by Iain Gately
Serial failure, once again, gave American colonies a bad name in England and it was twenty years before another was attempted. After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, Sir Walter Raleigh, their principal advocate, fell from grace and was imprisoned in the tower of London, where he wrote The Historie of the World and experimented with distillation with the Earl of Northumberland, a fellow prisoner. They christened their most palatable concoction “spiritus dulcis,” which they stilled from sack, “sugarcandie,” and “spirits of roses.”
However, by 1606, New World colonies were back on the English political agenda. Memories of failure were fading, and most of the written accounts of prior attempts, especially the Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) of Thomas Harriot, painted so attractive a picture of the potential of the Americas that it was decided to have another go. The superabundance of grapes was an important draw to the new generation of would-be colonizers. If wine could be produced in Virginia, it would lessen English reliance on imports from, and its trade deficit with, potentially hostile Catholic countries. A group of London merchants headed by some token peers set up a new Virginia Company, which was granted a royal charter by Elizabeth’s successor, King James I, in 1606. The charter anticipated that settlers would direct their energy toward finding pearls and gold mines, and in planting vineyards and olive trees. An expedition was organized, and in 1607 it set out for the Chesapeake Bay. A hundred and four colonists (out of 144) survived the voyage, and they elected to start their empire on a small, waterlogged island, to the north of Roanoke, which they named Jamestown.
Their first impressions of their new home were marred by the rapid departure of the transport ships, which took with them much of the beer that had been intended to refresh them until they could manufacture their own. As the sails vanished over the horizon, those remaining on American soil questioned the wisdom of their decision to emigrate to a place with “neither taverne, [nor] beere-house.” Ironically some of the colonists had been lured to the New World by the promise of a sober lifestyle and a healthy diet. Virginia, according to the promotional material of the eponymous Royal Company, was the perfect place to escape the temptations of London, with opportunity neither for drunkenness nor gluttony. The marketing proved true, as the colonists died in droves from famine or waterborne diseases. The absence of alcohol, and the consequent necessity of drinking water solo, was held to blame for their deaths in a later postmortem, which concluded: “To plant a Colony by water drinkers was an inexcusable error in those, who laid the first foundacion . . . which until it be laide downe againe, there is small hope of health.”
In order to stem the tide of mortality, the governor and the council of Virginia advertised in 1609 for two brewers. It seems, however, that they failed to attract any applicants, for the absence of alcohol continued to be a matter for lamentation among the Virginians. It was also taken as a sign of potential weakness. The Spanish sent a spy to measure English progress on what they regarded as their soil. His report, to a Spaniard, made encouraging reading: “There are about three hundred men there more or less; and the majority sick and badly treated, because they have nothing but bread of maize, with fish, nor do they drink anything but water—all of which is contrary to the nature of the English—on which account they all wish to return [home], and would have done so if they had been at liberty.”
The salvation of Jamestown was the discovery that it could produce something with a ready market in London—tobacco. England was in the grip of a smoking craze. Its poets and playwrights wrote eulogies in praise of tobacco with the enthusiasm they had hitherto reserved for sack and ale. Smoking was called drinking tobacco or dry-drinking by the English, who had no prior experience of smoking anything and so lacked the vocabulary to describe the act. In their enthusiasm they allotted it virtues—of suppressing appetite, of causing mild intoxication—and considered smokers to be elegant. In 1613, Virginia exported its first crop of the weed to England, in 1620 it shipped twenty thousand pounds of tobacco, and in 1627 it sent five hundred thousand pounds and had begun to prosper.
Experiments with winemaking as per charter were abandoned— the little wine the colony had produced was unpalatable. According to a governor of the Virginia Company, “We must confess our wine to have been more of an embarrassment than a credit to us,” and the vines were grubbed up to make room for more tobacco. With the exception of a little maize beer, Jamestown relied on imported alcohol. Outbound ships in the tobacco trade filled their holds with wine from Madeira and the Canary Isles, and English beer. They were not at all particular as to the quality of their merchandise, for the thirsty colonists would exchange tobacco for whatever they brought. Indeed, the beer supplied by one provisioner named Dupper was so bad that it was reckoned to have “been the death of two hundred.”
The improving fortunes of Virginia were closely monitored in England by its merchants and its dissidents. The proof that English people could live, and even prosper, in the New World inspired many with dreams of profits, or of freedom. King James I had chosen to enforce a very narrow view of Protestantism, centered on the duty of obedience owed by English Protestants to himself. Those who wished to worship otherwise were arrested or fled the country. A group of the latter, who had taken refuge in the Dutch town of Leyden, decided to attempt a colony in North America where they might practice their faith as they wished. They debated the matter at length before committing themselves. Their principal concerns about the proposed venture were that “the change of air, diet, and drinking of water would infect their bodies with sore sicknesses and grievous diseases.” They had read of the damage water drinking had wreaked in Virginia and, once they had resolved to go, included a vast store of booze (a neologism for alcoholic drinks) in their provisions.
This group of men, women, and children came to an arrangement with a group of London merchants that gave their proposed voyage legitimacy, and chartered a claret ship from the Bordeaux wine trade named the Mayflower for their passage. The hundred and two pilgrims, under the leadership of John Carver, plus perhaps three dozen sailors, had an easy transatlantic voyage until they approached the American coast, when foul weather forced them north of Virginia to Cape Cod, which they sighted on November 19, 1620. On the twenty-first of the same month, the first of their number stepped ashore. Their initial impressions were of fear and wonder—the landscape was wild and forbidding. Like the Virginians of 1587, they mourned the absence of “inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies.”
Their sense of isolation was heightened when they started to explore their new home. Their first reconnaissance party, under Captain Standish, very quickly lost itself in the forest. One of its members recorded the panic when they realized they had no idea where they were and that “our victuals was only biscuit and Holland cheese, and a little bottle of aquavitae.” Fortunately, they blundered upon “springs of fresh water, of which we were heartily glad,” and set an important precedent: “[We] drunk our first New England water with as much delight as ever we drunk drink in all our lives.” One of the party went so far as to claim the water had been “as pleasant . . . as wine or beer.” Hitherto, American water had been viewed with a distrust bordering on paranoia.
Winter was approaching and the pilgrims decided to settle where they were, because “we could not now take time for further research or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our Beere.” The shortage of beer was a point of friction between them and the crew of the Mayflower, which remained at anchor while they went ashore daily to clear ground and build houses in the sleet and snow. The winter was fierce, epidemics broke out among the pilgrims and mariners, but the latter, wishing to guard their stock of beer for the journey home, refused to allow it to be given to the sick. William Bradford, chosen by the colonists to be their leader after the death of John Carver, recorded their intransigence: “As this calamity fell . . . the passengers that were to be left here to plant . . . were hasted ashore and made to dri
nk water that the seamen might have the more beer, and one [Bradford himself] in his sickness desiring but a small can of beer, it was answered that if he was their own father he should have none.”
When spring arrived only fifty-three pilgrims remained alive. They disembarked for the last time from the Mayflower in March 1621, and she returned to England. As the weather improved, the colonists went exploring again and found, or rather were found by, an English-speaking Indian, Samoset, who had picked up the language from passing fishermen and slave traders. After appropriate introductions, Samoset asked for some beer, which was evidently the thing he had missed most since his last contact with Englishmen. The colonists had none with them but “gave him strong water . . . which he liked well.” Once refreshed, he told the pilgrims that “the place where we now live is called Patuxet, and that about four years ago all the inhabitants died of an extraordinary plague, and there is neither man, woman, nor child remaining, as indeed we have found none, so as there is none to hinder our possession, or to lay claim unto it.”
Samoset introduced the pilgrims to the neighboring tribes, parlays were arranged, and peace and harmony were agreed among them. At the most important of these meetings, with Massasoit, “the great king,” amity was sealed, in the English fashion, with a toast: “After salutations, our governor kissing his hand, the king kissed him, and so they sat down. The governor called for some strong water, and drunk to him, and he drunk a great draught that made him sweat all the while after; he called for a little fresh meat, which the king did eat willingly, and did give his followers. Then they treated of peace.”
The peace they made lasted twenty-four years, which in its time was something of a New World record, for both Europeans and Americans. During that period the colonists flourished. They were quickly self-sufficient in food, had furs and cod to trade, and their success laid to rest the ghosts of failure that had haunted England’s American endeavors. Among other matters, they were living proof that the English could drink water and enjoy good health. This latter achievement was a matter of pride, as is evident from a letter sent by Bradford to London in 1624, countering various slanders that had been published against New England:
6TH OBJ.: The water is not wholesome.
ANS.: If they mean, not so wholesome as the good beer and wine in London (which they so dearly love) we will not dispute with them; but else for water it is as good as any in the world (for aught we know) and it is wholesome enough to us that can be content therewith.
Bradford’s claims were corroborated by amazed newcomers, one of whom commented in a letter home that that New England water drinkers were “as healthful, fresh, and lusty as they that drink beer.”
Fresh groups of pilgrims arrived in 1621, 1623, and 1629, and settled in and around the Plymouth Colony. By the time the last batch arrived, the original New Englanders were not only self-sufficient in food but produced a surplus of it, some of which was used to make alcoholic drinks. Although the colonists had discovered some merits in water, as soon as they could brew they did, using whatever fermentable material they could spare, as a ditty from the time reflects:
If barley be wanting to make into malt,
We must be content and think it no fault,
For we can make liquor to sweeten our lips,
Of pumpkins, and parsnips, and walnut tree chips.
Imported liquor was available in addition to home brews. The pilgrims traded their surplus food with the cod fishing fleets to the north and the tobacco planters in Virginia to the south. The fisheries were one of the largest industries on either side of the Atlantic at the time, and possibly the most efficient. English fishing boats traveled to Newfoundland each spring, where they caught, cured, and loaded cod, which they sold for wine in Spain, Portugal, or their Atlantic island colonies. The wine was then either exchanged in England for trading goods for the settlers in Newfoundland, New England, and Virginia, or carried straight back to the American coast.
In consequence, there was plenty of booze sloshing around the colonies, as evidenced by a curious little settlement established close to Plymouth named Mount Wollaston. Its inhabitants consisted of a Captain Wollaston, Thomas Morton, and a number of indentured servants whom Wollaston hired out as laborers in Virginia for the tobacco harvest. In 1628, while the captain and his servants were absent, Morton turned the settlement into a Bacchic republic, much to the horror of his Puritan neighbors. According to Bradford, “Morton became Lord of Misrule and maintained, as it were, a School of Atheism. And after they had . . . got much by trading with the Indians, they spent it . . . in quaffing and drinking, both wine and strong waters in great excess. . . . They also set up a Maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies or furies . . . [and] revived and celebrated . . . the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians.”
The Maypole was an eighty-foot pine tree, topped off with a “pair of buckshorns.” A poem, composed by Morton, was nailed to its base, which renamed the little settlement Ma-re Mount, or Merrymount, and proclaimed that henceforth May Day was to be a holiday in the settlement. Morton also wrote a song, complete with the Bacchic ejaculation Io! for holidaymakers to sing as they danced around his pole:
Give to the Nymph that’s free from scorn
No Irish stuff nor Scotch over-worn.
Lasses, in Beaver coats, come away.
Ye shall be welcome to us night and day.
Then drink and be merry, merry, merry boys
Let all your delight be in Hymen’s joys;
Io! To Hymen, now the day is come,
About the merry Maypole take a room.
In order to finance their merriment, Morton and his accomplices broke a colonial taboo by selling arms to the Native Americans for their furs. They received better value, and were on the edge of cornering the fur trade, when the other settlers in the area banded together and sent a force against them to bring them to their senses. The confrontation turned out comically. Morton had holed up in a fortified house on Merrymount and threatened to fight to the death. There followed a brief standoff, during which period he and his band became so drunk that they were incapable of fighting and gave up. The only blood shed in the entire event came from Morton, who wounded himself in the nose with his saber. He was sent back to England,15 the Maypole was cut down, and the hill was rechristened Mount Dagon, after the god of the Philistines.
Morton was something of a maverick among emigrants. The majority left England in order to practice a particular style of Christianity, rather than to indulge in pagan revels. News of success in the New World traveled through underground conduits to their brethren at home and in exile in Holland, encouraging them to follow. In 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Company was chartered in London for the settlement of the eponymous area to the north of the Plymouth Colony, and English people flowed across the Atlantic to settle there in their hundreds, then their thousands. The first significant batch, under John Winthrop, arrived in Salem in June 1630 aboard the Arbella and ten other ships. The Arbella, in deference to contemporary prejudice, carried “42 tonnes of beere” (about ten thousand gallons) the same amount of wine, and only three thousand gallons of water. Her passengers—fearing, no doubt, a shortage of alcohol in Massachusetts— supplemented their rations with private caches. Winthrop recorded that a maidservant on board, because she was “stomach sick,” had “drank so much strong water, that she was senseless, and had near killed herself,” and commented, “We observed it a common fault in our young people that they gave themselves to drink hot waters very immoderately.”
By the time that Winthrop’s charges had settled down, New England was past the tipping point. A formula had been developed for self-perpetuation—someone might expect to emigrate and, within a few years, own land and make a profit from their work. With profit came progress, in the English sense, and the émigrés improved their new homeland with breweries and taverns. While brewing was und
er way by 1629, when John Smith claimed New England had two “brewhouses” that made “good ale, both strong and small” from Indian corn or barley, the first evidence of it occurring on a commercial scale dates to 1633, when a “furnace for brewinge” was shipped over from England. Thereafter, references to breweries come thick and fast, and much of their trade was wholesale. The absence of public drinking places, which had so disheartened the first pilgrims, had also been remedied. Inns, known as ordinaries, were constructed in most of the settlements in New England, and after 1634, every community was required by law to build one for “the receiving, refreshment, and entertainment of travelers and strangers, and to serve publick occasions.” Ordinaries were usually sited in the center of each settlement, alongside the meetinghouse and the stocks. They sold local brews, and imported wines and spirits, in standard measures. Their prices were fixed by law: “It is ordered that no person that keeps an ordinarie shall take above 6d a meal of a person, and not above 1d for an ale quart of beer.”
As breweries and ordinaries multiplied in number, so did drunkenness. The condition, pace Morton, seems to have been rare among settlers in the early years, and drunks were punished with fines, time in the stocks, or by naming and shaming. In 1633, for instance, Winthrop recorded in his journal that “Robert Cole, having been oft punished for drunkness, was now ordered to wear a red D about his neck for a year.” Public humiliation, however, as a “Presentment by ye Grand Jury” in Plymouth in 1637 attests, was not always a sufficient deterrent: “1. Wm. Renolds is presented for being drunck at Mr. Hopkins his house, that he lay under the table, vomiting in a beastly manner.”