Drink (20 page)

Samoset introduced the pilgrims to the neighboring tribes, parlays were arranged, and peace and harmony were agreed among them. At the most important of these meetings, with Massasoit, “the great king,” amity was sealed, in the English fashion, with a toast: “After salutations, our governor kissing his hand, the king kissed him, and so they sat down. The governor called for some strong water, and drunk to him, and he drunk a great draught that made him sweat all the while after; he called for a little fresh meat, which the king did eat willingly, and did give his followers. Then they treated of peace.”

The peace they made lasted twenty-four years, which in its time was something of a New World record, for both Europeans and Americans. During that period the colonists flourished. They were quickly self-sufficient in food, had furs and cod to trade, and their success laid to rest the ghosts of failure that had haunted England’s American endeavors. Among other matters, they were living proof that the English could drink water and enjoy good health. This latter achievement was a matter of pride, as is evident from a letter sent by Bradford to London in 1624, countering various slanders that had been published against
New England:

6TH OBJ.: The water is not wholesome.

ANS.: If they mean, not so wholesome as the good beer and wine in London (which they so dearly love) we will not dispute with them; but else for water it is as good as any in the world (for aught we know) and it is wholesome enough to us that can be content therewith.

Bradford’s claims were corroborated by amazed newcomers, one of whom commented in a letter home that that New England water drinkers were “as healthful, fresh, and lusty as they that drink beer.”

Fresh groups of pilgrims arrived in 1621, 1623, and 1629, and settled in and around the Plymouth Colony. By the time the last batch arrived, the original New Englanders were not only self-sufficient in food but produced a surplus of it, some of which was used to make alcoholic drinks. Although the colonists had discovered some merits in water, as soon as they could brew they did, using whatever fermentable material they could spare, as a ditty from the time reflects:

Imported liquor was available in addition to home brews. The pilgrims traded their surplus food with the cod fishing fleets to the north and the tobacco planters in Virginia to the south. The fisheries were one of the largest industries on either side of the Atlantic at the time, and possibly the most efficient. English fishing boats traveled to Newfoundland each spring, where they caught, cured, and loaded cod, which they sold for wine in Spain, Portugal, or their Atlantic island colonies. The wine was then either exchanged in England for trading goods for the settlers in Newfoundland, New England, and Virginia, or carried straight back to the American coast.

In consequence, there was plenty of booze sloshing around the colonies, as evidenced by a curious little settlement established close to Plymouth named Mount Wollaston. Its inhabitants consisted of a Captain Wollaston, Thomas Morton, and a number of indentured servants whom Wollaston hired out as laborers in Virginia for the tobacco harvest. In 1628, while the captain and his servants were absent, Morton turned the settlement into a Bacchic republic, much to the horror of his Puritan neighbors. According to Bradford, “Morton became Lord of Misrule and maintained, as it were, a School of Atheism. And after they had . . . got much by trading with the Indians, they spent it . . . in quaffing and drinking, both wine and strong waters in great excess. . . . They also set up a Maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies or furies . . . [and] revived and celebrated . . . the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians.”

The Maypole was an eighty-foot pine tree, topped off with a “pair of buckshorns.” A poem, composed by Morton, was nailed to its base, which renamed the little settlement
Ma-re Mount,
or Merrymount, and proclaimed that henceforth May Day was to be a holiday in the settlement. Morton also wrote a song, complete with the Bacchic ejaculation Io! for holidaymakers to sing as they danced around his pole:

In order to finance their merriment, Morton and his accomplices broke a colonial taboo by selling arms to the Native Americans for their furs. They received better value, and were on the edge of cornering the fur trade, when the other settlers in the area banded together and sent a force against them to bring them to their senses. The confrontation turned out comically. Morton had holed up in a fortified house on Merrymount and threatened to fight to the death. There followed a brief standoff, during which period he and his band became so drunk that they were incapable of fighting and gave up. The only blood shed in the entire event came from Morton, who wounded himself in the nose with his saber. He was sent back to England,
¹⁵
the Maypole was cut down, and the hill was rechristened Mount Dagon, after the god of the Philistines.

Morton was something of a maverick among emigrants. The majority left England in order to practice a particular style of Christianity, rather than to indulge in pagan revels. News of success in the New World traveled through underground conduits to their brethren at home and in exile in Holland, encouraging them to follow. In 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Company was chartered in London for the settlement of the eponymous area to the north of the Plymouth Colony, and English people flowed across the Atlantic to settle there in their hundreds, then their thousands. The first significant batch, under John Winthrop, arrived in Salem in June 1630 aboard the
Arbella
and ten other ships. The
Arbella,
in deference to contemporary prejudice, carried “42 tonnes of beere” (about ten thousand gallons) the same amount of wine, and only three thousand gallons of water. Her passengers—fearing, no doubt, a shortage of alcohol in Massachusetts— supplemented their rations with private caches. Winthrop recorded that a maidservant on board, because she was “stomach sick,” had “drank so much strong water, that she was senseless, and had near killed herself,” and commented, “We observed it a common fault in our young people that they gave themselves to drink hot waters very immoderately.”

By the time that Winthrop’s charges had settled down, New England was past the tipping point. A formula had been developed for self-perpetuation—someone might expect to emigrate and, within a few years, own land and make a profit from their work. With profit came progress, in the English sense, and the émigrés improved their new homeland with breweries and taverns. While brewing was under way by 1629, when John Smith claimed New England had two “brewhouses” that made “good ale, both strong and small” from Indian corn or barley, the first evidence of it occurring on a commercial scale dates to 1633, when a “furnace for brewinge” was shipped over from England. Thereafter, references to breweries come thick and fast, and much of their trade was wholesale. The absence of public drinking places, which had so disheartened the first pilgrims, had also been remedied. Inns, known as
ordinaries,
were constructed in most of the settlements in New England, and after 1634, every community was required by law to build one for “the receiving, refreshment, and entertainment of travelers and strangers, and to serve publick occasions.” Ordinaries were usually sited in the center of each settlement, alongside the meetinghouse and the stocks. They sold local brews, and imported wines and spirits, in standard measures. Their prices were fixed by law: “It is ordered that no person that keeps an ordinarie shall take above 6d a meal of a person, and not above 1d for an ale quart of beer.”

As breweries and ordinaries multiplied in number, so did drunkenness. The condition, pace Morton, seems to have been rare among settlers in the early years, and drunks were punished with fines, time in the stocks, or by naming and shaming. In 1633, for instance, Winthrop recorded in his journal that “Robert Cole, having been oft punished for drunkness, was now ordered to wear a red D about his neck for a year.” Public humiliation, however, as a “Presentment by ye Grand Jury” in Plymouth in 1637 attests, was not always a sufficient deterrent: “1. Wm. Renolds is presented for being drunck at Mr. Hopkins his house, that he lay under the table, vomiting in a beastly manner.”

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.”