cotton, speculating on a price rise. By the beginning of 1862, mills were being closed and workers laid off; one-third of the families in one Lancashire cotton town were in receipt of relief. The price of Middling Orleans, which had been produced at a cost of d and bought by the merchants for 8d in 1861, rose to 2s. 3d. by October 1862, and to 2s. 5d. the following year. It is calculated that the merchants had a windfall of £35 million. Surat Sea Island (also known as extra long staple), grown on the islands off the Carolina coast of America, was the best quality cotton; Egyptian — the name given to Sea Island cotton that had been introduced into Egypt — was the second best grade. The most common grades were the short staple Gossypium hirsutum (American upland) cottons which included Middling Orleans; it was these grades that were used by the majority of Lancashire's calico producers. The Surat cottons from India were the least suitable for machinery and were only ever used as a small percentage of a mixture as the fibres were short and broke easily. Surat came in smaller bales which contained stones and other impurities. Each town in Lancashire used different mixtures and when the supply of American and Sea Island Cotton dried up, the mill owners moved over to Surat. Some machines could be adjusted to take it but extra humidity was needed to reduce breakages. Running a loom on Surat could only produce about 40 per cent of the previous throughput and, as workers were paid by the piece, their income was slashed. Mill owners were also in difficulty as many of the smaller family-owned mills were mortgaged and if they stopped running the owners would fall behind with payments. Shopkeepers had no sales and could not afford the rents, workers defaulted on their rents and the landlord who stood the loss was often the mill owner. The wealthier mill owners such as Henry Houldsworth, were confident that the famine was temporary and planned for the new more efficient larger machinery that was becoming available, it was during the famine (1863–65) that he built Houldsworth Mill, Reddish, the first of the next generation of larger mills and at the time the world's largest mill with 138,000 spindles. With most raw cotton unavailable, mill owners had to either close mills and attempt to help