AN OPIUM FACTORY. [From Dickens's Household Words]

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume IX, Issue 811, 11 May 1853, Page 3

AN OPIUM FACTORY. [From Dickens's Household Words ]

At Ghazeepore, one hot and windy day, I went down to the " opium go-downs" or stores. The atmosphere of a hot and windy day at Ghazeepore, \i it should ever be thonght suitable for invalids or others, may be inhaled in England by any one who will stand at the open door of an oven and breathe a fog of fried sand cunningly blown therefrom. After a two miles drive through heat, and wind, and sand, and odoriferous bazar, we — I and two friends — found our way to a practicable breach or gateway in a high railing by which the store-house is surrounded. A faint scent as of decaying vegetable matter assailed our noses as we entered the court of the go-down ; as for the go-dowu itself, it was a group of long buildings fashioned in the common Indian style, Venetiandoored, and having a great deal more door than wall. Ju and out and abutb >ut these doors there was a movement of scantily claJ coolies (porters) bearing on their heads large earthen vessels ; these vessels, carefully sealed, contained opium fresh out of th* poppy district. Poppy-headed — I mean red-turbaned — accountants bustled about, while Burkunday (or policemen) whose brains appeared to be as full of drowsiness as any jar in the go-down, were lazily lounging about, with their swords beside them, or else fastened in sleep beside their swords. The doorway was shown to us through which we should get at the " Sabib," or officer on duty. Entering the doorway, we pushed through a crowd of natives into an atmosphere drugged powerfully with the scent of opium. The members of the crowd were all carrying tin vessels ; each vessel was half full of opium, in the form of a black, sticky dough, and contained also a ticket showing the name of tha grower, a specimen of whose opium wa3 therein presented, with the names of the village and district in which it was grown. The can- bearers, eager as cannibals, all crowded round a desk, at winch their victim, the gentleman on duty, sat. Cans were flowing in from all sides. On the right band of the Sahib stood a native Mephistopheles, with sleeves tucked up, who darted his hand into the middle of each as it came near, pawed the contents with a mysterious rapidity, extracted a bit of the black dough, carried it briskly to his nose, and instantly pronounced in English a number which the Sahib, who has faith in his familiar.inscribed at once in red ink on the ticket. As I approached, Mephistopheles was good enough to hold a dainty morsel to my nose, and call upon me to express the satisfaction of a gourmand. It was a lump of the finest, I was told. So readily can this native tell by the feel of opium whether foreign substance has been added, and so readily can he distinguish by the smell its quality, that this test by Mepliistopheles is rarely found to differ much in its result from the more elaborate tests presently to be described. The European official, who was working with the thermometer at a hundred, would be unabie to remain longer than four hours at his desk ; at the end of that time another jwuuM come to release him, and assume his place. Out of each can, when it was presented for the first rough test, a small portion of the dough was taken, to be carried off into another room. Into this room we were introduced, and found the thermometer working its way up from a hundred and ten degrees to a huudred and twenty. On our left, as we eutered, was a table, whereat about half-a-dozen natives sat, weighitg out, in measured portions of one hundred grain;, the specimens that had been just seat to them out of the chamber of cans. Edch portion of a hundred grains was placed, as weighed, upon a small plate by itself, with its own proper ticket by its side. The plates were iv the next place carried to another part of the chamber, fitted up with steam baths— not unlike tables in appearance — and about these baths or tables boys were sitting, who, with spatulas, industriously spread the opium over each plate, as though the plate were bread, and the opium upon it were a piece of butter. This bsiug; done over the steam-bath, caused the water to depart out of the dm.*, and left upon the plate a dry powder, which, being weighed, and found to be about twenty three grains lighter by the loss of moisture, is called standard opium. If the hundred grains after evaporation leave a residue of more than seventy-seven, the manufacturer is paid a higher price for his more valuable sample ; if the water be found in excess, the price paid for the opimn-dough is, of course, lower than the standard. I thought it a quaint sight when I watched the chattering young chemists naked to the waist, at work over their heated tables, grinding vigorously with their bluut knife-blades over what appeared to be a very dirty set of cheese-plates. But, the heat of this room was so great that we felt in our own bodies what was taking place about us, and before there had been time for the reduction of each hundred grains of our own flesh to the standard seventy-seven, we beat a retreat from the chamber of evaporations. With the curiosity of Bluebeard's wires we proceeded to inspect the mysteries of the next chamber. It was full of vat?, and in the vats was opium, and over the vats were ropes depending from the ceiling, and depending from the ropey were naked men — natives — themselves somewhat opium-coloured, kicking and stamping lustily within the vats upon the opium; each vat was in fact a mortar, and each man a living pestle, and in this room a quantity of opium — worth more lacs of rupees than I have ever had between my fingers — was being mixed and kneaded by the legs of men, preparatory to being made up into pills. From the chamber of pestlet, with curiosity unsated, we went forward to peep iuto the chamber of the pills. A rush of imps, in the tight brown dresses furnished to them gratuitously by their mother Nature, each imp carrying a bolus in his hand of about the size of a forty-two pound shot, encountered us, and almost laid as prostrate at we entered. This — the fourth — chamber was a long and narrow room quite full of busy natives, every tongue industriously talking, and every finger nimble over work. Around the walls of this room there are low stools placed at even distances, aDd upon each stool a workman rather squat; than sits,

having before him a brass cap of which the interior would fit one half of a bolus. Before each roan upon a stool there stands a man without a stool, and a boy with a saucer. The man with* out a stool has by bis side a number of dried poppy leaves, of which he takes r. few, and having moistened them in a dark gummy liquid, which is simply composed of the washings of the various vessels used in the establishment, be bands the moistened poppy leaves to the man upon the stool who sits before the cup. The man upon the stool, who has been rubbing the same liquid gum with bis fingers over the inner surface of tbe cap — as house-keepers, I suppose, butter their jelly moulds — proceeds to fit in two or three leaves ; then, with his fingers spreads over them more gam ; then, adds a few leaves more, and fits them neatly with his closed band round the bottom of the cup, until be has made a good lining to it. His companion without tbe stool has, in the mean time, brought to bis hand a fixed quantity of opium, a mass weighing two pounds, and this the genius of tba stool puts into the cup ; leaves are then added on the top of it, and by a series of thost dexterous and inscrutably rapid twists of tbe band, with which all cunning workmen are familiar, he rapidly twists out of his cup a ball of opium, within a yellowish brown coat of leaves, resembling, as I have already said, a forty two pouod shot. He shoots it suddenly into tbe earthen saucer held oat by the boy, and instantly tbe boy takes to his heels and scampers off with bis big pill of opium, which is to be taken into tbe yard and there exposed to the air until it shall have dried. These pills are called cakes, but they belong, evidently, to the class of unwholesome confectionery. A workman of average dexterity makes seventy such* cakes in a day. Doling the manufacturing season, this factory turns out daily from 6,500 to 7,000 cakes; tbe number of cakes made in the same factory in one season being altogether about 27,000. A large proportion of these cakes are made for the Chinese, but they do not at all agree with the Chinese digestion. The manufacture of the opium is not hurtful to tbe health of those who are engaged upon tbe factory. Tbe key of the fifth chamber being within our power we continued steadfast in our enterpri se and boldly looked into the chemical test room of a small laboratory, of which the genius appeared before us suddenly with a benign expression on iiis countenance, and offered chairs. His clothes are greatly splashed and he is busy among opium nuts, of which the contents have been pronounced suspicious by the Mephistopheles in the first clumber. From the contents of one of these cans an assistant take a portion, and having made with it a solution in a test tube, bands it to the chemist. The chemist, from bottles in which potent and mysterious spirits are locked up, selecting one, bids it, by tbe mysterious name of iodine, depart into tbe solution, and declare whether he finds starch to be there. Tbe iodine spirit does its bidding, goes among tbe opium, and promptly there passes through the glasses a change of colour, tbe appointed signal, by which the magic spirit of the bottle telegraphs to the benign genius of tbe laboratory, that " Tbe grower who sent this opium fraudulently added flour to it in order to increase its weight." Tbe fraud having been exposed, the adulterated drug has a little red ink mark made upon its ticket. The consequence of that mark will be confiscation, and great disappointment to tbe dealer wbo attempted a dishonest increase of bis gain. We have nothing more to see, bnt we have something more to bear, and the very kind chemist will be our informant. There are two opium agencies, one at Patna and one at Ghazeepore. I know nothing whatever about Fatna. For tbe Ghazeepore agency, the opium is grown in a district lying between its head quarters. Ghazeepore and Agra. Its cultivation gives employment to 127,000 labourers. The final preparation of the ground takes place in the months of October and November. Under tbe most favourable circumstances of soil and season, twenty four or twenty six pounds weight of standard opium it got from one biggah of land ; one biggah being t littl* more than three-fifths of an acre. Under unfavourable circumstances the yield may be as little as six or eight pounds to the biggah, the average produce being from twelve pounds to sixteen. To obtain tbe opium, as ii well known, the capsule of tbe poppy is scored or cut; tbe scoring is effected with a peculiar tool that makes three or four (vertical and parallel) wounds at a single stroke. This wounding of the hearts of the poppies is commonly the work of women. The wounds having been made, tbe quantity of juice exuding seems to depend very much upon conditions of the atmosphere. Dews increase tbe flow, but while they 'make it more abundant, they cause it also to be darker and more liquid. East winds lessen the exudation. A moderate westerly wind, with dews at night, is tbe condition most favourable to the opium harvest, both as regards quantity and quality of •produce. The average per cent, of morphia in this opium 4s from one and three quarters to three and a half ; of narcotine from three quarters to three and , a half. These are the valuable principles of tbe drug. In some opium, the per ccntage runs up to ten and three quarters per cent, of morphia, and six per cent, of narcotine. The income drawn from its opium by tbe East India Company amounts to some two and a half crores of rupees — twa and a half millions of pounds sterling.