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American Rum: John Josselin’s Vojages

John Josselyn was born in Essex, England, in 1608. We know little about him, but surely he was from a well-off family because he had received a good education and he could pay for the expensive voyages to America. He traveled to New England for the first time in 1638, for more than a year. Then he returned there in 1663, for eight years. We ignore the exact purpose of his voyages, but we know that a brother of his was an important planter in the colony.

Back in England Josselyn wrote a book, “An Account of Two Voyages to New England”, published in 1674. He was a keen naturalist and observer, particularly interested in medicine and botany and the Account is one of our fundamental sources about New England in this early phase of settlement.

Josselyn’s is also a handbook, a guide for settlers. In the description of his first voyage, he advises the colonists to take a number of things with them: food, medicines, weapons and various tools and he even quotes their prices. And “One gallon of Aqua vitae”. This is very interesting and would deserve to be examined further, starting from the word he uses, Aqua vitae, that is, Water of Life, the first name for distilled spirits in Europe. We don’t know what spirit it was, at the time, maybe brandy. But it tells us that in 1638 England the consumption of distilled beverages was already common, and this is an important contribution to the social history of alcohol.

But we are here for American Rum, and here it is:

“The fourth and twentieth day [September 1639] being Munday, I went aboard the Fellowship of 100 and 70 Tuns a Flemish bottom the master George Luxon of Bittiford in Devonshire, several of my friends came to bid me farewell, among the rest Captain Thomas Wannerton who drank to me a pint of kill-devil alias Rhum at a draught … .”

As far as I know, this is the first mention of Rum in what is now the USA. Sadly, it is a doubtful one, 1639 is such an early date! We know that sugarcane cultivation in Barbados began probably around 1630, perhaps some years before. But that in 1639 they already produced Rum and sold it to merchant ships seems quite a leap. Josselyn wrote his book more than 30 years after the facts, when Rum was well known in the British colonies, and maybe his memory was playing tricks on him. Maybe, or maybe we have to pre-date the Origins of Rum yet again. We’ll see.

For now, let’s read this sentence again: “kill-devil alias Rhum”. First, it is one of the few pieces of evidence he have that kill-devil and Rum are two different words for the same thing. Secondly, why Rhum with an H? I have never delved into the debate on the origin of the word Rum, the hypotheses that are circulating have not convinced me and I have not verified their sources. Still, there is a consensus in the Rum Community that the first to appear was the English word Rum and that Rhum is a later French version. Moreover, it is widely believed that the letter H was added for the first time in the “Encyclopédie”, possibly to ennoble the word, and only later did it come into common use in the French language. However, the “Encyclopédie” starts to be published in 1751, 70 years AFTER Josselyn’s book. And in an already quoted description of Surinam written in 1651 we read: “Rhum made from sugar-canes”.

But there is more. I haven’t had access yet to a printed edition of the Encyclopedie, I have only been able to look up an online edition. And I have discovered, at least I think I have, that there is no entry “RHUM”. There is, however, the entry “TAFFIA”, well known to those who are into the history of rum. And it starts like this:

“TAFFIA … le taffia, que les Anglois appellent rhum, & les François guildive”, that is: “the taffia, that the English call rhum and the French guildive”.

We know almost for sure the French word guildive came from the English word Kill-Devil and the Encyclopedie confirms that “rhum” is an English word, but what about the “h”?

So, what are we to make of it? I don’t know, but after reading Josselyn the real origin of the word Rum is really obscure.

But back to America. In his account of his second voyage, Rum, or better, Rhum, is mentioned several times. Jocelyn speaks of it as a remedy for several illnesses:

“The Stone terribly afflict many, and the Gout, and Sciatica, for which take Onion roasted, peeled and stampt, then boil them with neat-feets oyl and Rhum to a plaister, and apply it to the hip”.

It is hardly surprising: even nowadays, in the Caribbean but also elsewhere, Rum is a sort of universal remedy for colds, influenza and so on. Josselyn recommends it for hair loss too:

“For falling off of the hair occasioned by the coldness of the climate, and to make it curl, take of the strong water called Rhum and wash or bath your head therewith, it is an admirable remedie.” Cool, but alas, too late for me! But if I were you, in case of need I would give it a go.

Then, he gives us an example of precocious Yankee entrepreneurial spirit. Local fishermen spent long periods at sea, working hard on fishing grounds in the bitter cold of New England. And, since they couldn’t go to the taverns, the taverns went to them:

“at the end thereof comes in with a walking Tavern, a bark laden with the Legitimate bloud of the rich grape, which they bring from Phial, Madera, Canaries, with Brandy, Rhum, the Barbadoes strong-water, and Tobacco”.

The fishermen drank a lot, with the inevitable corollary of drunkenness, brawls, and wages spent even before they had been received.

In conclusion, now we know that perhaps Rum was known in New England as early as 1639. What we now do know for a fact is that, not later than 1663, the love story between Rum and the colonists had already started: Rum was well known and widely consumed, at the heart of a thriving, specialized trade. And it came from Barbados.

Marco Pierini

PS: if you are interested in reading a comprehensive history of rum in the United States I published a book on this topic, “AMERICAN RUM A Short History of Rum in Early America”. You can find it on Amazon.

American Rum: Why Rum?

Why did the british colonists go to great pains to produce rum? To find the answer, we have to take a step back and, in order to simplify such a complex point, we have to narrow our scope and focus on English colonists in the Americas.

In the England they came from, the consumption of wine and beer was widespread and extremely large. Since the beginning of 1600 distilled beverages had become relatively common too.

The first colonists sailed to the Americas full of dreams and hopes, but what they found was very different from what they had expected. In the West Indies life conditions were appalling. The environment was alien and hostile. New, terrible diseases scourged the settlements. Hurricanes battered men and their things. There was a permanent state of war against the Spanish and the French, and pirates were a constant threat. Poor white people had to work very hard, while the élite, the plantation owners, feared their rebellion. There were few white women. Finally, all white people lived in constant fear of a slave rebellion.

Mainland Colonies were relatively safer, but in the XVII century life was very hard. Clothes, tools, home furnishings, medicines, food, in a word all the ordinary things of everyday life in Europe had to be imported at an exorbitant price and sometimes they did not arrive at all, or they had to be wrung from a still wild, untamed and hostile environment. On top of that, in New England the winters were very long, dark and bitterly cold. And all the colonists had settled on the verge of a big unknown land, with immense dark forests, new animals and plants, Indian warriors… In a word: The Wild.

In order to soldier on, in order not to go crazy, the colonists wanted to drink: drink hard, get intoxicated, escape from reality for a while. In alcoholic beverages they didn’t look for the pleasure of taste, but for the inebriation that only alcohol could give. But wine was expensive and difficult to get on a regular basis. Beer and Cider were more easily available, but their alcoholic strength is low, so its inebriating effect was limited. Spirits are strong, bring to inebriation quickly and give warmth, energy, merriment. But imported brandy was expensive and local distilled whiskey suffered a chronic shortage of his raw material, grain.

Then Rum arrived. The new drink could be produced in great quantity, was affordable, it was cheap and very strong. It had everything the colonists wanted. Sure, it did not taste very good, indeed at the beginning it was really bad, but it guaranteed inebriation cheaply and that was all that mattered.

The elite went on importing wines and brandies, but the vast majority of the settlers began to drink mostly Rum, and Rum became their cheap Stairway to Heaven.

Marco Pierini

And if it were the French Caribbean the first Craddle of rum? Conclusion

In this last article I will try to sum up the outcome of my research into the role of the French Caribbean in the first steps of commercial production of rum.

In the 1620s and 1630s, the French began to settle in the Caribbean. In those years, they had known America and its resources for well over a century. In particular, they had a long experience of travelling to and trading with Brazil, the greatest producer of sugar of the age. And we know that in Brazil rum was already produced, at least from the beginning of 1600s.

When the French settled in the Caribbean, they already had a long and successful commercial experience of producing and exporting eau-de-vie de vin, water of life from wine, on a large scale. Or, to say it in another way, in the 1620s and 1630s the business of distilling had been well established in France for some time.

After this short historic introduction, here are some contemporary French documents.

Minutes of the Assembly of the Company’s Stakeholders, 13 August 1639. “Regarding the request made by Jean Faguet in order that the Company grant him for six years an exclusive license to make water of life on the islands of Martinique and Saint-Christophe, both from wine and any other fruit or legumes that he will be able to grow or find through his ingenuity and industriousness on the above-mentioned islands, … the aforementioned Faguet is granted exclusive license to make water of life on the aforementioned islands, using what grows on them, for six years, on condition that he pays to the Company the XXth part of the water of life he will produce, with everybody else being banned from producing it on the two islands during said period under penalty of confiscation of the water of life they have produced and a fine of a thousand pounds of tobacco.”
Jacques Bouton “Report on the settlement of the French after the year 1635” published in 1640. “They [the slaves] are fond of a strong water of life that they call stomach burner”.
Minutes of the Assembly of the Company’s Stakeholders, 7 January 1643. “Regarding the requests submitted by Captain Flament, letters in his favour will be written to Mr Aubert on the island of Guadeloupe and to Mr de Leumont, intendant general of the affairs of the Company on Saint Christophe. He will be granted permission to make water of life for a period of three years without prejudice to the public freedom to produce it as it is common, and to ship it from France to the islands.” In other words, the Company grants Captain Flament permission to produce spirits, but not exclusively. Other colonists are specifically allowed the right to continue producing them, as evidently they had been doing for some time.

We cannot be completely sure, though, that the water of life quoted in these documents was actually rum. Even before the Europeans arrived, the natives made various fermented beverages and the settlers drank them for want of anything better. We know that the Europeans distilled these beverages but it is probable that they also produced a spirit from sugar cane, that is, rum. Because there was sugar cane in the French islands.

Hyacinthe de Caen “Relation des îles de Saint-Christophe, Gardelouppe et la Martinique…”, 1641. “As sugarcane is cultivated in this place, there will be plenty of work making sugar, primarily on the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, that will one day be able to supply France…”
Maurile de Saint-Michel “Voyage des Isles Camercanes en l’Amérique”, published in 1652. “Never before have I seen a country where sometimes more diverse kinds of beverages can be found than on S. Christophe: more ancient and longer Frenchified than Martinique; as the Dutch bring their beer there; the Normans their cider, but it does not keep for long; those from S. Malo stop in Madeira and collect the wine which they carry and sell at a hefty price; those from La Rochelle the wine from Gascony which ages and becomes sour very soon; but vinegar sells well; everybody works hard to get water of life to the island, and that is the lifeblood of this country. Some send there [water of life] from rosolio; others produce it from sugarcane wine, and I will soon tell you how it is produced; others from Oüicou; others from Masbi.” Here there can be no doubt whatsoever: Maurile de Saint Michel tells us clearly that on Saint- Christophe several types of spirits were produced regularly, among which one made from sugarcane: RUM.
Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, “Histoire générale des isles de Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, et le Martinique et autres” published in 1654. “Another great bounty is obtained from this sugarcane; because from it excellent water of life is produced, which is sold at a high price in the country.”
Jean Baptiste Du Tertre “Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par los Francois” published in 1667. “Neither the crushed cane nor the scum that is removed from the second and third sugar boiling cauldrons is useless. The scum is reserved in a trough where it is kept to make eau-de-vie, or brandy. The slaves prepare an intoxicating drink from it, and it sells quite well on the islands; sugar syrup also sells quite well because it is used in making spice bread in Europe. I have also seen it boiled together with ouicou which renders a drink even stronger than the best Flemish beer. As for the crushed cane, it is fed to the pigs which fattens them and gives the meat and lard an excellent flavor. The juice from crushed sugar cane which isn’t tipped quickly enough into the boiling cauldrons, goes sour immediately, and when this is mixed with water the preparation is called vesou, which also sells well on the islands. All these little tricks contribute significantly to a well-run sugar plantation.” (translated by Bernie Mandelblatt in “Atlantic consumption of French Rum and Brandy and the economic growth in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Caribbean” 2011) Then, speaking about the slaves, he writes: “They are not given water of life to drink, except when they are obliged to do very hard work, or when they are planting tobacco under pouring rain. Water of life has been a bit more common on the islands since sugar started to be produced there, thanks to the secret which has been discovered of making it from the skimming taken from the cauldrons …”

Therefore, in two different French books, de Saint-Michel’s “Voyage des Isles Camercanes en l’Amérique” and Du Tertre’s “Histoire générale des isles de Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, et le Martinique et autres” , both published a few years before Ligon’s, we can find the earliest indisputable evidence of rum production in the Caribbean. Can we then state that the French were the first and that Barbados came in second? No, we can’t, not yet at least. There are other English documents in Barbados, older than Ligon’s book, but less clear, which ought to be studied thoroughly. And I don’t know whether it’s worth it, in any case it would be merely a matter of few years. But now we can say with certainty that, in the race to grow sugar and produce rum commercially in the Caribbean, the French and the English got to the finishing line together. And that both learnt from Portuguese Brazil.

In our modern world the cultural hegemony of the English language is a fact. Moreover, for centuries the British were by far the biggest producers and consumers of rum. All this explains why the attention of academics, popularizers and enthusiasts has focused on Barbados and much less on Saint-Christophe and Martinique. But the historic truth is that the French Caribbean and English Barbados have been together the first cradles of rum.

But if large scale commercial production of rum started at the same time in the French and English Caribbean, why did rum later become a typically British spirit? In other words, why didn’t the French producers have the same success as their English neighbors and rivals? We’ll endeavor to find an answer to this question through a new research dedicated to French Rum’s Early History.

Marco Pierini

PS: I published this article on April 2019 in the “Got Rum?” magazine. If you want to read my articles and to be constantly updated about the rum world, visit www.gotrum.com

And if it were the French Caribbean the first Craddle of rum? Jean Baptiste Du Tertre

One of the biggest pleasures of historic research is the discovery of some fascinating figures of the past. One of these is surely the French missionary Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, or Dutertre. Du Tertre was born in Calais, France, in 1610 and in his youth he served in the Dutch army and in the Dutch navy, before hearing the call of the faith and entering the Dominican order in 1635.

According to Doris Garraway in “The Libertine Colony” (2005) “That same year, four Dominican missionaries, including Raymond Breton, departed for Guadeloupe at the request of Richelieu and members of the new Company of the Islands of America. Due to the ill preparedness of the expedition, disease, and famine, only Father Breton remained after five years. To relieve him, Du Tertre traveled to Guadeloupe in 1640 with two other missionaries during that island’s grueling war with the Indians. Returning briefly to France in 1642 to request aid for the mission, Du Tertre remained in Guadeloupe until political differences with the governor forced him to leave in 1647.”

So Du Tertre visited the French Caribbean settlement from 1640 to 1647. He is relatively well known among rum history’s enthusiasts, because it is commonly believed that we owe him the first clear and exhaustive description of rum production in the French Caribbean, contained in his much quoted “Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les Francois …” published in 1667. Here it is:

“Neither the crushed cane nor the scum that is removed from the second and third sugar boiling cauldrons is useless. The scum is reserved in a trough where it is kept to make eau-de-vie, or brandy. The slaves prepare an intoxicating drink from it, and it sells quite well on the islands; sugar syrups also sells quite well because it is used in making spice bread in Europe. I have also seen it boiled together with ouicou which renders a drink even stronger than the best Flemish beer. As for the crushed cane, it is fed to the pigs which fattens them and gives the meat and lard an excellent flavor. The juice from crushed sugar cane which isn’t tipped quickly enough into the boiling cauldrons, goes sour immediately, and when this is mixed with water the preparation is called vesou, which also sells well on the islands. All these little tricks contribute significantly to a well-run sugar plantation.” (translated by Bernie Mandelblatt in her seminal essay “Atlantic consumption of French Rum and Brandy and the economic growth in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Caribbean” 2011)

Further on in the book, Du Tertre writes that the French settlers living in the islands are very hospitable and offer visitors “vin et eau de vie”, “wine and water of life”. Then, speaking about the slaves, he writes:

“L’on ne leur donne à boire de l’eau de vie, que lors qu’on les oblige à qualque travail rude, ou quand ils replantent le Tabac au fort de la pluie. L’Eau de vie estant un peu plus commune dans les Isles, depuis que l’on y fait du sucre, par le secret qu’on a trouvé d’en faire avec l’escume qu’on tire des chauderies ….” That means, more or less,

“They are not given water of life to drink, except when they are obliged to do very hard work, or when they are planting tobacco under pouring rain. Water of life has been a bit more common on the islands since sugar started to be produced there, thanks to the secret which has been discovered of making it from the skimming taken from the cauldrons …”

Let’s pay attention to the timing. Du Tertre travelled to the French Caribbean from 1640 to 1647 and he described sugar cane cultivation, sugar production and rum production as an ordinary part of the life and work of the French settlers. But he got back to the Caribbean again in 1656/57 and published this book only in 1667, ten years after his last voyage. Therefore, sadly, it can’t be used as a sure, reliable, historic source proving without doubts the existence of rum production in the French Caribbean in the 1640s. That is what we are trying to demonstrate with this series of articles.

And yet …

Proceeding with my research into the early French colonization of the Caribbean, I discovered that Jean Baptiste Du Tertre had previously written a first, shorter, relation of his voyages immediately after his return to France in 1647. This first book circulated in manuscript form for some years among his circles of relations. In 1654 he decided to publish the book. The reason for this early publication is very interesting; actually, we found ourselves in the middle of a real XVII century’s literary intrigue. Let’s read again Doris Garraway’s book, “Back in France, he [Du Tertre] circulated his historical manuscript among friends and supporters such as the illustrious Achilles de Harlay, chief financial administrator of the company and longtime counselor to the king. According to his preface of 1654, Du Tertre resolved to publish the work following the mysterious disappearance of one early draft. His Histoire générale des isles de Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, et le Martinique et autres appeared in 1654. Four years later César de Rochefort’s Histoire naturelle et morale des iles Antilles de l’Amérique was published anonymously in Rotterdam and thereafter carried the stigma of plagiarism from Du Tertre’s lost copy. Accusing Rochefort of inauthenticity and misrepresentation, Du Tertre produced an expanded second edition of his work based on research carried out during his final visit to the colonies in 1656-57. Published from 1667 to 1671, the Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par los Francois became a reference for all subsequent historians of the French Caribbean.”

In this first book, as I have said written after his return in 1647 and published in 1654, we find a large and detailed description of the technicalities of sugarcane cultivation and of sugar production. A complex, difficult, little known skill, Du Tertre writes, a veritable industrial secret which the French settlers at the beginning found it hard to master. But sometimes good fortune lends a hand:

“Monsier de Poincy l’à eu par hazard; car un sucrier Portugais homme fort expert qui le servait, ayant commis quelque crime pour lequel il devoit estre pendu; Monsieur de Poincy lui donna fay grace, à condition qu’il enseigneroit son secret à un de ses domestiques; ce qu’il fit, & depuis on fait quantité de tres-beau & tres-fin sucre à saint Christophe.” That means, as usual more or less,

“Monsier de Poincy got it by chance; because a highly skilled Portuguese sugar producer who served him had committed a crime for which he was sentenced to hang; Monsieur de Poincy granted him a reprieve on condition that he taught his secret to one of his servants. He did, and since then a great quantity of very nice, very fine sugar has been produced on Saint Christophe.”

Monsier de Poincy was Phillippe de Longvilliers de Poincy (1584–1660) a nobleman and a member of the Order of the Knights of Malta. He governed the island of Saint Christopher from 1639 to his death in 1660.

And here we find, at last, what we have been looking for:

“On tire encore une autre tres-grande utilité du sucre de ces Cannes; car on en fait des eaux de vie tres-excellents, lesquelles se vendent fort cher dans le pays.”

“Another great bounty is obtained from this sugarcane; because from it excellent water of life is produced, which is sold at a high price in the country.”

A brief description of the fermentation and distillation process follows. Therefore, according to Du Tertre, in the 1640s at the latest, French colonists grew sugarcane on a regular basis and produced sugar. Besides, with the by-products of sugar production they produced a fermented beverage that called vin de canne (cane wine) and also a strong distilled beverage that they called eau de vie de canne (cane water of life), our Rum.

Finally, we know that nothing of sugarcane is thrown away, but here is an example of usage which would never have occurred to me:

“Au reste, c’’est la meilleure commodité du monde, que ces Cannes de sucre pour les passans; car on en prend tousiours deux ou trois, qui vous servent de b°ton par le chemin, & lors que vous estes fatigué du voyage, & alteré par les chaleurs, en vous reposant vous mangez une partie de vôtre bàton, qui vous rafraischit d’une eau de sucre fort agreable.”

“Besides, these sugarcanes are very handy to wayfarers, because you can take two or three and use them as a walking stick, and when you are weary of walking, and thirsty because of the heat, while you rest you can eat part of your walking stick, which will refresh you very agreeable sugary water.”

Marco Pierini

PS: As I have already written, unfortunately I have never studied French and I don’t speak it. Moreover, these texts are written in XVII century’s French, which is different from contemporary French. However, it is a neo-Latin language so, with the help of some dictionaries and great effort I can read it and, hopefully, grasp the essential meaning. If any readers should find errors or inaccuracies, please let me know and I will be happy to make corrections.

PPS: I published this article on March 2019 in the “Got Rum?” magazine. If you want to read my articles and to be constantly updated about the rum world, visit www.gotrum.com

And if it were the French Caribbean the first Craddle of rum? Of Mice and Rum

In the three articles already published in this series, we have seen that, according to some contemporary sources, commercial production of rum may have begun in Saint-Christophe, Martinique and other French islands a few years before it got going in British Barbados. Moreover, we have also seen that when the French began to settle in the Caribbean in the 1620s and 1630s, they knew America and its resources well, and that a true distilling industry had been well-established in France for some time.

Now, I wish to go back to a number of contemporary French sources.

The Capuchin friar Hyacinthe de Caen came to Saint-Christophe in 1633 with a brother friar following Pierre d’Esnambuc, the founder of the colony, and participated in the early colonization of Martinique in 1635. He later met Dominican missionary Raymond Breton, the great anthropologist and ethnologist, author of the first Caribbean-French dictionary; he went back to France some years later, and then returned to the Caribbean. He and other brothers of his order clashed with the local authorities in Saint-Christophe, and he was arrested and expelled from the island in 1646. He went ashore in Guadalupe with another friar, and nothing further was heard of them.

In 1641, de Caen wrote his “Relation des îles de Saint-Christophe, Gardelouppe et la Martinique…”, which was not published until the year 1932. In this work we may read:

“Les cannes à sucre y étant cultivées, il y avra plus grande occupation à faire les sucres, principalement dans les îles de la Gardelouppe ou la Martinique, qui pourront un jour fournir la France …” That is, more or less:

“As sugarcane is cultivated in this place, there will be plenty of work making sugar, primarily on the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, that will one day be able to supply France …”

So sugarcane was already being grown on the islands, and grew well there, in 1641.

Following a lengthy description of cassava, the ouïcou that was made from it and its uses, de Caen then wrote: “De ce breuvage, se fait encore de l’eau-de-vie propre pour le pays …” that is, “From this beverage, they even make their own water of life in the country…”, while, he wrote, it was impossible to grow grapevines there.

Sugarcane was therefore already being grown on the French islands of the Caribbean in 1641, but not grapevines, and wine had to be imported. So what was the brùle-ventre which, according to Buton, the slaves made much use of; a distillate of ouïcou ? We don’t know.

Now, let us reread, in view of the above, a passage from Maurile de Saint-Michel’s “Voyage des Isles Camercanes en l’Amérique”, published in 1652:

“Never before have I seen a country where sometimes more diverse kinds of beverages can be found than on S. Christophe: more ancient and longer Frenchified than Martinique; as the Dutch bring their beer there; the Normans their cider, but it does not keep for long; those from S. Malo stop in Madeira and collect the wine which they carry and sell at a hefty price; those from La Rochelle the wine from Gascony which ages and becomes sour very soon; but vinegar sells well; everybody works hard to get water of life to the island, and that is the lifeblood of this country. Some send there [water of life] from rosolio; others produce it from sugarcane wine, and I will soon tell you how it is produced; others from Oüicou; others from Masbi.”

In 1652 the islanders were therefore already distilling sugarcane wine to make rum, and also distilled Oüicou and Masbi, that is, fermented beverages the natives traditionally made from cassava and potatoes. This was not an isolated case, but widespread practice. As F.H. Smith writes in “Caribbean Rum” (2005), “Before the large-scale transition to sugar production in the 1640s, colonists in the Caribbean experimented with the alcoholic potential of various local plants. … Distilling immediately became a central element of the French Caribbean sugar industry. In 1644, Benjamin Da Costa, a Dutch Jew from Brazil, introduced sugar making equipment and, perhaps, the first alembics, into Martinique. Yet, a manuscript from Martinique dated 1640 when the colony was only five years old, stated, ‘the slaves are fond of a strong eau de vie that they call brùle ventre [stomach burner]’. Although brùle ventre sometimes referred to French brandy, the comparative use of the term hints at a locally made concoction other than imported brandy. In the context of the Caribbean, brùle ventre was likely a distilled sugarcane-based alcoholic beverage and suggested that rum distilling preceded Da Costa’s arrival in 1644.”

Now here is a hypothesis which I cannot prove, but wish to propose anyway: in the early years of French (and British) colonization of the Caribbean, the number of European colonists and African slaves was limited, while the indigenous population was numerous. So the best way to get strong drink cheap would have been to distil ouïcou and other fermented beverages traditionally made by indigenous peoples. Later, however, the number of French colonists and, especially, the number of slaves grew rapidly, while the indigenous population continued to drop as an effect of war, disease and other factors. This may have been one of the factors that led the colonists to ferment and distil the by-products of sugarcane, which was by now widely grown, to obtain an abundant, cheap spirit.

But now let us return to Maurile de Saint-Michel. After describing how sugar is made, he writes: “Quand aux cannes rongées par les rats; ausquels Monsieur le General donne la chasse tant qu’ il peut, avec ses chiés; on en fait un breuvage, qu’ils nommèr Vin de canne; … Monsieur le General en faict remplir des pippes, & en retire grand profit, en les faisant vendre és magazins. Il est plus aggreable à boire, qu ‘il n’est sain.” That is, “When the canes have been gnawed by mice, which the General hunts as much as he can with his dogs, a beverage is made from them, referred to as cane wine … The General has barrels filled with it, and he earns a great profit from it, having it sold in the shops. It is more pleasurable than healthy to drink.”

And so Martinique was not exempt from the plague of mice! These words are reminiscent of Richard Ligon’s description of Barbados. Mice were most likely not native to the islands but brought over on European ships. They had few natural enemies in the Caribbean, and the sugarcane plantations offered them a virtually limitless amount of food. All the sources of the day report that mice were very numerous, infesting the colonists’ homes and plantations, a true plague. The problem was so serious there were slaves whose work consisted entirely of hunting them, who were rewarded a bottle of rum for every 50 mice they killed.

It is clear that in the French islands, as in Barbados, the production of alcoholic beverages made from sugarcane gave rise to an economically significant trade. And it would appear that in order to make this drink, which we now call rum, the people of the French islands used the worst quality cane, gnawed by mice, and not the skimmings of the cauldrons as in Barbados.

And now allow me a historic digression not strictly linked with rum. The history of the British colonization of the Americas is by far better known than the simultaneous French colonisation. And many of the authors who have published important works on British colonisation tend, whether consciously or not, to treat it as a unique phenomenon. Yet the two colonial enterprises were very similar, as were the societies they created in the Caribbean.

The French and the British were both looking for the same thing: tropical products that would allow them to get rich quickly. Some of the colonists did get rich, even very rich, but the majority of them had very hard lives, and the mortality rate was high for all. They even had similar tastes; both, for example, loved pineapple.

The French and the British also faced the same problems. They had to deal with an alien and often hostile natural world; they suffered the devastation of hurricanes and earthquakes; and they suffered from horrible new diseases and an oppressive climate.

What’s more, they were living in a state of permanent war: English and French fought each other, and both fought the Spanish, the pirates and the Carib. Even during rare times of peace, the rich feared the mass of indentured servants, and all the whites feared a revolt of the increasingly numerous slaves.

To escape from this hell on earth, both English and French settlers sought oblivion in alcohol. When Maurile de Saint-Michel writes “Never before have I seen a country where sometimes more diverse kinds of beverages can be found than on S. Christophe”, we are reminded of Richard Ligon, who, in his much better-known “A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados”, tells us how much the British plantation owners in Barbados drank.

In short, the French colonisation of the Americas was much like the British one. With one important difference: in numbers. According to Philip P. Boucher, in his seminal “FRANCE AND THE AMERICAN TROPICS TO 1700. Tropics of Discontent” (2008), “French migration across the Atlantic in the early modern era was comparatively small. Global estimates suggest a figure of 60,000 to 100,000 leaving for the Americas in the years 1500-1760, as compared to 746,000 British subjects, 678,000 Spaniards, and even 523,000 from thinly populated Portugal. France at the same time had the largest population by far of any European state, some eighteen to twenty million. Only the Dutch, with some 20,000 migrants, trailed France among the big five imperial powers.”

And the low number of settlers may have been the structural weakness in the French colonization of the Americas.

Marco Pierini

PS: I published this article on February 2019 in the “Got Rum?” magazine. If you want to read my articles and to be constantly updated about the rum world, visit www.gotrum.com

And if it were the French Caribbean the first Craddle of rum? The business of distilling in France

In the first article of this series, “SAINT CHRISTOPHE, MARTINICA AND EAU-DE-VIE” , I stated that according to some documents, a commercial production of rum may have started in Saint-Christophe, Martinique and other French islands, a few years before it did in Barbados.

In the second article, “ADAM’S WILL”, I maintained that in order to understand historic documents properly it is not sufficient to just read them. We have to contextualize them, that is, put them in their proper historical period. I also stated that in the 1620s and 1630s, when the French began to settle in the Caribbean, they knew America and its resources well. In particular, they had a long experience of travelling to and trading with Brazil, a great producer of sugar and where, at least from the beginning of 1600s, rum was produced too.

Now I want to delve further into another part of the historic context: when the French began to settle in the Caribbean, were they already familiar with commercial alcoholic distillation?

As far as I know, a scholarly work dedicated to the full history of alcoholic distillation in France does not exist and, as often when doing research on rum, distillation and alcohol, we have to look for evidence by perusing different and sparse sources. Having said this, let’s start from the very beginning.

“Between about 1270 and 1285 news began to spread from Bologna through northern Italy and beyond concerning a marvelous new panacea called aqua vitae [water of life]”, C. Anne Wilson writes in her interesting and innovative book, “WATER OF LIFE. A History of Wine-Distilling and Spirits 500 BC – AD 2000” 2006. And later she writes “In the Archives de l’Artois, dating from 1308, an entry refers to burning water prepared on behalf of the daughters of the Countess Mahaut. It is listed among items for which payments are due from the Count of Artois, and it records:’20 sous, 10 deniers for wine which Master Girard bought to make Ieaue ardent …to care for our damoiselles.” Probably this is the earliest evidence of alcoholic distillation in France.

Moreover, we know that at the court of the Popes in Avignon, scholars addressed the question of preserving health with water of life in the early decades of the 14th century, and that in 1330 Pope John 22^nd had an alembic made to produce it.

This early production and consumption was, of course, for medical purposes. The passage to pleasure consumption and commercial production occurred first in Italy, at the beginning of 1400 at the latest, as we can learn from the “Libreto de Aqua Ardente”- “Booklet of Burning Water” – written by Michele Savonarola in Ferrara, Italy between 1444 and 1450, possibly the first treatise entirely dedicated to water of life. There is no reason to think that in France it would happen much later. Actually, we know of the existence of a true professional corporation of distillers (ayga ardenterius) in Provence as early as 1411.

A few decades later, however, partly thanks to the invention of the printing press, works dedicated to water of life and to alcoholic distillation sprang up everywhere, especially in Italy and in Germany, and its production and consumption spread throughout Europe. I have not found further evidence in the France of 1400s, but probably simply because I have not looked hard enough.

In 1514, the French King Louis XII allowed the vinegar manufacturers’ guild to distill spirits and, in 1537, King Francis I encouraged the same among wholesale grocers. By the mid-sixteenth century, French distillers organized themselves into a separate guild, and distilled wine (brandy) soon became a beverage of more general use.

At the beginning of the 1500s, in Florence, the Fonderia Medicea di Palazzo Pitti (the Medicis’ Foundry at Pitti Palace) was at the leading edge of the production of spirits of many kinds. When Caterina de’ Medici in 1533 married the future King Henry II in Paris – the French discovered the virtues of Florentine liqueurs, which in Florence at the time were already served at the end of a meal, and in particular of “rosoglio”. During Caterina’s long Regency, the custom of drinking liqueurs spread rapidly in France.

According to G. Comet in “L’eau-de-vie, naissance et premiers pas” in La Rochelle, in 1559, an official declared that “le vin est médiocre, mais il est excellent pour faire de l’eau-de-vie’ et les bateux sur Londres emportent tonneaux de vin et battiques d’eau-de-vie.” That means, more or less, “the wine is mediocre, but it is excellent for making water of life and the vessels to London import tuns of wine and barriques of water of life”

Let’s read now some sentences from the fundamental book of Henriette de Bruyn Kops: “A SPIRITED EXCHANGE The Wine and Brandy Trade between France and the Dutch Republic in its Atlantic Framework, 1600-1650” (2007).

In that period, Holland was the most modern and technologically advanced country all over Europe. Their merchant fleet was by far the largest in the world, Amsterdam was the center of the world’s trade and finance and the Dutch were the pioneers of commercial distillation on a large scale.

“Dutch brandy consumption has been documented as early as 1536, when tavern keepers were prohibited from selling it for consumption off the premises. … the States of Holland started taxing ‘all fired wines’ in 1583, a sign that brandewijn consumption was high enough to warrant the revenuers’ attention. By 1588, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Hoorn and Enkhuizen had resident distillers. The Dutch did not confine their operations to the distilling of wine into proper brandy, but knew how to distill ‘jenever’ [gin] from a variety of raw materials, including beer, malt, wheat and barley. The step from brewing beer from grains to distilling wine, beer or grain into brandy was a natural one, and Dutch brewers quickly embraced the brandewijn industry. Rotterdam’s distillers produced enough brandy by 1604 that they had a surplus that could be exported.”

And from the Netherlands we have a lot of indisputable evidence about distillation and alcohol consumption. “By the mid-1580s, the brokers’ guild had started to publish the commodity prices on the Amsterdam Bourse on a weekly basis. These ‘Pryscouranten’ have thus far been used in Dutch price history, but … they also allow us to discern early modern consumer preferences. The sole sixteenth century survivor of the series [a single week in 1586] does not list any wines, but various French and Spanish wines and brandies were listed on a regular basis starting with the one remaining list of the first decade of the seventeenth century, dating 1609.”

The trade with France was very important for the Dutch economy. “French brandy was listed from 1609 onwards, initially under the generic heading of ‘French’ brandy, but starting with the list of 1630 the French brandies were sold under their regional label. Brandy from Bordeaux and the Cognac area made the list in 1630, followed by those from Nantes from 25 April 1633 onwards.”

“In the early part of the seventeenth century, a growing and increasingly well-to-do population plus the sailors of the mercantile and naval fleets expanded the Dutch consumer base and spurred the demand for wines and brandies from France. Specific conditions in local viticulture combined with technology imported by Dutch entrepreneurs – and especially those of Rotterdam – boasted the production of brandy in the region around Nantes and changed the nature of its alcohol supply.”

“The region around Nantes itself produced inferior wines that most contemporaries considered to be undrinkable. Sometime before 1600, Dutch entrepreneurs figured out that this poor white wine was the perfect and cheap raw material for brandy-liquor distilled from wine.. … Anthonie Casteleyn [Quisthlin or Chastelin in the French records] from Dordrecht must have arrived in Nantes well before 1609. That year the holder of a royal brandy monopoly complained about Casteleyn’s five stills near the bridge at ‘Pillerny’, his illegal export of 40 barrels of brandy to La Rochelle and about his Dutch assistant, a barrel cooper named Adrien.”

“Nantes had always been a transshipment point for the quality wines coming down the upper Loire valley from Anjou and Orleans, but it is significant that the first mention of Nantes as a center of Dutch efforts to produce exportable alcohol concerns brandy (eau-de-vie) instead of wines. The wines of the lower Loire area were deemed barely fit for human consumption but they made fine brandy. The Dutch introduced and commercialized the technology which distilled the Nantes wines into excellent brandy, a highly drinkable and thus marketable product. Some of this ‘gevuerde wijn’ [fired wine] was in turn used to fortify weak wines so that they lasted longer.”

“The French government recognized this development as early as 1605 when King Henri IV granted Isaac Bernard, one of his court officials, a ten-year monopoly on the transport of brandies from Nantes destined for export.”

In 1631, Nantes exported 1,382 tons of brandy and in the same year Dutch entrepreneurs shipped to Nantes 235 stills. Other 10 stills were imported by other entrepreneurs. Total: 245 brandy stills from the Netherlands in that year alone, transported by 29 ships. This is an early example of delocalization. “When Dutch merchants imported 235 brandy stills into Nantes in 1631, they did so in order to control the production of brandy at the source of the raw material, to achieve a vertical integration of the brandy trade, to reduce their costs and maximize their profit. In the process they transformed Nantes’ regional economy.” Thirty-three Dutch and seven French vessels participated in the brandy trade by either importing stills or exporting the finished product.

It is important to emphasize that Nantes was only one of the French ports from which French brandy was exported, and the Dutch were not the only importers. For instance, a scholar has estimated that in 1628-29 Bayonne and Saint Jean-de-Luz exported about 250 tons of brandy and in the mid-1640s the Dutch alone exported about 3.000 oxheads of brandy from Bordeaux, where an oxhead was about 200/250 liters. More, “In 1631, the city of Hamburg imported 3,801 tons of wine plus 242 tons of brandy from Nantes on 87 ships. All the brandy was imported by five French ships: 119 tons of brandy from Nantes, 88 tons from the upstream Loire region, plus another 35 tons of brandy from Anjou for a total of 242 tons.”

This is enough. In conclusion, in the 1620s and 1630s, when the French settled in the Caribbean, they already had a long and successful experience of producing and exporting eau-de-vie de vin, water of life from wine, in a large commercial scale. Or, to say it in another way, in the 1620s and 1630s the business of distilling had been well established in France for some time.

Marco Pierini

PS: I published this article on January 2019 in the “Got Rum?” magazine. If you want to read my articles and to be constantly updated about the rum world, visit www.gotrum.com

And if it were the French Caribbean the first Craddle of rum? Adam’s will

In the first article of this new series dedicated to the role played by the French in the origins of rum, I published some documents according to which a commercial production of rum may have started in Saint-Christophe, Martinique and other French islands a few years before it did in Barbados. I hope to be able to publish other documents in the next articles.

But in order to understand historic documents properly it is not sufficient to just read them. We have to contextualize them, that is, put them in their proper historical period. In this case, we are referring to texts written in 1600s by French missionaries and travelers who wanted to tell about, and often actively promote, the colonization of the Caribbean. Both they and their readers were interested in American nature, the natives and their costumes, the new society arising on the islands and in the riches that could be amassed from those lands. The production of spirits was a matter of little interest to them and they gave it only scattered observations, not specific reflection.

Let us say, yet again simplifying, that it is up to us to do some precise thinking. The first step is to understand how much the French knew about and how often they went to America in the 1620s and 1630s, at the time of their first permanent settlements in Saint-Chritophe, Martinica, Guadalupe etc.

Let’s see. In 1494, just two years after Columbus’ first voyage, Portugal and Spain signed the Treaty of Tordesillas under which the newly discovered lands would be divided between the two signatories. But France never accepted this Iberian monopoly and, from the very beginning, French seamen, merchants, privateers and pirates showed a keen awareness of the opportunities and wealth that could be derived from the new discoveries.

Later, after the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru, the sensational news of Aztec and Incan treasures whetted other European appetites, especially those of Spain’s enemies. First of all France, which was at war with the Spanish Empire for roughly all the first half of the 1500s. Wars are expensive. The fleets coming back from America loaded with treasure were vital to ensure the wealth and consequently the military power of the Spanish empire; for this reason the Spanish towns and ships of America became subject to constant attack by the French.

As Philip P. Boucher writes in his seminal work FRANCE AND THE AMERICAN TROPICS TO 1700, “The French king François I (r. 1516 – 1547) vociferously refused to honor Iberian pretension to monopoly on America. In an oft-quoted anecdote, he reputedly asked the Spanish ambassador to produce Adam’s will leaving the Americas to Iberians. He insisted that legitimate claims to areas overseas depended on de facto occupation, not on grandiose papal grants. … Not only did François support voyages searching for a northwest passage to the Orient, the expeditions of Giovanni da Verrazzano, Jacques Cartier, and Jean Roberval, but during these years of almost continuous war, he unleashed privateers in the Caribbean.”

French privateer attacks achieved spectacular success, one of the earliest being the 1523 capture of Spanish ships carrying the stolen treasures of the Aztec city Tenochtitlan off the coast of the Azores by Jean d’Ango, a wealthy ship owner from Dieppe. Later, in 1555, the French privateer Jacques de Sores captured Havana and burned it to the ground. Only the terrible religious and civil wars that tore apart and bled France dry in the second half of 1500s prevented the French Crown from establishing enduring colonies in America.

This it enough for the French connection with America in general; now let’s focus on Brazil, which roughly from 1550s to 1650s was the biggest producer of sugar in the West world.

French captain Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, in 1504 onboard L’Espoir, visited Brazil and traded with the natives. He also brought back to France a Native American person named Essomericq. Gonneville stated that when he visited Brazil, French traders from Saint-Malo and Dieppe had already been trading there for several years.

We know from contemporary sources that from the very beginning of the settlement, the Portuguese were worried about the presence in Brazil of other Europeans, first of all the French. Let me quote Schwartz, S.B. EARLY BRAZIL. A DOCUMENTARY COLLECTION TO 1700: “The Portuguese Crown made efforts to clear foreign competitors, especially Norman and Breton ships, from the coast, and to that end Martin Alonso de Sousa captained an expedition in 1532 that sought to ensure Portugal’s control of the new land.”

France continued to trade with Portugal, especially loading Brazil wood, for its use as a red dye for textiles. The fascination that Brazil and its inhabitants exerted on the French was very strong, to the point that in 1550, during the great celebrations for the royal entry of King Henry II at Rouen, about fifty men disguised as naked Brazilian natives staged a battle between the Tupinamba allies of the French and their enemies, the Tabajaras.

The French ambitions on Brazil were not limited to trade, they also tried to colonize it.

The first French settlement in Brazil was called France Antartique. In 1555, French vice-admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, a Catholic knight of the Order of Malta, led a small fleet of two ships and 600 soldiers and colonists, and took possession of the small island of Serigipe in the Guanabara Bay, in front of present-day Rio de Janeiro, where they built a fort. In 1560 Mem de Sá, the new Governor-General of Brazil, received from the Portuguese government the order to expel the French. With a large fleet he attacked the French colony. The strong religious tensions that existed, in the colony and at home, between French Protestants and Catholics, weakened the defense and delayed the dispatch of reinforcements from France. In January 1567, the Portuguese inflicted a final defeat on the French forces and decisively expelled them from Brazil. In the place, the Portuguese founded the city of Rio de Janeiro.

A second settlement was France Équinoxiale, started in 1612, when a French expedition departed from France, carrying 500 colonists. They arrived in the Northern coast of what is today the Brazilian state of Maranhão where they soon founded a village, which was named “Saint-Louis”, in honor of the French king Louis IX. The colony did not last long: a Portuguese army defeated and expelled the French colonists in 1615. A few years later, in 1620, Portuguese and Brazilian colonists arrived in number and São Luís started to develop, with an economy based mostly on sugar cane and slavery. Actually, it was largely in response to the attempts of France to trade with the natives and to conquer new territories that the Portuguese crown decided to expand its colonization efforts in Brazil.

French traders and colonists tried again to found a colony further North, in what is today French Guyana, in 1626, 1635 and 1643. It was only after 1674, when the colony came under the direct control of the French crown and a competent Governor took office, that France Équinoxiale became a reality. To this day, French Guyana is a department of France.

To sum up, according to W.J. Eccles in his THE FRENCH IN NORTH AMERICA, “For a century, French traders had challenged the Portuguese hold of this vast region, with little or no aid from the Crown. But for the religious dissensions at Rio de Janeiro, and the unfortunate character of Villegaignon, France rather than Portugal might have established a vast empire in South America.”

Therefore, in the 1620s and 1630s, when the French began to settle in the Caribbean, they knew America and its resources well. In particular, they had a long experience of travelling to and trading with Brazil, a great producer of sugar and where, at least from the beginning of 1600s, rum was produced too. This part of the historic context of our documents is sufficiently clear.

What remains to be seen now is whether the French already knew alcoholic distillation, sugarcane cultivation and sugar making.

See you again in the next issues.

Marco Pierini

PS: I published this article on december 2018 in the “Got Rum?” magazine. If you want to read my articles and to be constantly updated about the rum world, visit www.gotrum.com

And if it were the French Caribbean the first Craddle of rum? Saint Cristophe, Martinica and eau-de-vie

The first clear evidence of rum production – that is, a strong alcoholic beverage made from the fermentation and then by the distillation of the products of sugar cane – in the West, can be found in Brazil at the beginning of the 1600s.

However, it is common knowledge in the rum world that if not the very birthplace, the cradle of rum was the English colony of Barbados round 1650. There, it is claimed, a real commercial production of rum started. This common knowledge relies mainly on the book of Richard Ligon “A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados” published in 1657. Ligon visited Barbados from 1647 to 1650 and described the new distilled beverage as “the drink of the island, which is made of the skimmings of the Coppers, that boil the Sugar, which they call Kill-Devil”.

But, after thorough research on the Early French Caribbean, a subject little studied by scholars and well-nigh unknown to the public at large, I have come to the conclusion that things may have gone otherwise. According to some documents, a commercial production of rum may have started in Saint-Christophe, Martinique and other French islands, a few years before it did in Barbados.

It would seem that everything started in Saint-Christophe, present-day Saint Kitts. The English settled there in 1623, whereas the exact beginning of the French colonization is uncertain, around 1625. What is certain, albeit forgotten, is that the French had been sailing in the Caribbean, had fought against the Spanish and had temporarily inhabited some islands right from the beginning of 1500s. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that they had arrived immediately after Columbus and before the English.

They partitioned the island, with the English in the middle and the French on either end. At the beginning, relations between the French and the English were good, and together, a little while later, they exterminated the Carib who lived on the island. Then their relations worsened and the island was disputed for years between the two powers, until the final victory of the British in 1783.

In 1626, at the instigation of Cardinal Richelieu, the Company of Saint-Christophe was founded in France to promote the colonization of Saint-Christophe and other islands. More French settlers arrived and they started to develop a society in many ways similar to the one, much better known, that was developing in Barbados in the same years. In 1635, the Company was re-founded under the new name Company of the Islands of America and it started the colonization of Martinique and Guadalupe. The Company got from the French Government a monopoly over trade, land ownership and various rights over the settlers. Like the English, the French too were looking out for land where to grow the tropical products so in demand all over Europe. At the beginning they grew tobacco, then they tried with other staples, among which sugarcane.

Also the French settlers drank a lot and wine and brandy were among the most sought-after goods. The Company endeavored to get sufficient quantities through, but they failed, so the wine and brandy imported from France were not enough and they were costly. The settlers resorted to contraband, buying from the omnipresent Dutch, but the prices stayed high. So, they tried their hand at producing in loco something to drink which was strong, plentiful and cheap.

The French called vin, wine, the grape wine itself and also other fermented beverages, so vin de canne, cane wine, is a fermented beverage made from sugarcane. On the other hand, they called eau-de-vie, water of life, every distilled beverage. So eau-de-vie de canne is water of life from sugarcane, that is, rum. For the sake of correctness, I believe it is fairer to show the original French documents first, then their English translation.

Minutes of the “Assembly of the Company’s Stakeholders”, 13 August 1639: “Sur la demande faite par Jean Faguet à ce qu’il plût à la Compagnie lui permettre à l’esclusion de tous autres pendant six ans de faire faire dans l’île de la Martinique et de Saint-Christophe de l’eau-de-vie soit de vin ou de tous autres fruits ou légumes qu’il pourra faire ou recouvrer par son soin et industrie dans lesdites îles, offrant de payer XX livres de pétun pour chacune barrique d’eau-de-vie qu’il fera, à la charge que nul autre ne pourra faire pendant lesdites six années sous peine qui seront ordonnées.

A été accordé audit Faguet de pouvoir faire pendant six années à l’exclusion de tout autre dans lesdites îles de l’eau-de-vie de ce qui croîtra en icelle, a la charge de payer à la Compagnie le XX° de l’eau-de-vie qu’il fera, avec defense à tous autres d’en faire dans lesdites deux îles pendant ledit temps à peine de confiscation de celle qu’ils feront et de mille livres de pétun d’amende.”

“Regarding the request made by Jean Faguet in order that the Company grant him for six years an exclusive licence to make water of life on the islands of Martinique and Saint-Christophe, both from wine and any other fruit or legumes that he will be able to grow or find through his ingenuity and industriousness on the above-mentioned islands, offering to pay XX pounds of tobacco for each cask of water of life that he will produce, on condition that during the aforementioned six years, nobody else is allowed to make it under the penalties which will be determined,

the aforementioned Faguet is granted exclusive licence to make water of life on the aforementioned islands, using what grows on them, for six years, on condition that he pays to the Company the XXth part of the water of life he will produce, with everybody else being banned from producing it on the two islands during said period under penalty of confiscation of the water of life they have produced and a fine of a thousand pounds of tobacco.”

L. Mims in his “Colbert’s West India Policy” published in 1912 writes:” It is possible and even almost certain that it is a question of the manufacture of brandy from sugar cane” that is, rum. We cannot be completely sure, though. It is clear from the text that they meant to use local plants. Even before the Europeans arrived, the natives made various fermented beverages and the settlers drank them for want of anything better; the most widespread ones were Masbi, made from sweet potatoes and Oüicou , made from cassava. Perhaps Faguet meant to distill these beverages but, given the traditional production systems, the quantities were probably meagre. In any case, I have found no clear evidence. On the contrary, cane wine was relatively plentiful and cheap. It makes sense to think that M. Faguet wanted to produce also a spirit from sugar cane, that is, rum.

From “Relation de l’establissement des Francois depuis l’ann 1635” (more or less: “Report on the settlement of the French after the year 1640” ) published in 1640 by Jacques Bouton:

“Ils aiment fort l’eau de vie, qu’ils appellent du brusle ventre” “they [the slaves] are fond of a strong water of life that they call stomach burner”.

Later, the Company decided to start making sugar in their own right in Guadeloupe, where a few settlers had already been growing sugar cane for years. Here we can read what the Assembly of the stakeholders deliberated on 7 January 1643.

“Sur les requêtes présentèes par le capitaine Flament, serà écrit en sa faveur au sieur Aubert en l’île de Guadeloupe et au sieur de Leumont, intendant génèral des affaires de la Compagnie pour Saint Christophe. Lui serà expédié permission de faire de l’eau-du-vie durant trois ans, sans préjudicier à la liberté publique d’en faire à l’ordinaire, et d’en porter de France aux îles”

“Regarding the requests submitted by Captain Flament, letters in his favour will be written to Mr Aubert on the island of Guadeloupe and to Mr de Leumont, intendant general of the affairs of the Company on Saint Christophe. He will be granted permission to make water of life for a period of three years without prejudice to the public freedom to produce it as it is common, and to ship it from France to the islands.”

In other words, the Company grants Captain Flament permission to produce spirits, but not exclusively. Other colonists are specifically allowed the right to continue producing them, as evidently they had been doing for some time.

It appears clear from these documents that in the French Caribbean producing spirit drinks was common practice. But there is an even more interesting document.

From “Voyage des Isles Camercanes en l’Amérique” by Maurile de Saint-Michel, published in 1652: “Je n’ay jamais veu pays où ils se trouvent quelquefois plus de diverses sortes de boissons, qu’à S. Christophe: plus antée & francisée de mon témps eque la Martinique; Car les Hollandois y aportent de sa Biere; les Normans du Cider, mais il ne s’y conserve pas long temps; les Maloüins s’ s’arrestent a Madere, & en retirent du Vin qu’ils y apportent, & le vendemt bien cher; les Rochelois du Vin de Gascogne, que i’ ay veu y aigrir bien-tost; mais le vin-aigre s’en debite bien; tout le monde met peine d’y apporter de l’eau de vie, & c’est la vie de ce pays. Les uns du Rosossol; d’autres y font du vin de cannes de sucre, ie diray tantost comme il est fact; d’autres du Oüicou; d’autres du Masbi.”

Here there can be no doubt whatsoever: Maurile de Saint Michel tells us clearly that on Saint- Christophe several types of spirits were produced regularly, among which one made from sugarcane: RUM. And his book was published 5 years before Ligon’s.

This is all for now, see you again in the next issue.

Marco Pierini

PS: I published this article on November 2018 in the “Got Rum?” magazine. If you want to read my articles and to be constantly updated about the rum world, visit www.gotrum.com

American Rum: Thirsty Settlers

It is not easy for us to understand the significance of alcoholic beverages in XVII Century’s British Colonies. Today, we drink alcohol for our pleasure, not because we need to. We drink spirits for the sake of the taste, of feeling exhilarated, of being in good company, etc. but we do not actually need spirits. They are an extra, a little luxury that we treat ourselves to. But back then, things were very different and alcoholic beverages actually fulfilled a far more important task.

As Hewson L. Peek writes in his delightful “ Americana Ebrietatis” first published in 1917, “At the time when America was settled, no European people drank water as we do today for a constant beverage. The English drank ale, the Dutch beer, the French and Spanish light wines, for everyday use. Hence it seemed to the colonists a dangerous experiment to drink water in the New World.”

We have to remember that in XVII century’s England water was something to be wary of. It was not advisable to wash oneself too much, or to drink water on a regular basis. Many, both doctors and common people, considered it dangerous for the health. There was certainly a grain of truth in this belief: water-pipes and sewers were non-existent, and water was badly stored in wooden casks, therefore it was often polluted, and always of poor quality. To drink, to quench one’s thirst, one had to resort to beer and, for those who could afford it, to the more expensive wine. Beer and wine were considered the most suitable drinks for everyday life, and probably they really were, since the alcohol in them clearly had an antiseptic function. They were also nutritious. In a world perpetually on the brink of starvation, beer was an important addition to the everyday diet of the lower classes. “Teetotalism would have been quite unintelligible to the farmer or burgher of those healthy days of breezy activity out of the doors” (Peek).

Why would a grown man in a civilized society drink water? It was something odd, noteworthy: “It was not accounted a strange thing in those days to drink water”; thus, in a book published in London in 1654, a colonist recounts the hardships of the first days. Then, after recalling the shortage of food and the bitter cold too, he adds “ and most began to repent when their strong Beer and full cups ran as small as water in a large Land”.

For some time, also distilled beverages had come into common use, and they were considered as wholesome and nourishing as wine and beer. Moreover, to distilled beverages were attributed healing, medicinal properties, useful to treat many diseases. Besides, they provided warmth in the long, chilly winters. And then, of course, people drank for the feeling of intoxication, in order to experience a moment of joy and oblivion in an otherwise hard, drab and dangerous life. In short, for the colonists alcoholic beverages were an absolute necessity. And at the beginning it was necessary to take them all the way from England, or get hold of malt to make them.

As early as 1643, in Virginia colonists were already distilling. We know it because that year, worried by the “general scandal” of heavy drinking, the local authorities decided that “no debts for wine imported nor for strong waters distilled and made in the colony should be recoverable in any Court in the Colony”. And also archeological work conducted in Virginia corroborates the documentary records. But in spite of this early start, commercial distilling did not develop in Virginia during the colonial period. The American distilling industry started instead much further up North, in Puritan Boston, Massachusetts Bay.

Even in the preparation stage of the first voyages, Puritan leaders advised the colonists to take with them an adequate supply of alcoholic beverages. Reverend Francis Higginson, the first Minister at Salem in 1629, wrote:

“Therefore be sure to furnish yourself with things fitting to be had before you come: as meale for breads, malt for drinke, woolen and linnen cloath …”

His ship, the Talbot, carried a cargo of 300 tons, among which 9 tons of water, 45 tons of beer, 20 gallons of brandy and 20 gallons of Spanish wine.

In the same year, the Massachusetts Bay Company sent Rev Samuel Skelton there too, whom they supplied with food, clothes and the wherewithal to live, including “one gall. Aquavite” and “five qu. of stronge water”.

Incidentally, I thought that the terms aquavite (water of life), strong water, hot water and similar were the same thing at the time, but it seems that I was wrong because two different words in the same list must have meant two different things. However, the stocks were bound to run out sooner or later, and it was extremely expensive to have beer, wine etc. brought over from Europe; therefore, from the very beginning the colonists tried to produce alcoholic beverages themselves using fruit, grain and also imported molasses to brew beer.

Let us see some verses from the 1630s:

“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”

They also tried to grow vines, but without success.

In one case they were immediately successful: apples were not native of North America, but grew well in New England. Apples naturally fermented at about 7% abv to make hard cider. As Georg Francis Dow writes in “Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony” (1935):

“Cider mills were found on a great many farms where the apples, which were mostly natural fruit, were made into cider. This was a common drink and found a place upon the table three times a day with each meal, and was carried into the fields to quench thirst forenoon and afternoon. The men of those days assumed to be unable to labor without a liberal supply of cider, as water seldom agreed with them.”

They also distilled cider to make the so called “applejack”. And in the Southern colonies also peach brandies were popular. But the colonists were accustomed to drinking much better stuff in England, and they were not prepared to give it up. With part of the grain of the first harvests they soon started to brew beer and to distill grain-spirit, whisky, even though at the time the word had not come into common use.

The Mayflower arrived in 1620 and as early as 1648 Emmanuel Downing, Governor John Winthrop’s brother-in-law, claimed that his spirit was better than the imported one. But he had a big problem: shortage of raw material. The local production of grain was scarce, and it constituted the staple diet of the majority of the population. Giving up part of the grain crops to distill it was costly, dangerous and, in any case, there wasn’t enough. His wife Lucy gets to the heart of the problem in a letter to her brother, written on 17^th December 1648:

“Our stillings might be pritty strong but that all the rye was eaten up allmost before the Indian [corn] was gathered. Could you but teach us to kern [i.e. To make] rye out of the sea watter, that invention, I question not, would quicklye make the still vapor as far as pecoite [i.e. Pequot], and the Indians I beleev would like that smoake very well for the English here have but 2 objections against it, one it’s too dear, 2 not enough to it. Cure those, and we might all have implayment enought at Salem to make liquors, and as it is we could have custome ten time more than pay.”

Of course Lucy Winthrop couldn’t know it, but before long the solution to the shortage of grain to distill would come right from the sea. It wasn’t rye, wheat or another kind of grain. It was instead a dark, thick liquid, sticky and cloying. It had an exotic name: molasses.

Marco Pierini

American Rum: the Barbados Connection

After 1650, Barbados was a big producer of sugar and therefore the richest colony of the rising English Empire: “the most flourishing Island in all those American parts” as a contemporary wrote. Barbados and the other little islands of the West Indies were far richer than the mainland colonies! Just to give you an idea, the wealth deriving from sugar can be compared to the wealth given today – or maybe better some years ago – by oil.

The profits made from sugar were so high that nearly all available land was devoted to sugarcane cultivation. As a consequence, Barbados had to import everything. Not only luxury goods for the élite of the planters, but also the daily food for the mass of the poor white farmhands and the slaves. Moreover, they needed plenty of timber for the buildings, the barrels and the fires necessary to process the sugar. And all the products had to be purchased in big quantities and at a low cost; it was unthinkable to get them from Europe. Luckily there were the Mainland Colonies. They were much closer, covered with enormous forests, with large fertile fields and some of the richest fishing grounds in the world, the Grand Banks. From the very beginning, there was a flourishing trade between Barbados and the Mainland Colonies.

“… pleased the Lord to open to us a trade with Barbados and other Islands in the West Indies, which as it proved gainful, so the commodities we had in exchange there for our cattle and provisions, as sugar, cotton, tobacco, and indigo, were a good help to discharge our engagements in England” writes John Winthrop in 1647.

And as early as 1660 a mariner declared before the English Privy Council that Massachusetts Bay had become:

“… the key to the Indies, without which Jamaica, Barbadoes, and the Caribbee Islands are not be able to subsist, there being many thousands tons of provisions, as beef pork, peas, biscuit, fish, carried to Spain, Portugal, and Indies every year, besides sufficient for the country’s use”.

Historians speak about a British America which stretched from Barbados in the South as far as Canada in the North. The ties between Barbados and the future US were not only commercial. The young Englishmen who left for Barbados as indentured servants did so because they hoped to be able to buy a small piece of land at the end of their service. But the high profits from sugar caused the price of land to increase rapidly, and as early as 1650 it had become impossible to buy good land without having large amounts of money. Many decided to emigrate again and thousands went to the Mainland Colonies. Therefore, vessel traffic was intense, families and individuals were always on the go and many strong relationships, based on family, friendship and business connected the Mainland Colonies with the West Indies and first of all with Barbados.

It is perhaps no coincidence that all along his life, George Washington left North America just one time, for a voyage to Barbados in 1751. The central importance of plantations, the massive resort to slavery, the development of a local gentry of planters, possibly even the title of “President” for its ruler, are some of the distinctive features that the US owe to those far-away, today almost forgotten ties with Barbados.

But back to trade – what did Barbados give in exchange for the many goods it bought from the colonies? Barbados offered letters of credit, which were used to buy from England the commodities the colonies needed. It offered also slaves, sugar, molasses, which was used at the beginning as a cheap sweetener, and rum. As early as the middle of XVII century, when it was still unknown in England, the American colonists commonly drank rum. A lot of it. As well as drinking it, the colonists used rum as a trade commodity with the Indians, who loved it. They used it also as a currency. Money was chronically scarce in the colonies and the colonists largely relied on barter, but they needed something fit to be a reliable unity of measure of the value of the goods. And rum was perfect: it was always in large demand, easy to add and divide and relatively easy to transport; moreover it did not deteriorate with the time In short, rum was a sort of lubricant which oiled the wheels of American economic and social life. And of the political life too, as we will see in the next article.

Marco Pierini