by James Walvin
By c.1700, rum distilleries in Barbados had taken on a recognizably modern form, with their custom-made copper stills (hence the term ‘coppers’), with large metal vats, and all the necessary piping to contain and process the liquids. Although it was on a small scale at first, as volumes increased, and as taste and demand grew (locally, but especially in North America), rum, like many other exotic products, passed from the apothecary shop to the tavern-keeper. A great deal of rum was consumed in the rum-producing regions by master and man, planter and slave. On Martinique, servants and African slaves each drank, on average, an estimated 3.5 gallons of rum per year. Much the same was true of military staff stationed in the Caribbean. They drank rum for pleasure, of course, but also as a result of prevailing medical advice. Alcohol was seen as a vital medicine in maintaining the body’s temperature against the threat of local diseases. The conviction spread that rum was especially important for white troops stationed in the tropics; it was also recommended for men standing guard during the night. British troops in North America were consuming a monthly average of 3.5 gallons of rum – twelve times that of the slave population that produced it.5 There was, then, a thriving rum trade on each sugar island, and between the islands, although the main impetus behind the development of Caribbean rum was the export trade, particularly to North America.
Rum exports from the Caribbean increased rapidly in the late seventeenth century. In 1664–5, 102,744 gallons of rum were shipped from Barbados; thirty years later, that had risen to more than half a million gallons.6 By c.1700, rum had become an important source of income to planters throughout the Caribbean. Above all, perhaps, that rum provided comfort and pleasure for untold numbers of drinkers in taverns and ‘grog’ shops on both sides of the Atlantic. Rum-drinking spread from the plantations to the dockside, and then to all the major ports and their wider hinterlands around the Atlantic. Rum became the mainstay of seamen plying their trade throughout the extensive legs of global maritime commerce. Sailors had traditionally needed alcohol to sustain them through the rigours of long-distance sailing for weeks and months at sea.
After 1731, rum also established itself as the daily sustenance and pleasure of men serving in the Royal Navy. Indeed, it is hard to overestimate the importance of rum to sailors in both the commercial and naval fleets. In fact, the ration on Royal Navy ships continued until 1970. The hardships endured, for instance, by the crew on Captain Cook’s epic voyages to Australia and New Zealand in the 1760s and ’70s were eased by a daily one pint of rum (a half pint for boys), doled out at noon and 6 p.m.7
The most important market for Caribbean rum was North America, where it quickly spread from dockside taverns to the remotest of frontier settlements. It was drunk by yeoman farmers, fisherfolk, Chesapeake planters, African slaves, Native Americans, and frontier fur traders . . .’8 By 1700, Barbados exported a yearly average of almost 600,000 gallons of rum, but only a tiny fraction went to England and Wales; the bulk went to North America, and there was also a lively trade to Spanish America. And although the islands cultivated a wide range of export crops, more than 90 per cent of the trade from the British islands to North America consisted of sugar, rum and molasses.9 Another receptive market for Caribbean rum was Ireland and, in the process, the Irish became a nation of rum-drinkers.10
Rum became much more than a pleasurable popular drink in North America; it was also a means of exchange – a form of currency. The New England merchants importing most of North America’s rum lacked any real money supplies, so they bartered for their rum, paying for it with cargoes of North American goods – foodstuffs, fish, timber and pitch – all of which they shipped south to the Caribbean. In this way, the economy of North America helped to clothe, house and feed slaves in the Caribbean.
North America’s taste for sweetness in drink and food was established in the years of colonial rule, and it laid the basis for what followed when the American Republic developed into the most powerful economy and country on earth. From the early days of European settlement in the Americas, there had been strong economic and personal links between North America and the Caribbean; they were particularly strong between Barbados and the Carolinas. There were also regular migrations of people from one region to another. As the Caribbean plantation economies evolved, the islands naturally turned to North America both for markets and for a wide range of necessary goods – timber, for construction and roofing, and foodstuffs (especially cod fish) to feed the Africans. In return, and by way of payment, the northern colonies received Caribbean produce. Above all, they liked the by-products of the Caribbean sugar industry – rum and molasses.
North America also needed sugar, and although there had been early efforts to grow sugar cane in North America, notably in Virginia, American sugar had to await the settlement and American acquisition of Louisiana in the early years of the nineteenth century before local sugar production took off. Until then, Americans imported and consumed sugar from the Caribbean, although it remained costly. As in Europe, the crude sugar shipped to North America underwent further refining in major ports on the east coast. There was a sugar refinery in New York as early as 1689; a century later, there were refineries in seven American cities, although, by then, most of the sugar had passed through refineries in Philadelphia. As in England, the final product, refined sugar, was sometimes sold in what, to modern eyes, seem to be unusual places. Evan Morgan’s shop in Philadelphia offered corsets and children’s coats alongside ‘very good Chocolate, Wine, Rum, Melasses, Sugar . . .’11
The social importance of sugar in colonial America followed the pattern already in evidence in Europe. At first it graced the tables of more prosperous Americans. In the major cities, or in the more elaborate country residences (on plantations, for example), people flaunted their standing, as did their European peers, by equipping their homes with elaborate coffee and tea sets – each with the necessary sugar bowl. Thomas Jefferson, for example, experimented with making ice cream, which required lots of sugar. We also know that sugar was used as a basic ingredient in colonial American cooking, because cookbooks recommending sugar as an ingredient had begun to appear in the kitchens of prosperous Americans. In general, however, sugar remained a luxury item in North America much later than it did in Europe. Poorer Americans, on the other hand, sweetened their foodstuffs with honey, maple syrup or molasses, and the cost of sugar kept consumption low. In the early years of the new Republic, for instance, the average American consumed only 8lb of sugar each year. A century later, in the 1890s, that had risen to 80lb a year.12
What colonial North Americans seemed to enjoy most of all was Caribbean rum, its initial popularity spreading from sailors who acquired the taste in the Caribbean and at sea. It was also actively encouraged by the Dutch who had a long-standing commercial interest in the rum trade, although the Dutch were eventually excluded from North America by the imposition of British Navigation Acts, designed to keep trade firmly in British hands. It was this policy which, by 1776, became another major reason for America’s growing alienation and dislike of British colonial control. These British restrictions on trade led to a flourishing smuggling trade which ensured that rum continued to flow into North America via Dutch traders.
New Englanders also produced rum from cheap, smuggled French molasses, much to the disgruntlement of British Caribbean planters and British officials keen to maintain British economic dominance over the French. Even a tax on imported French molasses did little to prevent New Englanders acquiring supplies for their rum distilleries. The Peace of Paris in 1763 severely hurt the French. Not only did they lose Canada, but their Caribbean islands were henceforth allowed to export only molasses and rum. New England merchants made the most of this by shipping ever greater volumes back to the northern colonies. All this prompted closer scrutiny by the British, with the resulting Acts to regulate North American and Caribbean trade, and the imposition of duties on sugar and molasses (regularly revised to suit British interests) and all serving to aggravate North Am
erican – and sometimes Caribbean planters’ – feeling against the British.
Caribbean molasses was widely used as a source of sweetening in North America, and was also used to produce local beer. But its main use was in making local, North American rum. At the mid-eighteenth century, 2.7 million gallons of rum flowed from distilleries in Massachusetts. It was sold in taverns throughout the colonies (Boston alone had 177 in 1737) and was sold throughout the colonial settlements as far as the distant frontiers, where it sustained and emboldened the military, and lubricated trade with the Native Americans. The North American colonies seemed awash with rum. Indeed, throughout the American colonies (and what was to become Canada), rum was a prized commodity that could be exchanged for most other items.
All this is evidence of the degree to which the sugar economy, in all its complexities, had permeated the Atlantic world by the mid-eighteenth century. People all over the Atlantic region had come to depend on sugar for their drinks and food, but they also enjoyed sugar’s derivatives in equal measure. In North America, Caribbean rum had established itself as a major drink, especially among labouring men. It proved an ideal drink to cope with the rigours and the hardships of colonial life. It also became a vital element in the fur trade with Native Indians and, despite efforts to control its impact, it was to have a dire, malignant influence on those communities – harm that was later to be exacerbated by whisky. Although American colonists also established their own alcoholic drinks – wines, and especially beer – those drinks made little headway against rum imported from the Caribbean.
Barbados dominated the early rum trade and, by the end of the seventeenth century, that tiny island was exporting 600,000 gallons of rum annually. Most Barbadian rum went to New England and to the Chesapeake region dominated by slave-grown tobacco. An estimated 250,000–300,000 gallons of rum were shipped to the Chesapeake alone. A similar story could be told of French North America, with French legal restrictions demanding that colonists import and consume only produce from French Caribbean islands. That rum was a key ingredient in the fur trade with Native Americans. French officials, like the British, were torn between the economic advantages created by rum exchanged for furs and pelts, and the obvious damage wrought by rum among Native Americans – and among African slaves. Colonial officials and the occasional local cleric united in arguing that drunkenness was having a corrosive impact throughout the colonies. Despite this being also true of large numbers of European settlers, it seemed especially damaging among the Native American Indians – and the main source of that problem was rum and molasses imported from the sugar islands.13 And it is from around this time that the phrase ‘a bender’ was first coined – it was originally a Seneca Indian expression for a bout of excessive drinking.14
Wherever Europeans settled and traded in North America, officials complained about levels of drunkenness. They tried to curb it, they railed against it, and they tried to limit the importation and sale of rum. But the harsh reality was that the New England economy needed rum; it was the essential means of exchange for a string of local export commodities. Without imported rum, there could be no export of local goods which were so vital to the well-being of the economy of the northern colonies. Boston merchants were understandably anxious to maintain their lucrative trade to the Caribbean. Moreover, the increase in numbers of New England rum distilleries made imports of Caribbean molasses even more important and, despite the regular complaints, rum and molasses, two by-products of slave-grown sugar, had become an integral feature of the economy of both French and British North America. They were also central features in the social lives of settlers, slaves and American Indians alike. As long as that remained the case, local denunciations or prohibitions against rum would remain utterly ineffective.
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By the late eighteenth century, the influence of sugar and rum had spread far beyond the obvious markets in Europe and North America. Because France prohibited the import of rum (to protect its wine and brandy industries), French rum producers were forced to look elsewhere for markets. When Spanish rum took off in the mid-eighteenth century, especially in Cuba (although it remained on a lower level than the French and British industries), it, too, faced hostility from the Spanish wine and brandy industry. This allowed the British and French to export large volumes of their own rum to Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and South America. The French islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Domingue exported huge volumes of rum (‘tafia’) to Spanish colonies. By then – in what seems a bizarre, ironic twist – molasses and rum had also found their way to West Africa, normally via Europe’s major slave-trading ports. Slave-grown tobacco, rum and molasses became a popular export item from Brazil to West Africa, where it was traded for yet more Africans bound for slavery in the Americas.
By the time of American Independence, rum and molasses were important features of the American economy. Both were widely consumed in North America, although they had also spread wherever Europeans settled, traded and colonised. British soldiers also received a regular rum ration. Soldiers and sailors who survived the fearful mortality rates in the Caribbean, all returned home with a taste for rum.
Rum also took hold in the British population at large, promoted by the West Indian planters’ lobby. It was seen as an alternative to the disastrous levels of gin consumption that so plagued the country until the restrictions of the Gin Act of 1750. Rum punch seemed more benign and less corrosive than gin, and it had been a popular drink among planters from the early days of the rum industry. By the 1730s, it had established its popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. It was unusual in that it began as a popular drink before gaining a fashionable following in the form of ‘punch’ in the late eighteenth century and, as we’ve seen already, the prevalence of expensive ‘punch bowls’ among the fashionable status symbols of prosperous society.15 The rum trade ate into the long-established British reliance on continental Europe for wines and brandy and, by 1733, Britain imported 500,000 gallons of rum. Although the sugar lobby tried to woo the wealthy from their love of continental wines and spirits, rum’s major, secure market was significantly lower down the social scale.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the British taste for rum was being supplied not solely by Barbados, but by the burgeoning sugar economy of Jamaica. In the early 1770s, 2 million gallons of Jamaican rum were shipped to Britain. Jamaica’s sugar plantations were now earning between 15 and 20 per cent of their overall income from rum – although the percentage received by plantations in Barbados was even higher.
The Irish, too, enjoyed their rum. In the 1760s and ’70s, Ireland imported almost 1.5 million gallons of rum from Barbados. The main market for Barbadian rum, however, was North America. British Canada also liked it, importing 600,000 gallons of Barbadian rum in 1770. Jamaica (which was less reliant on rum exports) shipped c.900,000 gallons to the northern colonies on the eve of the American war. The Caribbean planters by this time had come to rely on rum for a large part of their livelihood; upwards of 25 per cent of their income came from the sale of rum.16
American independence in 1776 posed a threat to the Caribbean sugar economy and planters feared losing vital supplies from North America but, once again, smugglers helped them out – rum headed north and American supplies headed south, shipped through the Danish Caribbean islands. There was a game of fiscal cat and mouse between the British and Americans about supplies to and from the Caribbean. In the event, the real threat to Caribbean rum in North America came from the rise of the local whisky industry, and the American revulsion against all things British. The USA had begun the process of going its own way politically and culturally, and cast aside British habits by choosing to embrace coffee and whisky, rather than tea and rum.
By the time the USA had set itself on the road to secure nationhood, rum and molasses had found a receptive home throughout the Americas. It had also travelled at sea in Britain’s huge naval and mercantile armadas, and in military bases dotted around the globe. Grog sh
ops in New England and on the docksides of old England dispensed the drink, while distilleries throughout the Atlantic world converted slave-grown molasses into rum for local consumption.
Rum even found eager customers among pioneering settlers in Botany Bay. Indeed, some of the early complaints of settlers in Australia after 1787 were about the extortionate prices demanded by local traders for rum. Government officials were also accused of making money by trading in rum with the convict settlers – the same settlers who had been given an allowance of sugar to mix with their tea as part of their daily rations on the first convict ships.17 Even the pioneers clinging precariously to the new experimental colony of Sierra Leone (mainly freed slaves from London and Nova Scotia) were allowed a rum allowance.18 And everywhere across the Americas, rum was doled out to enslaved Africans to make their labouring lives more tolerable. Rum also began to play an important role in a variety of religious ceremonies among slaves in the Americas – and among Africans in their various homelands.
The irony, again, is clear enough. Slave-grown sugar, and the molasses and rum derived from processing sugar cane, made slave life more tolerable. Slave-produced rum softened the hardships of men on warships and slave ships, in military camps and in times of conflict, and in the precarious settlements founded by Europeans right around the globe, from the American frontier to Botany Bay. It was as if slaves were producing a lubricant to ease the hardships and miseries of their own lives, and those of their oppressors. And everything hinged on the cultivation of sugar.
Rum may have eased the arduous and stressful lives of settlers and labouring people across the northern colonies, but it also played a disastrous role in weakening the resilience of native people. Rum had a devastating impact on the native people of the Caribbean islands. Although fermented alcohol had played important roles in traditional Taino life, rum brought a new, destructive dimension to their drinking habits. The story of the damage wrought by rum was a precursor to what was about to happen among native people in North America. For all the apparent pleasures they brought, by 1700, sugar and rum were already revealing their power to corrupt life in all corners of the Atlantic.