs of timber for burning restored their losses… to some extent.
However, the demand for charcoal increased so much that in 1898, when Cheyron passed away, his charcoal wharf was bought by the imperial government for £1,030, with a view to turning Victoria Port into a veritable naval charcoaling station.
In 1889, the central portion of the charcoal wharf was raised about 18 inches on an area of 1,800 square yards. The granite side walls were repaired and raised to the same height on a length of 640 feet, and a wall was built on a length of 55 feet where it did not exist before. And up on the humid, forested slopes of Mahe, heavy clouds of smoke appeared frequently.
After Seychelles became a separate colony in 1903, local consumption of imported fuel rose constantly. That came about on account of more buildings and social infrastructure that were constructed…’
Sources
Tony Mathiot
Seychelles News Agency
The Nation
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