While one must admire the mixological spirit displayed here, five or six spoonfuls of anise-flavored booze in a quart of water is weak sauce indeed, particularly when compared to the heady compounds lurking over the horizon. But it’s a start.
Spirits were also beginning to slink into the bar. In 1572, an establishment turns up in London property records that not only foreshadowed the eventual solution to the problem of where to drink spirits but also served as a signpost for the route by which they would infiltrate and, for a time, subdue the highest reaches of English society. In a run-down row of stone buildings in Petty Wales, just east of the Tower of London, tucked in between a pair of alehouses known as the Ram’s Head and Mother Mampudding’s, stood the Aqua Vitae House.i Its location was no accident: behind Petty Wales, you see, lay the quays of the Thames, where cargo ships unloaded. And sailors—well, as an anonymous French freebooter observed in 1620, the sailor’s way of celebrating anything “est du boire l’eau-de-vie”—“is to drink aqua vitae.” Under Queen Elizabeth I, England suddenly had a lot of celebrating sailors.
“The Sailor’s Joys,” after Robert Dighton, 1782. BRITISH MUSEUM
III
“PUNCH BY NO ALLOWANC”
As the sixteenth century began to shade into the seventeenth, England sailed forth into the world, the Virgin Queen’s canny hand loosely on the tiller. In the process, her mariners laid the foundations of what would become the greatest maritime empire the world has ever known. Having been too embroiled in internal strife to participate in the first part of the Age of Exploration, when Spain and Portugal mapped the globe and snapped up the richest parts of it, England had a latecomer’s determination to pick up what hadn’t yet been nailed down and, if possible, to un-nail a few things that had already been nailed. At first, ships were sent forth to America in the West and Muscovy in the East (the Queen and Ivan the Terrible were longtime correspondents, and he even proposed marriage to her; one shudders) in the hopes of finding a northern route to the riches of Asia, one that wouldn’t be infested with Spaniards and “Portingales” and Hollanders and other dangerous pests of that ilk. When such a thing could not be found, they broke out the crowbar and set to un-nailing.
In 1577, Sir Francis Drake sailed for the Spanish-held west coast of the Americas, bent on exploration and plunder. He returned via the Pacific and the Cape of Good Hope, thus leading the second mission to successfully circumnavigate the globe. Unlike Ferdinand Magellan, he survived his voyage. Better yet, he came back rich with pirated Peruvian gold. Two years after his return, some of the queen’s inner circle tried to capitalize on what he had learned and launched the country’s first attempt at direct trade with Asia (with perhaps a little unofficial slaving and piracy at Iberian expense along the way). Led by Captain Edward Fenton, this expedition “for China and Cathay” dissolved into squabbling and disharmony and never made it out of the Atlantic. Ten years later, after the fight against the Spanish Armada had boosted England’s confidence and professionalism at sea, another mission was sent east. This one actually reached Asia but left no permanent English presence there.
That would soon change. In 1600, a group of hard-nosed London merchants obtained a royal charter to form the English East India Company. The company’s first trading mission reached the spice-rich islands of Sumatra and Java in 1602, but unfortunately the Hollanders had beaten them to it.j Nonetheless, despite Dutch harassment and interference, they still managed to establish a small “factory” (the contemporary term for trading post) there. In 1608, one of the company’s men first set foot in India, although it would be another seven years before its “factors”—traders—would be able to gain a secure commercial foothold. By 1632, anyway, the company had factories dotted up and down India’s southeast and northwest coasts and was on the verge of setting up its first outpost in the rich province of Bengal, where, 125 years later, its private troops would defeat a French army at the battle of Plassey and seize effective control of the entire Indian subcontinent, thus ushering in the age of Britannia Triumphant.
But already, in those first thirty years of England in Asia, the opportunistic, even semipiratical cadre of sailors, soldiers and merchant-adventurers that the company sent out had made a mark on world culture that time cannot erase nor age destroy. We know this from a letter sent on September 28, 1632, from Armagon, one muggy, mosquito-ridden pinprick on the Coromandel Coast, to Pettapoli, another.k In it Robert Addams, one of the company’s men-at-arms, thanks Thomas Colley, a “factor,” for a favor and wishes him well on the upcoming mission to Bengal, on which Colley was slated to be second in command to Ralph Cartwright. “I am very glad you have so good compani to be with all as Mr. Cartwright,” Addams wrote, and “I hop you will keep good house together and drincke punch by no allowanc.” Thus Punch makes its debut in the written records of history. As far as debuts go, it’s not much: a name let fall in a passing comment without definition or explanation (in this, it is not unlike the first mention of a drink named cock-tail, in a 1798 London newspaper, which tells us only that it is “vulgarly called ginger”). About all that we can be sure of from this famous letter is that Punch was already a known drink and that there were those who feared it—and that Englishmen were often savage spellers.
As with the Cocktail, it would take a few years before someone would bother to define the drink for those playing the home game. Punch got there in 1638, when Johan Albert de Mandelslo, a young German adventurer, washed up at the company’s factory in Surat. There he found the factors irrigating themselves with “a kind of drink consisting of aqua vitae, rose-water, juice of citrons and sugar.” “Palepuntz,” he called it in the account of his wanderings published a few years later; ungarbled, that’s “bowl o’ Punch,” or—as the French traveler François de La Boullaye-Le Gouz, who visited the same factory eleven years later, called it, “bolleponge.” The Frenchman’s de-scription of it (sugar, lemon juice, “eau de vie,” mace and toasted biscuit) more or less tallies with Mandelslo’s, give or take a spice (and, of course, the toast garnish, traditional in English ale-based bowl drinks but a little odd here). Add the one given by François Bernier, who encountered “bouleponge” in Bengal in the 1660s (“aqua vitae . . . with lemon juice, water and a little nutmeg grated on top”), and we have a pretty clear idea of what these Englishmen were drinking. Aqua vitae, watered down to a more quaffable strength, soured with citrus juice, sweetened with sugar and spiced with whatever was handy, be it nutmeg, mace, rosewater or what have you—simple enough, considering that it’s the foundation stone upon which all of modern mixology rests.
If the what is plain, the who, when and where are anything but. The problem is, as far as we can tell from what has come down to us almost four hundred years later, of all those early factors, of all the men who carried them from port to port, supplied them, protected them, not one took a few minutes to scribble down the origins of this new tipple. But then again, they had more pressing things to attend to than the curiosity of distant generations about their refreshments—like, for example, attempting to get the servant of the Chinese-Javan drinking-house keeper who has just tried to tunnel into your warehouse and steal your goods to give up where his master has hidden himself, a task that Edmund Scott attempted by shoving hot irons under the servant’s nails and then tearing them all off, shredding his flesh with rasps, causing “cold iron screws to be screwed into the bones of his arms, and suddenly snatched out” and a dozen other demonic things (Javanese servants are tough; the man still wouldn’t talk, or even cry out). Admittedly, that was in 1604, in Java, not 1632, in India, but it gives us a pretty good idea of the sort of person we’re dealing with. They were not mixographers.
They certainly did like their Punch, though. Take our friend Thomas Colley. Evidently poor Mr. Colley—a rather sporty youth from London, it appears from the scant notices we have of his life—did not choose to heed Richard Addams’s advice, and he probably should have: he died on August twenty-fifth, less than four months after
he set foot in Bengal. He was not alone. In the first year of the factory there, four more of his companions were laid to rest, as was one of their replacements. “The Chiefe Occasion of this disease,” one of the company’s captains reported to his bosses in London, “is doubtless Intemperancy . . . for ’tis a place that abounds with Racke and ffruit [sic], and these immoderately taken Cannot Chuse but ingender Surfeits.”
Once thirst and enforced sobriety weaned them of their native beverages, the English factors took to the native ones wholeheartedly; as early as 1618, some factories were already including arrack among their standard provisions. Few abstained from drinking Punch, and many abused it. Yet one can hardly blame them. Consider, for a moment, the factor’s life. Thirteen thousand miles and six months at sea from home, pent up in a claustrophobic little compound (few were allowed to live outside of the factory) perched on the rim of an alien land whose people, languages and way of life were utterly foreign to anything in your experience, with little to occupy your time for weeks on end but waiting for ships to come in and trying not to think about the disease and death that were claiming all too many of your comrades. Small wonder if, as the Reverend John Ovington reported after his 1689 tour of the English factories of western India, you lost yourself in “Luxury, Immodesty and a prostitute Dissolution of Manners”—if you gambled, drank yourself insensate on Punch and solaced your existence with native whores.
Of course, some company men were just plain bad to begin with. “In those early turbulent days,” as Major H. Hobbs wrote in 1944 in his marvelously chatty John Barleycorn Bahadur: Old Time Taverns in India, “India swarmed with unrepentant sinners who had discarded their Bibles and their consciences at the Cape of Good Hope.” But not all were so studiedly wicked. Mandelslo leaves us a rather poignant portrait of how William Methwold, president of the Surat factory, would gather with three other factors after prayers each Friday, “which day being that of their departure from England,” to toast with sherry and Punch the health of their wives, half the world away in England. “Some made their advantage of this meeting to get more than they could well carry away,” he adds. It would take a strong man not to.l
But drinking something and inventing it are two different things, and with all that tippling, there was not much reflection on the origins of the factors’ social drink of choice, and no informed account of its introduction has yet come to light. In the absence of eyewitness testimony, plausible assumptions tend to harden into orthodoxy. In the case of Punch, those assumptions began early. In 1658, Edward Phillips, a pioneering English lexicographer, published his New World of English Words. Among those new words was “Punch,” which he defined thus: “A kind of Indian Drink.” From his point of view, this was a good call. Paging through the convivial literature popular in the day—from Thomas Dekker’s and Robert Greene’s low and squabblesome satires and pasquinades to the various rowdy comedies by Shakespeare and his contemporaries to the 1638 Barnabae Itinerarium, aka “Drunken Barnaby’s Itinerary” (a wet and smutty tour of England recounted in execrable verse, both Latin and English) and on up the literary scale to the elegant drinking songs of Ben Jonson and the other Mermaid wits and the suave little essay James Howell devoted to the world’s drinks in 1634—he would have found no Punch. Poking around London, he might perhaps have heard of such a concoction at the East India docks. Elsewhere, the only recreational drink he would have found made with spirits would have been the newly popular pop-in (the seventeenth-century tippler’s name for a shot of booze in a mug of beer or glass of wine), and he would have had to descend to low precincts indeed to find that. See, for example, Dekker’s 1609 lowlife excursion, The Bel-Man of London, in which the senior member of the “ragged regiment of beggars” calls his crew to order while swigging from “a double Jug of Ale (that had the spirit of Aqua vitae in it, it smelt so strong).” Of course, the fortified wines coming into England from Spain at the time were made on essentially the same principle, but wines were for gentlemen and thus received little satirical attention.
In 1676, John Fryer, a young English physician working for the company in India, gave weight to the Punch-as-Indian-drink theory when he noted in one of his letters home thatat Nerule [Nerul, just outside Goa] is made the best Arachm . . . with which the English on this coast make that enervating Liquor called Paunch (which is Indostan for Five) from Five Ingredients; as the Physicians name their Composition Diapente; or from four things, Diatesseron.
Fryer’s letters were published in 1698. Ever since, his offhand remark has had the force of holy writ. In part, it’s because of the erudition displayed. Compared to the hardheaded Edmund Scotts, whom the company usually sent east, Fryer was a gentleman, and as such, he knew Greek (that “Diapente” and “Diatesseron”) and was quick to use his learning to fit modern phenomena into classical molds. It helped that his etymology was plausible—the Hindi for “five” is indeed panch, and Punch did generally have five ingredients, except of course when it didn’t. It also helped that the idea of the drink’s Indian origin appealed to not only academic sense but common sense. Everything in a bowl of Punch but the water either came exclusively from the East or was much cheaper there and easier to come by—but here I am merely repeating what Joseph Addison already observed in No. 22 of his newspaper, The Free-Holder, three centuries ago.5
Addison’s observation was particularly true when it came to the booze. The first European travelers to the eastern and southern parts of Asia found them awash in distilled spirits of various new and interesting species, none of them involving lees or draff and none needing to be spiced to mask the flavor. Antonio Pigafetta, one of the few who sailed with Magellan to survive the voyage, encountered two of the most common types on the Philippine island of Palawan in 1521. There the natives drank both distilled palm wine and distilled rice wine, he reported, the latter being the stronger and better. “It is as clear as water, but so strong that it intoxicated many of our men. It is called arach.” When it touched at Java in 1596, the first Dutch mission to the Spice Islands found the Chinese community there (“very subtil and industrious people,” as the contemporary English translation of their report puts it) also making “much aqua vitae of rice and Cocus [i.e., coconut sap], which the Iauars [Javans] by night come to buy, and drinke it secretly, for by Mahomets law it is forbidden them.” Indeed, it’s likely that the distilling technology in the great Southeast Asian island groups came originally from China; certainly the stills that they used, and in some places use to this day, are Chinese style.n But the only thing sketchier than the history of distilling in Europe is the history of distilling in Asia; in this respect, great stretches of time and territory are sunk in stygian blackness.
Only relatively recently has the antiquity of India’s distilling tradition become clear. Archaeological excavations in the 1950s and 1960s in the region around the ancient trading center of Taxila, at the headwaters of the Indus in what is today Pakistan, uncovered remains of what were unmistakably distillery-grogshop complexes, each with multiple clay-pot stills. These have been dated to the time of Christ, give or take a century or two. Combine them with the sugarcane that Alexander the Great found growing in the same region and the long-standing domestication of the lime in India, and it’s not impossible that Rum Punch could be two thousand years old. Frustratingly, the millennium and a half between then and the arrival of European explorers in the 1500s remains one of those dark stretches, and I cannot say whether that ancient tradition survived unbroken or had to be reestablished through contact with the Chinese or Arabs. In any case, those explorers found not only a tremendous amount of distilling going on but some unusual people drinking the resulting spirits.
Moghul emperors, for example. Although they strove mightily to spread the faith with sword and lance and glorified it with jaw-dropping architecture (e.g., the Taj Mahal), Babur, the conqueror who swept into India from the north at the beginning of the sixteenth century and founded the dynasty; his son Humayun; his grandson Akbar and his great-
grandson Jahangir all shared one great, un-Islamic weakness. Like the Javans, they could not resist a little tipple. Unlike them, however, they made no attempt to hide it. Akbar the Great, drunk on arrack, once famously raced across the rickety pontoon bridge spanning the Yamuna in Agra at a gallop. He was riding Hawai, his favorite elephant, at the time. And Jahangir, who at one point in his life was sticking away twenty capacious cups of arrack a day, scrupled not to drink it in front of William Hawkins, the East India Company’s first emissary to his court, and then banish him from court for having alcohol on his breath.o By the time the elegant Sir Thomas Roe, who replaced Hawkins in 1615, arrived at his court, the shah had ostensibly cut back to six cups a day, although Roe still found him often “very busy with his Cuppes” and possessed by “a drowzines . . . from the fumes of Backus.” And those six cups weren’t even of pure arrack: Jahangir preferred “mingled wyne, halfe of the Grape, halfe Artificiall.” When he offered Roe a cup of it, the aristocratic ambassador took one sip and promptly sneezed, remark-ing later that “it was more strong then [sic] ever I tasted.” I shouldn’t wonder; pop-in was not exactly favored by gentlemen. Ever true to his class, Roe informed his mercantile masters in his first report home that he “drancke water this 11 Monthes, and Nothing els,” adding that “Rack” he could not endure.
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