And a Bottle of Rum, Revised and Updated

by Wayne Curtis

  Others, no doubt a majority, failed to experience such conversions, demanding another dram of rum up until the moment the rope went taut. William Lewis, who was hanged in the Bahamas, bedecked himself in red ribbons for the occasion and “scorn’d to shew any Fear to dye but heartily desired Liquors enough to drink with his fellow sufferers…and with the Standers by.” Captain William Kidd—who was either a pirate or privateer, depending on whom you believe—asserted his innocence until hanging day. Few reports of Kidd’s execution fail to mention he was much inebriated as he was marched through teeming crowds to the gallows at the Execution Dock in London. Drunk, Kidd dropped through the hatch, whereupon the rope broke. Dazed and befuddled, he sprawled on the ground, then was marched up the steps again and fitted with a new rope. This time the rope held. When the twitching stopped, Kidd’s corpse was taken down and hung along the Thames to be pecked at by crows, a warning to those considering a similar path.

  The pirate most associated with rum was undoubtedly Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard. A privateer during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), he turned pirate and harassed merchant ships plying the seas between Virginia and the Caribbean. Already tall and muscular, Blackbeard further cultivated his appearance to give fright. He had eyebrows like small shrubs, and in a time when beards weren’t common, he let his grow and would braid it and tie it up with colorful ribbons, which he would “turn about his ears.” As a final flourish, he would tuck slow-burning, smoky fuses made of hemp cord, saltpeter, and lime under his hat, and ignite them during battle, moving about in a wreath of acrid smoke, like an emissary from the underworld. In one eighteen-month period, he captured some twenty ships.

  Blackbeard’s fondness for rum was legendary. He and his crew would make stops on islands between harrying raids for feasting and indulging in massive quantities of drink. “Rum was never his master,” wrote his biographer, Robert Lee. “He could handle it as no other man of his day, and he was never known to pass out from an excess.” Among his cocktails was a potion of gunpowder mixed with rum, which he would ignite and swill while it flamed and popped.

  Blackbeard’s career ended, as pirate careers often did, with extravagant bloodshed. He had set himself up in November 1718 along the Outer Banks of North Carolina, using Ocracoke Island as a base for his ship, the Adventure Galley. Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia found the harassment of traders increasingly intolerable and sent out a pair of naval sloops, the Pearl and the Lyme, to put an end to it. On the evening of November 21, the two ships came upon the Adventure Galley at anchor with Blackbeard and about two dozen of his men aboard. The sloops dropped anchor as the sun set and prepared for a morning engagement.

  Blackbeard and his men readied for battle the way they knew best: They drank heartily. Some days earlier, Blackbeard had written of a melancholy predicament in his ship’s log: “Such a day, rum all out:—Our company somewhat sober:—A damned confusion among us!” He overheard talk of insurrection among his men, and at length, succeeded in sacking a ship with “a great deal of liquor on board, so kept the company hot, damned hot; then all things went well again.”

  At first, all went well on the morning of November 22. The dawn encounter began with missteps by the Virginia sloops, which ran aground on sandbars that Blackbeard knew to avoid. Freed after tossing ballast and water casks overboard, the government sloops resumed pursuit and caught up with the Adventure Galley.

  Blackbeard fought with his accustomed vigor, firing volleys of shot and old iron from a cannon, which killed the captain of the Lyme and dismasted the ship. The crew of the Pearl, undaunted, closed in on Blackbeard. According to newspaper accounts, the pirate taunted the sloop as it neared, calling the crews “cowardly puppies,” then hoisted aloft a drinking glass (of “liquor” in some accounts, “wine” in others) to Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Pearl, yelling, “Damnation seize my Soul if I give you Quarter, or take any from you.” Maynard hollered back that he expected no quarter, nor would he give any.

  Blackbeard leaped aboard Maynard’s ship with ten of his men, assuming that his volleys had decimated the crew. He was in for a surprise. All but two of Maynard’s men were hiding beneath the decks with weapons readied; when they swarmed onto the deck, Blackbeard and his men found themselves outnumbered. They fought fiercely. Maynard’s fingers were wounded by a slash from Blackbeard; his men rushed to his aid. One of Maynard’s men, a stout Scottish Highlander, landed a blow that sliced Blackbeard on the neck. At this, the pirate called out, “Well done, lad!” The Scotsman wasn’t finished. According to the account in the Boston News Letter, the Highlander replied, “If it not be well done, I’ll do it better.” With that, he gave him a second blow, which cut off his head, “laying it flat on his shoulder.” Blackbeard went down not only headless and lacerated with horrific gashes, but with five bullets in him.

  Blackbeard’s head was suspended from the bowsprit of the captured Adventure Galley, which Maynard sailed back to Williamsburg, Virginia. He turned over the head, the sloop, and the pirate’s effects to his commander.

  That wasn’t the end of Blackbeard’s head. After serving as an ornament suspended from a tall pole at the entrance to Hampton River, a grisly memo to would-be pirates, the head was taken down. The skull, it’s been widely reported, was later adorned with silver plate and crafted into the base for a bowl from which rum punch was served at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg. People still claim they know of people who knew of other people who once drank from it, but no one really knows what, at last, came of Blackbeard’s head.

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  If you come across a pirate and he bellows for “grog,” he is, in all likelihood, not a real pirate. Grog was invented well after the decline and fall of piracy, becoming an improbable symbol of order, rather than disorder, on the high seas. To understand how this happened, we must switch to the other side: the British navy ships that were the bane of pirates.

  Rum was first officially doled out to British navy sailors in 1655, during the triumphant British assault on Jamaica. We do not know why, but we can surmise. Drinking water was exceedingly difficult to store on long ocean voyages, especially in the tropics: It would became algae-ridden and musty in its casks. Beer was a reasonable alternative: The modest alcohol content kept it from fouling, but the taste tended to go off, and sailors commonly groused about “stinking beer.” French brandy and Spanish wines, especially rosolio and mistela, were popular. (Sailors took to calling the latter “Miss Taylor.”) But these were difficult to provision with any consistency to ships stationed in the West Indies.

  Then there was rum. This new spirit was increasingly abundant on the islands, especially in Antigua and Barbados, as more sugar planters imported stills to convert their waste molasses into a marketable commodity. Rum had the merit of remaining sweet almost indefinitely in a cask and improving in flavor over time as the wood of the cask tempered the harsher qualities of the sharp-edged distillate. It also had the advantage of being more potent than beer or wine and so required less room for storage than its lower-alcohol kin.

  Another push to distribute rum aboard British navy ships came from the island planters, who envisioned the growing British navy as a lucrative market. By 1769, the Society of West India Merchants had organized themselves sufficiently to commission the writing and printing of three thousand copies of a booklet entitled An Essay on Spirituous Liquors, with Regard to Their Effects on Health, in Which the Comparative Wholesomeness of Rum and Brandy Are Particularly Considered. Rum, it should come as no surprise to hear, was found the more wholesome. A decade later, the naval provisioning office was officially authorized to contract for West Indian rum to replace brandy in ship stores. It was among the earliest, but by no means the last, instance of the sugar and rum industry organizing to ensure its economic good health. Island plantation owners could cooperate when need be, and they would do so most effectively in ensuring their
own interests at the expense of the northern colonies in the run-up to the American Revolution.

  An overly fertile imagination is not needed to understand the broader appeal of a midday dram of rum to the common seaman. The naval sailor was typically in his mid-twenties (the average age in the early eighteenth century was twenty-seven), and he was likely from a poor family, for the well-off tended not to embrace the great risks and endless unpleasantries of life at sea. The life of an eighteenth-century mariner could be appallingly bleak—stuck in cramped quarters with unhygienic men, many of whom no doubt suffered from ailments of the lower gastrointestinal tract. A sailor’s private quarters consisted of just enough space belowdecks in which to sling a hammock, plus a small trunk in which to stash possessions. As Marcus Rediker has pointed out in his study of eighteenth-century seaman, life at sea was rarely a matter of man against nature. It was man against man aboard floating prisons. “Their isolation was communal,” he wrote. “They could escape neither their loneliness nor each other.”

  Drink offered brief escape. The officers and crew would drink to relieve the tedium of shipboard life and to smooth over tensions. They drank to forget life between the decks, to warm up to their fellow crewmen, and to toast to the king, their wives, their mistresses. One seaman wrote in 1723 that he “never had any great fancy for fuddling,” but tippled more “for the love of my company than for the drink.” Also, rum was safe and relatively palatable, whereas the food on board was neither. “Good liquor to sailors,” wrote Woodes Rogers, an English privateer and later governor of the Bahamas, “is preferable to clothing.” In Tobias Smollett’s novel The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), rum was called “Necessity.” Nothing rang better in a sailor’s ear than the call to “splice the main brace”—the euphemism for doling out rum. This is attributed to the hard work needed to repair a parted main brace, or the stoutest of the running rigging, and seamen who accomplished the task were typically rewarded with a double ration of rum.

  For a captain stationed in the West Indies in the early eighteenth century, balancing morale and discipline was made all the more difficult by the distribution of rum rations. Tipsy sailors were more likely to be injured—it’s difficult enough to scramble about the rigging in a galloping swell or blustery wind when stone sober, never mind while drunk. And rum could inflame the passions and cause smoldering frictions between seamen to combust.

  Rum-induced crises did not go unnoticed by Admiral Edward Vernon of the British Royal Navy. The admiral was well educated, much admired by his men, and possessed of an uncommon competence. (Lawrence Washington, George Washington’s half brother, named his Virginia estate after him, and George kept the name Mount Vernon when he inherited the plantation.) Vernon served in the West Indies between 1698 and 1712, commanding a sixty-gun ship, and by 1739 had been elevated to vice admiral. That happened to be the year that England declared war on Spain—the so-called War of Jenkins’ Ear—which was triggered when the master of a British merchant vessel had his ear cut off by a vengeful Spanish captain.

  Vernon regarded rum as a competitor for his men’s affections, noting that its charms often led to men permanently abandoning their posts. Vernon wrote in a letter to the Admiralty that some five hundred seamen had vanished from Jamaica “since being in my command; which I believe to have all been seduced out and gone home with the homeward bound trade, through the temptations of high wages and 30 gallons of rum, and being generally conveyed drunk onboard their ships from the punch houses where they are seduced.”

  Vernon assailed the “pernicious custom of the seamen drinking their allowance of rum in drams, and often at once.” This resulted in “many fatal effects to their morals as well as their health, which are visibly impaired thereby.” What’s more, rum, quaffed straight, caused a “stupefying [of] their rational qualities, which makes them heedlessly slaves to every passion.” Distributing copious amounts of potent rum, Vernon realized, was not a formula for building a navy that would dominate the maritime world.

  The alcoholic content of early rum is unknown to us because it was unknown to those who consumed it. Not until 1816 was the Sikes hydrometer invented, which made it possible to measure the percentage of alcohol in liquor. Before that, alcohol content was determined by mixing the spirit with a few grains of gunpowder and then subjecting the concoction to the focused rays of the sun under a magnifier. If the gunpowder managed to ignite but the liquid didn’t flare up, this was said to be “proof” of its proper alcoholic content.

  What was Vernon to do? Eliminating the rum ration would likely give rise to mutinies or, at the least, a sullen crankiness among seamen who had learned to live from tot to tot. So Vernon fashioned an alternative strategy: He would dilute the rum.

  In an order issued at Port Royal in 1740, Vernon called for rum served to naval crews to be “mixed with the proportion of a quart of water to every half pint of rum,” resulting in a concoction that was one part rum to four parts water. To ensure that the effects on the men would be reduced, Vernon decreed that this diluted rum was to be served over two sessions daily, rather than at once, as had been the custom. Between ten in the morning and noon, the first tot was to be ladled out, and the second between four and six in the afternoon. Because the mixing of rum and water left itself open to shortchanging by dishonest pursers—and the general belief among seamen was that every purser was dishonest—Vernon’s edict required that mixing occur on deck, “and in the presence of the Lieutenant of the Watch, who is to take particular care to see that the men are not defrauded in having their full allowance of rum.” (The writer Edward Ward reserved a special wrath for the purser: “The worser Liquor he keeps, the more he brews his own Profit,” Ward groused, and “he shall draw more Gain from wretched gripe-gut Stuff, in one Forenoon, than a Dozen Ale-wives from all their Taps, on a Day of Thanksgiving.”)

  The order for diluted rum was circulated throughout the fleet, and the new drink made its way from the West India station throughout the Royal Navy over the next two decades. By 1756, the daily distribution of watered rum was codified in the Admiralty’s naval code.

  The new, less-potent ration needed a name. It was no longer rum, and it no longer had the kick to be called kill-devil. An ingenious solution presented itself to some anonymous seaman. Vernon had a fondness for wearing a coat made of a material called “grogram,” a woven fabric stiffened and weatherproofed with gum. Vernon’s nickname among sailors was “Old Grogram,” and so his new rum was dubbed “grog.” The name stuck.

  In grog, one also finds evidence of a proto–West Indian cocktail, an early precursor to the daiquiri and the mojito. Vernon’s 1740 order to distribute grog rather than “neat” rum included a provision that allowed crewmen to exchange their salt and bread allotment for “sugar and limes to make [grog] more palatable to them.” Although the order was likely issued with the sailor’s palate, rather than his health, in mind, it had an unexpectedly tonic effect. Scurvy had been devastating sailors for years with bleeding gums, sore joints, loose teeth, and a slow healing of wounds, but it was still a great medical mystery. Rum was issued as a preventative, but later experiments, starting in 1747, identified the cause as a deficiency of ascorbic acid—found in citrus fruit, among other things. By 1753, the Scottish surgeon James Lind had proved that a regimen of juices from lemons, limes, or oranges would keep scurvy away. Two years later, the naval regulations called for a half-ounce of lemon or lime juice per day “to be mixed with grog or wine.” English sailors became known as limeys. And so Vernon, by luck or instinct, was well ahead of the movement toward citrus.

  Over time, the dispensing of grog became more fixed and ceremonial. The pseudonymous Jack Nastyface (a common nickname for a cook’s assistant) wrote in 1805 that the time around noon was “the pleasantest…of the day,” since that’s when the “piper is called to play Nancy Dawson or some other lively tune, a well known signal that the grog is ready to be served out.” The purs
er would haul to the open deck a premeasured portion, with each of the crew allotted one-half cup of rum per session. The mixing water would be tested to ensure it wasn’t salty. If it passed muster, the grog would be blended and promptly doled out, often to the cook, who would, in turn, distribute it to his messmates belowdecks. The ritual would be repeated in the late afternoon.

  Even diluted, the grog ration was still equivalent to about five cocktails per day, assuming an ounce and a half of rum per cocktail. That’s an agreeable amount by any standard. Perhaps too agreeable. As the navy became more professional and the temperance movement gained a foothold, grog rations fell further into disfavor. In 1823, the ration was cut in half, and then halved again in 1850—effectively slashing the rum allotment by three-quarters in less than three decades. The nineteenth-century writer and sailor Richard Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast, groused that cutting back rations was a curious way to promote the idea that “temperance is their friend,” since it “takes from them what they always had, and gives them nothing in place.” In fact, the navy did provide some compensatory reward, often greater rations of tea, cocoa, and meat, as well as a token increase in pay.

  And there was other good news: As the quantity of rum diminished, its quality improved. The navy’s longtime blender and supplier of rum, E D & F Man, decided to appeal to the more discerning tastes of officers, and British naval rum developed an almost cultish following among navy men. The exact blend codified by the Admiralty in 1810 was a highly guarded secret. (It was, broadly, a blend of heavy rums from Guyana and Trinidad, leavened with three lighter rums.)

  The British custom of serving up daily tots persisted into the twentieth century, a feral habit that resisted eradication even as it fell out of favor with crewmen. By the 1950s, only about a third of a hundred thousand British sailors opted for their daily grog rations. As navy operations become more complex and computers and advanced weapons systems demanded more mental acuity than hauling tar buckets, questions surfaced about the wisdom of distributing rum to sailors on duty. The advent of the Breathalyzer didn’t help: A British newspaper unsportingly pointed out that sailors could be legally drunk after consuming their allotted grog rations.