A History of the World in 6 Glasses

by Tom Standage

  It soon became customary for Fmropeans to present large quantities of alcohol, known as dashee or bizy, as a gift before beginning negotiations with African traders. The Europeans and Africans conversed in a pidgin language derived from Portuguese, several examples of which were transcribed by a French trader, including qua qua (linen) and singo me miombo (give me some strong liquor). According to John Atkins, a British naval surgeon who chronicled the slave trade, the African slaver "never cares to treat with dry lips." William Bosman, a Dutch slave trader, recommended that captains of slave ships should make daily gifts of brandy to local leaders and principal traders. The Africans of Whydah, he warned, would not do business at all unless they had first been presented with sufficient dashee. "He that intends to trade here, must humour them herein," he wrote.

  Brandy oiled the wheels of the slave trade in other ways, too. One account records that the canoemen who ferried goods to and from European ships were paid a bottle of brandy a day as a retainer, plus an extra two to four bottles on days when they worked, and a bonus bottle on Sundays. The guards who marched slaves from holding pens on the coast down to the shore were also paid in brandy. The connections between spirits, slaves, and sugar were further strengthened following the invention of a powerful new drink made from the waste products of the sugar-production process itself. That drink was rum.

  The First Global Drink

  On a September day in 1647 an Englishman named Richard Ligon caught his first glimpse of the Caribbean island of Barbados from the deck of the ship Achilles. "Being now come in sight of this happy island, the nearer we came, the more beautiful it appeared to our eyes," he wrote in an account of his voyage. Appearances proved deceptive, however, for when Ligon and his fellow travelers disembarked they discovered that Barbados was in the midst of an outbreak of the plague. This disrupted the travelers' plans, so that having only intended to stay for a few days, Ligon remained on the island for three years. During his stay he compiled a detailed account of the island's many plants and animals, the customs of its people, and the workings of its sugar plantations.

  The first English settlers had arrived on Barbados in 1627 to find the island uninhabited. They set about trying to grow tobacco, which had become popular in their homeland and had proved to be a profitable crop for farmers in the new North American colony of Virginia. But Barbados tobacco was, Ligon observed, "the worst . . . that growes in the whole world." So the settlers brought in sugarcane, equipment, and expertise from Brazil instead. During Ligon's stay, sugar established itself as the island's most important crop. The industry was heavily dependent on slave labor. Ligon ran into the religious logic used to justify slavery when a black slave, to whom he had explained the workings of a compass, asked if he could convert to Christianity, "for he thought that to be a Christian was to be endued with all those knowledges he wanted." Ligon relayed this request to the slave's master and was told that slaves were not allowed to convert—since "by the Lawes of England . . . we could not make a Christian a slave"—so any slaves who were allowed to convert would have to be freed. And that was unthinkable, since it would have stopped the lucrative sugar business in its tracks. Within a decade Barbados dominated the sugar trade, making its sugar barons among the richest men in the New World.

  The planters on Barbados gained more than just sugarcane and equipment from Brazil; they also learned how to ferment the by-products of the sugar-making process and then to distill the result to make a powerful alcoholic drink. The Portuguese called it cane brandy, and they made it from the foam skimmed off the boiling cane juice or from the cane juice itself. This process was further refined on Barbados, however, where the cane brandy was made from molasses, the otherwise worthless leftovers from sugar making. This made it possible to make cane brandy far more cheaply and without any reduction in the output of sugar. The planters of Barbados could literally have their sugar and drink it too.

  According to Ligon, the resulting drink, known as "kill-devil," was "infinitely strong, but not very pleasant in taste. . . . The people drink much of it, indeed too much; for it often layes them asleep on the ground." Wine and beer were costly to import, and liable to spoil while in transit from Europe, but kill-devil could be made locally in large quantities. Ligon noted that kill-devil was sold on the island itself "to Planters, as have no sugar-works of their own, yet drink excessively of it, for they buy it at easie rates," and also to passing ships, "and it is transported into foreign parts, and drunk by the way." Only after Ligon's departure was kill-devil given the name by which it is known today. A traveler who visited Barbados in 1651 observed that the islanders' preferred drink or "chief fudling" was "Rumbullion, alias Kill-Devill, and this is made of sugarcanes distilled, a hot, hellish and terrible liquor." Rumbullion, a slang word from southern England that means "a brawl or violent commotion," may have been chosen as the drink's nickname because that was frequently the outcome when people drank too much of it.

  Rumbullion, soon shortened to rum, spread throughout the Caribbean and then beyond. It was given to newly arrived slaves as part of the "seasoning" process, which weeded out the weak and subdued the unruly. Slaves were encouraged to become dependent on regular rations of rum, both to withstand the demands placed upon them and to blot out the associated hardship. It was also used as an inducement. Slaves were rewarded with extra rum for catching rats or performing particularly unpleasant tasks. Plantation records suggest slaves were typically issued two or three gallons of rum a year (but in some cases as much as thirteen gallons), which they could either drink themselves or barter for food. As a result, rum became an important tool of social control. Ligon noted that it was also used as a medicine, and that when slaves were unwell, the doctor gave to each one "a dram cup of this Spirit, and that [was] a present cure."

  Rum also became popular among sailors, and from 1655 was adopted as a substitute for the traditional ration of beer on Royal Navy ships in the Caribbean. Within a century it became the navy's preferred drink during long cruises. Replacing the usual gallon of perishable, weak beer with a half pint of rum had predictable consequences for discipline and efficiency, however, and prompted Admiral Edward Vernon to issue an order that the rum should be mixed with two pints of water. Diluting the rum had no effect on the total amount of alcohol consumed, though it made the sailors more inclined to drink the otherwise unpalatable water available on board ships. What turned out to be far more important was Vernon's idea to add sugar and lime juice to the mixture to make it more palatable. He had invented a primitive cocktail that was immediately named in his honor. Vernon's nickname was "Old Grogram," because he wore a waterproof cloak made of grogram, a coarse fabric stiffened with gum. His new drink became known as grog.

  The problem remained that the strength of rum varied widely, and sailors who saw their rum being watered down to make grog felt shortchanged. Before the invention of an accurate hydrometer in the nineteenth century, there was no easy way to measure the strength of an alcoholic drink. So the navy's pursers, who were responsible for distributing the rum ration, measured the strength of the unmixed rum beforehand using a rule of thumb said to have been devised at the Royal Arsenal. They mixed the rum with a little water and a few grains of black gunpowder, then heated the mixture using a magnifying glass to concentrate the rays of the sun. If the gunpowder failed to ignite, the mixture was too weak, and more rum would be added. Only when the gunpowder just barely ignited was the mixture deemed to be the correct strength, which corresponds to 48 percent alcohol. (If the mixture was too strong, an explosion could ensue, and tradition has it that the sailors were then entitled to help themselves while the purser was incapacitated.)

  The use of grog in place of beer played an unseen role during the eighteenth century in establishing British supremacy at sea. One of the main causes of death among sailors at the time was scurvy, a wasting disease that is now known to be caused by a lack of vitamin C. The best way to prevent it, discovered and forgotten many times during the eighteenth cent
ury, was to administer regular doses of lemon or lime juice. The inclusion of lemon or lime juice in grog, made compulsory in 1795, therefore reduced the incidence of scurvy dramatically. And since beer contains no vitamin C, switching from beer to grog made British crews far healthier overall. The opposite was true of their French counterparts, for whom the standard drink ration was not beer but three-quarters of a liter of wine (the equivalent of a modern bottle). On long cruises, this ration was replaced by three-sixteenths of a liter of eau-de-vie. Since wine contains small amounts of vitamin C but eau-de-vie does not, the effect was to reduce the French navy's resistance to scurvy, just as the British navy's resistance was increasing. The Royal Navy's unique ability to combat scurvy was said by one naval physician to have doubled its performance and contributed directly to Britain's eventual defeat of the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in 1805. (It also meant that British sailors became known as "limeys.")

  All this was far in the future, however, when rum was first invented. Its immediate significance was as a currency, for it closed the triangle linking spirits, slaves, and sugar. Rum could be used to buy slaves, with which to produce sugar, the leftovers of which could be made into rum to buy more slaves, and so on and on. Jean Barbot, a French trader, observed on visiting the west coast of Africa in 1679 that he found "a great alteration: the French brandy, whereof I had always had a good quantity abroad, being much less demanded, by reason that a great quantity of spirits and rum had been bought on that coast." By 1721 one English trader reported that rum had become the "chief barter" on the slave coast of Africa, even for gold. Rum also took over from brandy as the currency in which canoemen and guards were paid. Brandy helped to kick-start the transatlantic trade in sugar and slaves, but rum made it self-fueling and far more profitable.

  Unlike beer, which was usually produced and consumed locally, and wine, which was usually made and traded within a specific region, rum was the result of the convergence of materials, people, and technologies from around the world, and the product of several intersecting historical forces. Sugar, which originated in Polynesia, had been introduced to Europe by the Arabs, taken to the Americas by Columbus, and cultivated by slaves from Africa. Rum distilled from its waste products was consumed both by European colonists and by their slaves in the New World. It was a drink that owed its existence to the buccaneering enterprise of the Age of Exploration; but it would not have existed without the cruelty of the slave trade, from which Europeans deliberately averted their gaze for so long. Rum was the liquid embodiment of both the triumph and the oppression of the first era of globalization.

  6

  The Drinks That Built America

  Out of the cheap molasses of the French Islands, New England made the rum which was the chief source of her wealth—the rum with which she bought slaves for Maryland and the Carolinas, and paid her balances to the English merchants.

  —Woodrow Wilson, U.S. President (1856-1924)

  America's Favorite Drink

  ENGLAND'S PLAN TO establish colonies in North America, starting in the late sixteenth century, was founded on a fallacy. It was generally assumed that the region of the North American continent to which England laid claim—the lands between thirty-four degrees and thirty-eight degrees north, named Virginia in honor of Queen Elizabeth I, the virgin queen—would have the same climate as the Mediterranean region of Europe, since it lay at similar latitudes. As a result, the English hoped that the American colonies, once established, would be able to supply Mediterranean goods such as olives and fruit and reduce England's dependence on imports from continental Europe. One prospectus claimed that the colonies would provide "the Wines, Fruit and Salt of France and Spain . . . the silks of Persia and Italy." Similarly, abundant timber would do away with the need to import wood from Scandinavia. The colonists and their backers in London also hoped to find precious metals, minerals, and jewels. America, in short, was expected to be a land of plenty that would quickly turn a profit.

  The reality turned out to be very different. The harsher-than-expected North American climate meant that Mediterranean crops, and other imports such as sugar and bananas, would not grow. Nor were there any precious metals, minerals, or jewels to be found, and attempts to make silk failed. In the decades after the establishment of the first permanent English colony in 1607, the colonists faced many unexpected difficulties as they struggled to make a living from the land. They had to contend with disease, food shortages, infighting, and constant battles with the local Indians, whose lands they had appropriated.

  Amid such hardship, securing a reliable supply of alcohol assumed great importance. When two of the three ships that had brought the first permanent settlers to Virginia in 1607 set off back to England, Thomas Studly, one of the inhabitants of the new colony of Jamestown, complained that "there remained neither taverne, beer house, nor place of reliefe." The first supply ship, arriving that winter, brought some beer, though much of it had been drunk by the crew. Further shipments were often substandard or had spoiled during the voyage. In 1613 a Spanish observer reported that the three hundred colonists had nothing but water to drink, "which is contrary to the nature of the English—on account of which they all wish to return and would have done so if they had been at liberty." Little had changed by 1620: The population had grown to three thousand, but, noted one observer, "the greatest want they complain of is good drink"—in other words, something other than water.

  That same year, a shortage of beer determined the site of the second English colony, established by the Puritan separatists known as the Pilgrims. The Mayflower set out in 1620 aiming for the Hudson River but made landfall farther north at Cape Cod. Bad weather prevented the ship from heading south, so the ship's captain dumped his passengers on the shore. William Bradford, a Pilgrim leader who became governor of the colony, noted in his diary, "We could not now take time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our Beere." The sailors were anxious to ensure sufficient supplies of beer for the return journey since it was wrongly believed at the time that drinking beer on a sea voyage provided protection against scurvy. The Pilgrims, like the colonists in Virginia, had to resort to water. "It is thought that there can be no better water in the world, yet dare I not prefer it before good beer, as some have done," a colonist named William Wood observed, "but any man will choose it before bad beer." When a third English colony was established, in Massachusetts, the settlers made sure they brought plenty of beer. In 1628 the ship Arbella, which carried the leader of the Puritan colonists, John Winthrop, had among its provisions "42 Tonnes of Beere," or about ten thousand gallons.

  Owing to the harsh climate, European cereal crops, which could be used to make beer, were very difficult to cultivate. Rather than rely on imported beer from England, the settlers tried to make their own from corn, spruce tips, twigs, maple sap, pumpkins, and apple parings. A contemporary song is testimony to the resourcefulness of these brewers: "Oh we can make liquor to sweeten our lips, Of pumpkins, of parsnips, of walnut-tree chips." Nor was wine making an option, as it was for the Spanish and Portuguese colonists farther south. The colonists tried to introduce European vines, but their efforts failed due to the climate, disease, and, since they were from northern Europe, lack of wine-making experience. They tried to make wine from local grapes instead, but the result was revolting. Eventually, the Virginia colonists decided to concentrate on the commercial cultivation of tobacco, and to import malted barley (from which to make beer) from Europe, along with wine and brandy.

  Everything changed in the second half of the seventeenth century, however, when rum became available. It was far cheaper than brandy, since it was made from leftover molasses rather than expensive wine, and did not have to be shipped across the Atlantic. As well as being cheaper, rum was stronger too. Rum quickly established itself as the North American colonists' favorite drink. It alleviated hardship, provided a liquid form of central heating in the harsh winters, and conveniently reduced the colonis
ts' dependence on imports from Europe. Rum was generally drunk neat by the poor, and by the better off in the form of punch—a mixture of spirits, sugar, water, lemon juice, and spices served in an elaborately decorated bowl. (This drink, like the cruder naval drink of grog, was a forerunner of the modern cocktail.)

  The colonists consumed rum when drawing up a contract, selling a farm, signing a deed, buying goods, or settling a suit. One custom decreed that anyone who backed out of a contract before signing it had to provide half a barrel of beer, or a gallon of rum, in compensation. Not everyone welcomed the appearance of this cheap, powerful new drink, however. "It is an unhappy thing that in later years a Kind of Drink called Rum has been common among us," lamented the Boston minister Increase Mather in 1686. "They that are poor, and wicked too, can for a penny or two-pence make themselves drunk."

  From the late seventeenth century, rum formed the basis of a thriving industry, as New England merchants—primarily in Salem, Newport, Medford, and Boston—began to import raw molasses rather than rum and do the distilling themselves. The resulting rum was not thought to be as good as West Indies rum, but it was even cheaper, which was what mattered to most drinkers. Rum became the most profitable manufactured item produced in New England. In the words of one contemporary observer: "The quantity of spirits which they distil in Boston from the molasses they import is as surprising as the cheapness at which they sell it, which is under two shillings a gallon; but they are more famous for the quantity and cheapness than for the excellency of their rum." Rum became so cheap that in some cases a day's wages could get a laborer drunk for a week.

  From Rum to Revolution