The Mascuñana family owned two galleons that alternately sailed between Iloilo and Europe (Spain) and which, among others, were used in bringing in machinery – iron mills and the like-- to Iloilo and Negros Island for sugar production in the 1840s. When Nicholas Loney (the first British vice consul of Iloilo) arrived in 1856 after the place (Yloilo) opened to foreign trade in 1855, he became a friend and business partner of Ramon in a sugar trading in Iloilo and sugar plantation in Negros. Loney, who believed in the potential of sugar as an export product, advanced the methods of cane cultivation, cane milling, and sugar manufacturing. A practical financing scheme in the form of crop loans that Loney introduced further improved the thriving industry for it provided the sugarcane planters the capital outlay to transport their cane products to Manila for exporting to other countries. Likewise Loney made the necessary shipping arrangements for them and identified vast markets for their sugar in foreign lands.
