by Iain Gately
In the same year that Wm. Renolds was hauled up for drunkenness, the regulations governing ordinaries were tightened up. Only licensed ordinaries might sell alcohol for consumption on their premises, and these could offer only wine, spirits, and beer in fixed measures for fixed prices. Furthermore, they could not brew their own beer but had to buy from a “common brewer,” i.e., one with a special permit. Among the number of common brewers was Captain Robert Sedgwick, perhaps the first man to grow rich out of brewing in America. In 1637 he “set up a brew house at his great charge, & very commodious for this part of the countrey.”
The drinks list in New England was supplemented by cider, whose manufacture grew to be a cottage industry, analogous to ale brewing in medieval England. Indeed, the drink came to be identified with the place—fermented apple juice 16 was more American than apple pie. The first orchard in Massachusetts was planted in 1623 by William Blaxton—an eccentric clergyman, who for a number of years was the only English resident of Boston—on his farm on Beacon Hill. Cider orchards were also planted in Virginia and in New Amsterdam, an American settlement founded by the Dutch, in imitation of their English Protestant cousins.
The pilgrims had planned their colony while in Holland and had sent there for their families and friends once they had established a modus vivendi in New England, so that the Dutch had as good a picture of their progress as the English. Once it was clear to them that Europeans might prosper in the Americas, they formed a West India Company (1621), which established colonies at Fort Orange and Fort Nassau on the Delaware River. In 1625 work started on a fort on Manhattan Island, and the next year, Peter Minuit, the director general of Dutch interests in the region, bought the island itself from its native American owners.
The name Manhattan is reputed to be of bibulous origin: According to a Moravian missionary, writing some time after the event, when Henry Hudson was exploring the region in 1609, he met some Indians on an island in the river that bears his name and, as was the custom of the age, offered them a drink. The Indians, by their own account, did not like its smell and refused. One of their warriors, however, not wishing to appear ill-mannered in front of strangers, took the drink, bid his friends farewell (for they were convinced it was a poison), and swallowed it down in one. He collapsed on the spot but rose again to his feet shortly afterward and declared the beverage to be wonderful. His fellows imitated him; they, too, drank and became intoxicated, and thereafter the place was called Manahachtanienk—“the island where we drank liquor.” The story has some corroboration from Hudson, who admitted to giving the Indians wine “in order to make a trial of their hearts.”
Once they had possession of Manhattan, the Dutch completed their fort, whose southern limit was marked by Wall Street, and laid out farms. They were as fond of their booze as the English, and in 1632 their West India Company built a brewery on a lane that became known as “Brouwers Straet.” They also planted vineyards, gathered wild hops from the woods, and Peter Stuyvesant, who became governor in 1647, cultivated cider apple trees imported from Holland on his farm in what is now the Bowery district of Manhattan. As had been the case with other European settlers in North America, the Dutch noted that the Indians with whom they traded for land and furs had no prior acquaintance with alcoholic drinks. In his Description of the New Netherlands (c. 1642) Adriaen van der Donck observed that while the local tribes drank fresh grape juice, “They never make wine or beer. Brandy or strong drink is unknown to them, except those who frequent our settlements, and have learned that beer and wine taste better than water. In the Indian languages, which are rich and expressive, they have no word to express drunkenness.” Van der Donck believed that such innocent sobriety had benefits: the “rheumatic gout” and “red and pimpled noses” were unknown among Native Americans; nor did “they have any diseases or infirmities which are caused by drunkenness.”
However, the innocence did not last. Once the indigenous peoples got their first taste of alcohol, they seemed to be eager to make up for lost time. Whereas initially, Europeans had made a point of offering drinks as a gesture of friendship to any natives they came across in the Americas, once they founded settlements and had had the opportunity to observe the effects of alcohol on peoples who had hitherto existed without it, they were no longer so free with their liquor. Their Indian neighbors seemed incapable of drinking for any other reason than to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible. Once inebriated, they were violent and dangerous, albeit principally to themselves.
Europeans in the New World, especially French missionaries, were curious as to what it was that prompted this all-or-nothing approach to alcohol among Native Americans. It was a novelty, true—in 1633, a Montagnais brave told a Jesuit that when the people of his grandmother’s time first had seen the French “covered with their cuirasses, eating biscuits, and drinking wine” they believed they were “dressed in iron, ate bones, and drank blood.” But the tribe had adjusted to biscuits and armor far better than the heady red fluid the French used to slake their thirsts. It seems that instead of considering alcoholic beverages to be a kind of food, as did most Europeans, the Indian nations focused instead on the soul—the alcohol—and not the body in which it was hidden. When the Compte de Frontenac inquired of an Ottawa Indian “what he thought the brandy he was so fond of was made of, he said, of tongues and hearts, for, added he, after I have drunk of it I fear nothing and I talk like an angel.” Similar sentiments were noted in the 1640s by a Jesuit among the Iroquois, who told him that they did not like the taste of alcoholic drinks, but drank them nonetheless “simply to become intoxicated—imagining, in their drunkenness, that they become persons of importance, taking pleasure in seeing themselves dreaded by those who do not taste this poison.”
The problem was exacerbated by the relative abundance of spirits, versus other drinks, in the Americas. Their concentrated form made them easier to carry across the Atlantic than wine or beer, so that unlike most Europeans, who started drinking beer or watered wine while children, the first contact a Native American had with alcohol was likely to be with strong waters, a mouthful or two of which was enough to produce an altered state of consciousness. Thereafter, they would look to drink for stimulation rather than mere refreshment, and since their cultures did not possess rituals and safeguards as to when and how much to drink, many very quickly ruined themselves on the white man’s wicked water.
11 RESTORATION
The thirsty earth soaks up the rain,
And drinks and gapes for drink again;
The plants suck in the earth, and are
With constant drinking fresh and fair;
The sea itself (which one would think
Should have but little need of drink)
Drinks twice ten thousand rivers up,
So fill’d that they o’erflow the cup.
The busy Sun (and one would guess
By ’s drunken fiery face no less)
Drinks up the sea, and when he’s done,
The Moon and Stars drink up the Sun:
They drink and dance by their own light,
They drink and revel all the night:
Nothing in Nature’s sober found,
But an eternal health goes round.
Fill up the bowl, then, fill it high,
Fill all the glasses there—for why
Should every creature drink but I?
Why, man of morals, tell me why?
—“Drinking,” Abraham Cowley
A significant proportion of the strong waters arriving in the Americas were there courtesy of the Dutch, who, by the middle of the seventeenth century, were the largest maritime trading nation in the world. Their rise to eminence had, in historical terms, been exceptionally rapid: Prior to 1566, their nation was a patchwork of duchies and bishoprics under the control of Spain. However, over the following decades, seventeen of these entities, mostly Protestant, combined together to form the United Provinces, and with the assistance of England they established a republi
c and drove the Spaniards from their lands. Overseas, meanwhile, they appropriated a number of Portuguese colonies and founded, as in America, new stations of their own. By 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia, a pan-European settlement of various conflicts, was agreed and their nation recognized, they had trading posts in Manhattan, the Caribbean, Africa, India, Sri Lanka, and various Indonesian Islands. They carried Virginian tobacco to Europe, African slaves to the Americas, French wine and brandy everywhere, and they had a near monopoly on Asian spices.
Their modus operandi, backed up by force if necessary, was similar wherever they traded. The breadth of their commercial network allowed them to match supply and demand however distant, and they encouraged suppliers to grow specific products and process them in a particular manner. They provided technical assistance to ensure the suppliers got it right, paid cash for their produce, and offered easy terms for those goods the suppliers themselves most valued and which they carried to them. The Dutch method was honed in the Bordeaux region of France, where they had long been buyers of its wines. In order to stimulate supply, they sent in engineers to reclaim land and build dykes (a Dutch specialty) and provided vines and loans and barrels and a guaranteed market to any vintners willing to work with them. In return, they wanted cheap sweet white wine, and plenty of it.
Their system created losers as well as winners. Traditional growers in Bordeaux exported via its port, which still levied medieval duties on ships bringing wine down the river Gironde. These were, in Dutch eyes, unnecessary costs. They therefore dropped their customary suppliers and transferred their attentions inland toward the Dordogne, and north, to the hinterland behind La Rochelle. Here they offered their standard incentives to growers and shipped their purchases around the tariff walls. The Dutch wanted their wine to be stable as well as inexpensive. To this end they introduced the technology of fumigating wine barrels with sulphur matches, and the practice of fortifying the wine itself with ardent spirits. These two measures extended its lifespan, and the taste of sulphur wore off as it aged.
In some economic-captive areas of France, the Dutch elected to export brandy instead of wine fortified with the same. The region they focused on was the Charente, in particular the district around the village of Cognac, which was perfectly situated for the manufacture of spirits. Its principal advantages were, in order of importance, the proximity of a duty-free port, the abundance of firewood (necessary to heat stills), and plenty of substandard wine. In the event, thanks to chalk in the soil, the wine of the region proved to be peculiarly well suited to distillation, and the finished item—cognac —acquired a reputation as a superior beverage. It had fans in England by 1594, Native American victims two decades later, and was used subsequently to prize open new markets elsewhere. In 1652, the Dutch purchased a substantial block of land in the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa for a few barrels of Cognac and some good Virginian tobacco. Cape Town became a vital staging post for their Asian trading fleet, and to save transport costs, they imported breeding livestock and planted their new colony with all the standard provision crops, including vines, perhaps the first to be cultivated in sub-Saharan Africa.
Go-betweens to most of the world, the Dutch kept the pick of the cornucopia of goods that they traded for themselves. The decades during which they flourished and won their independence were characterized by suffering in much of the rest of Europe. Wars religious, civil, and despotic rolled back and forth across the continent, so that by the time that Peter Stuyvesant was planting his cider apple orchard in Manhattan, his native land was “an island of wealth surrounded by a sea of want.” The Dutch were conspicuous consumers on home soil, in both public and private life. They staged elaborate functions for their various civic bodies and militia, including feasts that lasted several days, at which mountains of delicacies were served out on gold and silver plate. These events took place in purpose-built halls whose walls were covered with tapestries and oil paintings, where their participants enacted rituals centered around the sharing of food and drink. Such rituals, all of which had been invented within the lifespan of the republic, and most of which involved communal intoxication, helped it to establish an identity. Heavy drinking was part of being Dutch. Despite the relative youth of these ceremonies, they were surprisingly sophisticated and amazed foreigners with their complexity. After attending one such formal binge, a French visitor commented, “All these gentlemen of the Netherlands have so many rules and ceremonies for getting drunk, that I am repelled as much by them as by the sheer excess.” The sheer excess was striking. An English observer at a Dutch schutter party in 1634 reported, “I do not believe scarce a sober man was to be found among them, nor was it safe for a sober man to trust himself among them, they did shout so and sing, roar, skip, and leap.”
Drunkenness was ubiquitous in the young republic. Its towns were packed with taverns, and the Dutch demonstrated their disdain for the medieval notion that these might lead them into sin by giving them provocative names, such as the Beelzebub in Dortrecht, and the Duivel aan de Ketting (Devil on a Chain) in Amsterdam. Drink and be damned was their ethos. The Dutch imbibed for nourishment as well as intoxication, and the alcoholic part of their diet reflected the wealth of choice they enjoyed in comparison to commoners elsewhere. Workingmen breakfasted not merely on beer but on such luxurious beverages as Wip, which was comprised of warm ale, nutmeg, sugar, egg whites, and brandy. They topped themselves up throughout the working day with various brews, with wine, and a shot or two of spirits. They drank with every meal, they sealed bargains over a drink— there was no occasion in which alcohol was inappropriate. Indeed, the Calvinist pastor Peter Wittewrongel, as part of a general philippic against sin, complained in 1655 that “men drink at the slightest excuse . . . at the sound of a bell, or the turning of a mill.”
The Dutch celebrated their good fortune in their visual art. They commissioned tavern scenes from painters, showing ordinary people socializing, drinking, and smoking. This was an innovation. Hitherto, no one had wasted paint on peasants, unless as incidental figures in the background, present as an aid to perspective, or to direct the eye with their praise and diminished stature toward a saint or a noble. Moreover, these revolutionary canvases, depicting ordinary people in everyday clothes and unselfconscious postures, were affectionate without being sentimental in their treatment of their subjects. The spirit of the new genre is apparent, reduced to a single figure, in Gabriel Metsu’s canvas of a Dutch drinker (c. 1660). This depicts an old soldier seated on a bench with one arm slung over a beer barrel, as if it were a lover or his best friend. He holds a long clay pipe in the fingers of his left hand, like an artist with a paintbrush. In his right hand is a shining pewter tankard. His expression is alert and mischievous. The beer barrel has a faded stencil of a red stag on its face. Technically, the painting is on a par with Italian Renaissance standards; philosophically, it is an aeon apart.
Gabriel Metsu’s The Old Drinker
The luxury and plenty enjoyed by the Dutch in the middle third of the seventeenth century stands in stark contrast to the poverty and strife that the English endured over the same period. Two civil wars were fought between 1642 and 1649, which culminated in the execution of King Charles I and the declaration of a commonwealth by the remnants of Parliament. From 1653 to 1658, the country was a protectorate under the puritan Oliver Cromwell, during which period the theaters were closed, press censorship was imposed, and an excise, i.e., consumption, tax on beer and ale was introduced.
These austere times came to an end with the restoration of King Charles II in 1660. Known as the “Merrie Monarch,” Charles had spent much of the preceding decade in exile at the French court, where his natural hedonism had flowered. Upon his return to England he reopened the theaters, encouraged the arts and sciences, and set an example as a libertine that his court strove to emulate. A spirit of decadence flourished, which included a passion for fine wines, and plenty of them. Daniel Defoe, passing comment on the initial years of the Restoration half
a century later, noted that “our drunkenness as a national vice takes its epoch at the Restoration. . . . Very merry, and very mad, and very drunken the people were, and grew more and more so every day.”
The Restoration ethos was embodied in the courtier and poet John Wilmot, first Earl of Rochester. His portrait shows a young man with a slim face, Mae West lips, and long fluffy chestnut hair, but does not do credit to his actual debauchery. His lyrical, often pornographic verse, much of which was topical, delighted English society. His life was short and alcoholic—“in a course of drunken gaiety and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious obligation . . . [Rochester] lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness.” Before, however, he died from syphilis aged thirty-three, Rochester made some graceful contributions to the drinking canon. He considered wine to be “Poetick Juice” and acknowledged its influence, together with sex, over his work:
Cupid and Bacchus my saints are;
May drink and love still reign:
With wine I wash away my cares,
And then to cunt again.
Wit, wine, and love were the Holy Trinity of Restoration lyrical poets. Their output was encouraged by gifts from the court and patronage by its nobles.17 Similar themes prevailed in Restoration theater, whose principal genre was comedy. New plays were topical, with convoluted plots, rakish aristocratic characters, and plenty of tippling. Their contemporary settings provide a guide to prevailing drinking habits and highlight the fashion for wine, especially French wine. While sack was considered appropriate for poets, the court and nobil-ityhad moved on to Haut-Brion and champagne. The former was a red wine from Bordeaux, whose producers had discovered the concept of quality and the power of marketing. Haut-Brion was the antithesis of the pink rotgut the English had bought in spectacular quantities in the Middle Ages. Its appearance in England, and its memorable flavor, were recorded by Samuel Pepys, in his diary entry for April 10, 1663: “Drank . . . a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that had a good and most particular taste that I ever met with.” Haut-Brion was a deep ruby in color and, if properly kept, had a lifespan of several years. It was shipped to England in casks, where it was sold at exorbitant prices in taverns or carted off to stately homes and bottled.