by Wayne Curtis
No surprise, that. Distillers hadn’t sorted out the variables, and the early technology didn’t allow for any sort of precision in rum making. The quality of the cane, water, and fermentation would have played a secondary role in the quality of the output, and the taste would have been determined largely by the condition and oversight of the still. If the distiller were distracted for a few minutes, a batch could be irretrievably fouled. If the water cooling the worm were to evaporate, the rum would acquire “a burnt, disagreeable taste, not wholesome for those who drink it,” wrote Martin. But it was probably sold anyway and drunk eagerly.
Stills needed to be thoroughly cleaned between batches, lest the next batch take on a singed taste. Some have pointed out that this was not necessarily bad. Drinkers had discovered that rum distilled in Britain from imported molasses almost never tasted like rum from the West Indies. George Smith, in 1729, looked into this intriguing fact. He attributed part of the difference to the “newness and richness of the Molasses” used in the West Indies. But he put forth another theory: that the estate overseers and slaves who operated the island stills simply neglected to clean stills between batches, sometimes even for an entire distilling season. “As nothing is more viscous and adhesive than Molasses,” Smith wrote, “it cannot be expected but that a great quantity of the grosser matter must adhere to the sides and bottom of the still, and consequently burn thereto.” That slightly burned taste survived distillation, giving West Indian rum a caramelized flavor. Smith said that British distillers hoping to mimic the taste of imported rum “must not stand too much upon Niceties,” and he suggested they might adopt the indolent island practices when it came time for cleaning.
Aging was another way of improving the taste of rum, but this was another nicety that few distillers would have bothered with. Colonists knew that leaving rum in a cask or barrel for months or, better yet, years would dull the burrs of new rum and give it a richer, smoother taste. Rum shipped abroad was always better when it arrived. “All rum is improved by time in wooden casks, by exhalation of ether and absorption of oil,” explained Bryan Higgins in 1797. Later markets would demonstrate a preference for the aged spirit. New rum sold for seven shillings per gallon in the 1700s, whereas aged rum brought eighteen shillings. But early Barbados rum consumed on the island was almost certainly pure moonshine, raw and harsh.
And it was often toxic. Lead pipes were typically used in the early distillation process, which put the tippler at risk of a painful condition called “the dry gripes.” In 1745, Thomas Cadwalader wrote an essay on the dry gripes and its treatments, and noted among the symptoms “excessive griping pains in the pit of the stomach and bowels, which are much distended with wind…at other times there is a sensation, as if the bowels were drawn together by ropes.” In some cases, “the patient begins to break wind backwards, which is some times exceeding offensive.” (It strains the imagination to think of times this would not be “exceeding offensive.”) Other associated problems included paralysis of the limbs and, in dire cases, death. The supposed remedy was scarcely better than the dry gripes itself: A molasses enema was often prescribed.
All the same, rum drinking was just as often linked with good health as with illness. To drink to one’s health was more than an idle phrase in the seventeenth century. Europeans who first explored the West Indian islands and the East Indian archipelagoes initially believed that the constant heat would eventually be fatal to those of northern constitutions, and that one could only stand so much heat before dropping dead in one’s tracks. Theories of health at the time posited that a proper balance needed to be maintained between the four humors—blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile—and this balance was determined by the climate in which one was raised. Venturing someplace with a radically different climate would upset that. In the tropics, yellow bile would predominate and unwellness and death would ensue. William Vaughan, a British writer on medical subjects, stated definitively in 1612 that a European transplanted to the tropics would perish in five years. In 1626, he revised his figure upward to fifteen years, presumably based on fresh evidence that colonists were not, in fact, dying of the heat in wholesale quantities.
In his A Natural History of Barbados (1750), Rev. Griffith Hughes detours for five folio pages from his inventory of the island’s flora and fauna to expound on his intricate theories regarding tropical heat and blood. His own belief was that well-being stemmed from “an equal Motion of the Fluids and the Resistance of the Solids.” In hot climates, he wrote, where sweating is constant, the blood loses its fluidity and becomes “more viscid, and Consequently the Circulation is more languid.” Those with slow, turgid blood soon become less logical, and “overlook those Rules of Method and Connexion, that are observed by Europeans of a cooler and more regular Fancy.” By way of example, Hughes notes that southern Spaniards tended toward the “pensive, melancholy, and revengeful.” Fortunately, an easy antidote could be had. Viscous blood could be “counterbalanced by the daily Use of a great Quantity of Diluters of every kind,” which included a punch made with rum.
Richard Ligon also dabbled in theories on blood and heat, although he believed that the blood of colonists was not more viscid, but rather “thinner and paler than in our own Countreys.” Happily for the colonists, the remedy was the same: “Strong drinks are very requisite, where so much heat is,” Ligon wrote, “for the spirits being exhausted with much sweating, the inner parts are left cold and faint, and shall need comforting, and reviving.”
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Rum’s appeal to the rougher classes is suggested by what the first drinkers named this spirit. “Kill-devil” was for much of the mid- and late seventeenth century the most common name for rum. It appeared not only in traveler’s accounts, but in official bills of lading and other documents. It’s a rather ambiguous name. Does it suggest that this spirit is potent enough to kill the devil? Or is it a product of the devil and thus lethal in its effect? Irish naturalist Hans Sloane appeared to back the latter; in 1707, after spending fifteen months in Jamaica, he wrote that “rum is well-called Kill-Devil, for perhaps no year passes without it having killed more than a thousand.” The term migrated over time from the English to the Danish, who called it kiel-dyvel, and to the French, who pronounced it guildive, a term that lives on today in Haiti. The origins of the word rum are no less a mystery. Rum is a blunt, simple word, and admirably Anglo-Saxon. In an 1824 essay about the name’s derivation, Samuel Morewood suggested it might be from British slang for “the best,” as in having “a rum time.” Morewood writes, “As spirits, extracted from molasses, could not well be ranked under the name whiskey, brandy, arrack, &c. it was called rum, to denote its excellence or superior quality.” Given what was known about the taste of early rum, this is unlikely. Among those unconvinced by this argument was Morewood himself, who went on to suggest another possibility: that it was taken from the last syllable for the Latin word for sugar, saccharum, an explanation that is often heard today.
Other word detectives have mentioned the gypsy word rum, meaning “strong” or “potent.” Tantalizingly, this variation of rum has been linked to rumbooze (or rambooze) and rumfustian, both popular British drinks of the mid-seventeenth century. Unfortunately, neither of these drinks is made with rum, but rather with eggs, ale, wine, sugar, and various spices.
The most likely derivation is that rum is a truncated version of rumbullion or rumbustion. Rumbullion and rumbustion both first surfaced in the English language around the same time as rum, and both were British slang for “tumult” or “uproar.” This is a far more convincing explanation and brings to mind fractious islanders cracking one another over the head in rumbustious entanglements at island tippling houses. Nothing more need be said on the matter.
As product names go, modern marketing consultants would no doubt prefer rum over kill-devil—it’s easier to rhyme, for starters, and has less unsavory associations. No matter what one call
ed it, though, rum marked one of the more successful product introductions in history. It dominated life in the West Indian islands for several decades while the beverage and the colonists both gained their footing, but rum was soon ready to set sail. It had larger appointments to keep.
And so it began its voyage from the sugar islands to the larger world beyond. At the outset, it was more hitchhiker than paying passenger. Rum didn’t have the luxury cachet of sugar. No one in Europe or the North American colonies was yet clamoring for the new and harsh liquor, for few had yet tried or even heard of it. But like a glass spilled across a tavern table, rum seeped slowly into the colonial world’s small fissures, dribbling into large harbors and small coves alike. It found a particularly warm welcome in the northern colonies, where the colonists were starved for cheap diversion. A merchant captain in the mid-seventeenth century might load a cask or two aboard his vessel to buoy himself and his crew on their northward voyage. He would have shared the marvel of rum in distant ports as he chased trade and the winds. Colonists would ask the captain to bring back another cask or two when his ship next sailed from the Indies. Word of rum spread. Between 1650 and 1700, rum raised itself from an oddity of the islands to a respectable bulk cargo that was stored in increasing quantity in ships’ holds alongside barrels of molasses, rough brown sugar, and indigo.
Rum still had to overcome many obstacles in finding a wider acceptance beyond the West Indies. It had to cross from the tropical islands to distant markets through unpoliced seas, and do this without attracting the attention of pirates, buccaneers, brigands, and others who took a keen interest in the colonies’ burgeoning trade.
In this, as we shall see, rum was not terrifically successful.
[ GROG ]
Pour two ounces RUM into an eight-ounce glass. Fill with WATER. Add a touch of fresh LIME juice or CANE SUGAR to taste.
Chapter 2
[ GROG ]
Captain Morgan is a lot more than flavor….It reflects an attitude. It’s fun and adventurous. It has a real personality and an appealing proposition—good taste, good times, good fun.
—LAURA GOLDENBERG, U.S. RUM CATEGORY MANAGER FOR SEAGRAM’S
Captain Henry Morgan was born in Wales in 1635, at the outset of the great British rush to the sugar islands. The son of a prosperous farmer, Morgan had no interest in harrows or furrows and instead went off to seek—in the words of a contemporary—“some other employ more suitable to his humour.” The teenaged Morgan found himself at a Welsh port, where he boarded a ship bound for the West Indies. He eventually disembarked on Barbados, where accounts suggest he found employ as an indentured servant.
His career on the island was evidently short-lived. In 1655, a British fleet manned by some twenty-five hundred sailors and soldiers was dispatched across the Atlantic by Oliver Cromwell, with the aim of expanding the British presence in the islands. The fleet landed first at Barbados, where it took on some four thousand Barbadian colonists to supplement the fighting force. This included a number of indentured servants who were seized over the objections of the planters who had paid for their contracts. Morgan may have been among them; the historical record is sketchy. The fleet then sailed off with high purpose, intent on sacking the wealthy Spanish colony on Hispaniola. The attack did not go well; the British force was all but routed by the Spanish after blundering their assault on the city of Santo Domingo. The British fleet withdrew, and the commanders hastily came up with another plan: strike and capture the lightly defended Spanish settlement on Jamaica, near present-day Kingston.
Here, the British prevailed. The great force scattered the hapless and outnumbered Spanish into the hills and easily took control of the settlement, and thus of the thinly populated island. Although the attack lacked heroism, it marked two historical milestones: It was the first state-financed naval operation by the British in the West Indies. And Henry Morgan had his formal coming out.
Young Morgan rapidly proved himself something of a prodigy in the art of combat. He led raids on Dutch settlements as second in command during the Anglo-Dutch War of 1665 to 1667. Soon after, at the age of thirty-two, Morgan was named head of the Brethren of the Coast, a loosely organized group of privateers. Privateers, unlike pirates, had the official blessing of their government to attack ships flying the flags of the enemy. Privateers weren’t paid by the government but got to keep a generous percentage of the spoils. The arrangement was a good deal for everyone except those attacked. England got an extended navy without putting up any hard cash, and the more rapacious privateers earned far more than a sailor could hope to see in the standing navy. The distinction between privateer and pirate was often vague, since months might elapse between the signing of a truce and word of the peace getting to a captain on a mission of plunder. Even if that word did come through, privateers had little incentive to cease their marauding, since other ships were where the gold was. “To the buccaneers a treaty of peace meant merely a change from public employment to private enterprise,” as historians J. H. Parry and P. H. Sherlock put it.
Morgan was wildly successful in his engagements, being particularly drawn to Spanish ships and villages, since they were the richest. Since the early sixteenth century, the Spaniards had been wrenching gold from the mines of Mexico and Peru and carting it to well-defended ports to await the sailings of the Armada, which escorted the treasure back to Spain. Morgan built his reputation through ruthless and audacious attacks, including one on well-defended Puerto Príncipe (now Camagüey) in Cuba, and others on several Spanish villages along Lake Maracaibo in present-day Venezuela. Between 1655 and 1671, Morgan sacked a total of eighteen cities, four towns, and thirty-five villages, and captured more than $100 million worth of gold, silver, and trade goods.
Two episodes transformed Morgan from mortal to legend, and both took place in Panama. With its three stout fortresses, Portobelo on Panama’s Caribbean coast was among the best defended towns in New Spain, bettered only by Havana and Cartagena. Morgan knew enough not to attack these forts directly, so in 1668 he quietly landed his force of 460 men on a stretch of undefended coast some distance away. The troops marched overland by night, and then struck at dawn, catching guards by surprise and quickly overwhelming most of the town’s citadels.
Morgan’s appearance in the streets of Portobelo that morning was a surprise, but his reputation for brutality had no doubt preceded him. Coastal residents generally found it unwise to withhold information about hidden riches if Captain Morgan knocked on their doors. Those who did would be stretched on the rack, or have flaming sticks tied between their fingers, or a cord twisted around their heads so tightly that eyeballs popped like grapes from skins. Other recalcitrants would be hoisted by their wrists with weights tied to their neck and feet while being burned with flaming branches. In Maracaibo, an elderly Portuguese man had been ratted out (falsely) by a neighbor as being from a wealthy family. While demanding to know the location of his supposed fortune, Morgan’s men suspended him from the ground by tying his thumbs and big toes to four stakes, then placed a two-hundred-pound rock on his belly and hammered at the cords with clubs, all the while burning him with palm leaves. And he was one of the lucky ones. Some had their feet burned off while still alive; others were said to be suspended by their testicles and battered with sticks until a violent anatomical separation ensued.
In Portobelo, Morgan did little to dull his reputation for ruthlessness. He forced priests and nuns to serve as shields when his men advanced on a fortress that still held out. He calculated that the Spaniards were too pious to fire on their own clerics. He calculated wrongly, and the priests and nuns fell. Morgan still managed to overtake the redoubt and punished the resisters by herding them into a room, packing explosives under the floor, and blowing them into the sky. His demands for a gold ransom to spare the rest of the town were eventually met, and he sailed for Jamaica with a half-million pieces of eight and some three hundred slaves.
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nbsp; Two years later, Morgan outdid himself by sacking the capital of Panama City on the distant Pacific Coast. He assembled nearly two thousand men and thirty-six ships, sailed to Panama’s Caribbean coast, and then left his fleet behind for a long and grueling march through the jungle. The expedition seemed doomed at times; at one point the men had to boil their shoes to stave off their hunger. Morgan would eventually lay waste to Panama City after a fierce, two-hour battle—the task considerably simplified by the panicked mayor, who torched his own town as Morgan arrived. Morgan made off with four hundred thousand pieces of eight, yet his triumph was bittersweet: He narrowly missed seizing a Spanish ship with five million pieces that had fled into the open Pacific as Morgan’s men appeared at the gates.
What we know about Morgan’s exploits is chiefly due to a remarkable account published by a Dutchman who wrote under the name of Alexander Exquemelin. He spent eight years with the pirates in the Caribbean, a large part of that with Morgan. His 1678 book, De Americaensche Zee-rovers, was translated into English and published in 1684 as Bucaniers of America, and proved as enduring as it was popular. Although riddled with inaccuracies and exaggerations, Exquemelin’s lavish account is considered the best source of information on Captain Morgan and the habits of pirates. The detail in Exquemelin’s book is so rich and so lavish that it grieves me slightly to make one observation. At no time is rum ever mentioned.