Leonard (Hume) Wray, son of Leonard Wray, was a sugar planter in Jamaica for many years. He left that country when its economy collapsed after the abolition of slavery and subsequently resided in India, South Africa, the East Indies and the Straits of Malacca. In 1848 he wrote an extensive work entitled The practical sugar planter; a complete account of the cultivation and manufacture of the sugar-cane... In this book he described the different methods of sugar cultivation used in the countries where he had farmed. Later he came to the Cape Colony and settled in British Kaffraria (now part of the Eastern Cape). However, by 1852 he had moved to Natal, where he was declared insolvent. In 1854 he wrote a treatise on The Zulu-Kaffir Imphee, or "sweet reed" (the Holcus saccharatus of Linnaeus), comprising a description of its numerous varieties; its mode of cultivation; and the manufacture of sugar and other products from its rich saccharine juice. This work was published for private circulation in London in 1854 (45pp), while a French translation was published in Paris that same year. Three years later this treatise was included, with the same title, in a book by Henry S. Olcott, Sorgho and imphee, the Chinese and African sugar canes (New York, 1857, pp. 193-249; also 6th ed., 1858). It included a description of Wray's patented process for crystallizing sugar from the juice of the imphee. Wray also published articles, most of them in the Journal of the Society of Arts, on the cultivation of cotton in the United States (1858), timber for ship building (1858), tea cultivation (1860), and Indian fibres (1868).
Wray married his wife Sophia Lydia Wray in the United Kingdom in 1850. They had a son, also named Leonard (who may have been born in Natal in 1852, died in 1942) who in the eighteen-nineties published on tin prospecting, fish culture, rubber cultivation, silk cultivation, etc. in Perak and Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula.
