Drink (23 page)

One particular group of rum drinkers did not, however, make it to a good old age. The Caribbean pirates, who flourished in the 1660s, and again in the seventeen-teens, made the new liquor a part of their freebooting identity. Sir Henry Morgan (d. 1688) was the best known and most successful example of the first period. Strictly speaking he was not a pirate but a privateer, licensed by King Charles II to fight Spaniards on his behalf and to pay himself from their treasure. Morgan established a base at Port Royal in Jamaica and launched a series of lucrative raids, notable for their brutality, against Spanish possessions in Cuba and Colombia. In 1670 he outdid himself by sacking Panama and burning it to the ground, just after peace had been declared between Spain and England. He was arrested and sent back to England on the frigate
Welcome,
where he was acquitted of piracy, knighted, and returned to Jamaica as its deputy governor. He drank himself to death and was buried in Port Royal, which was wiped off the map by an earthquake four years later. His name and likeness still grace a popular brand of West Indian rum.

The second wave of Caribbean pirates appeared in 1713 as a result of a cessation of hostilities between the various European nations that held islands in the West Indies. Peace created a pool of unemployed seamen, ex-prisoners of war, impressed convicts, and adventurers of every nationality, who took to pillaging minor settlements and merchant shipping. They operated in loose confederations and regulated affairs between themselves according to written
articles,
which were, for the age, models of democracy. They wrote the right to rum into such agreements, as the following extract from the Articles of Captain Roberts illustrates:

Perhaps the most iconic pirate from this second period was Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, and notorious for his cruelty, concupiscence, and drunkenness. This fiend cut an impressive figure. He was the “embodiment of impregnable wickedness, of reckless daring, a nightmarish villain so lacking in any human kindness that no crime was above him.” His eponymous facial hair was luxuriant, and he dressed it for battle with scarlet ribbons and illuminated it with burning matches behind his ears, “which appearing on each Side of his Face, his Eyes naturally looking fierce and wild, made him altogether such a Figure, that Imagination cannot form an Idea of a Fury, from Hell, to look more frightful.” Blackbeard lived up to his looks, as the following entry from his journal illustrates:

For a while, Blackbeard operated out of the Carolinas with the complicity of the colonial authorities, until a warrant for his capture, together with a handsome reward, was issued in Virginia by its governor, Alexander Spotswood. He and his crew were cornered in Okercok Inlet by a superior force, and the pirate died defiant: “
Black-beard
took a Glass of Liquor, and drank . . . with these words:
Damnation seize my Soul if I give you Quarters, or take any from you
.” He then stood his ground and fought “with great Fury, till he received five and twenty Wounds, and five of them by Shot.” He was beheaded after death, and his skull continued in service as a receptacle for alcohol. It was converted into a very large punch bowl, called The Infant, “which was used until 1903 as a drinking vessel at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg.” According to one account it bore a silver rim on which was engraved “Deth to Spotswoode.”

The Carolinas, where Blackbeard drank his last glass of liquor, were emblematic of the progress England’s colonies had made in the second half of the sixteenth century. Though none was a match for Barbados in terms of financial clout, they were all flourishing, and expanding in both population and number. The Virginia and the Massachusetts settlements had been joined by Maryland and Pennsylvania, the Dutch had been pushed out of New Amsterdam, which had been renamed New York, New Hampshire had been claimed and settled, and a “great port town” had been founded in Charleston in the Carolinas. Its first church, St. Philip Episcopal, was financed by a tax of two pence per gallon on rum and other imported spirits.

Rum had a considerable impact on the drinking habits and trading patterns of the American colonies. Its influence was greatest in New England, which became a mercantile nation in its own right as a consequence of the rum trade. One of the first New Englanders to sail down to Barbados had noted that its inhabitants were “so intent upon producing sugar that they had rather buy foods at very deare rates than produce it by labor.” The phrase
deare rates
was music to the New England soul. In return for rum, molasses, and sugar, the Massachusetts settlements sent fish, flour, and timber in their own boats. A ship-building industry evolved to service this trade, and its captains ranged far and wide in pursuit of profits. As African slaving grew in importance, they entered into the business—indeed they had been involved right from the start. In 1644, John Winthrop of Boston had shipped a cargo of wooden staves to the Cabo Verde Islands, where they were exchanged for slaves, who in turn were traded for sugar in Barbados.

New Englanders started slaving in earnest after it had been discovered that Caribbean rum commanded a premium in Africa. Their presence in the trade was made legitimate in 1689, when the monopoly that the Royal Africa Company held on English slave trading was terminated. Over the next quarter century “about one in seven English slave voyages began in the Americas rather than in England.” They loaded up with spirits for the outward journey—according to a current estimate, they carried 1.3 million gallons of them to Africa between 1680 and 1713, which they exchanged for approximately sixty thousand humans.

Africa was a seller’s market. Its countries dictated the terms of business on their coasts. With the exception of the Portuguese settlement in Angola, no European nation established more than a toehold on the west coast of the continent before the nineteenth century. Their few forts and trading posts were stationed on islands, such as the English depot at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, or on narrow, easily defensible peninsulas. Even these were insecure. Ships were regularly cut out, and Europeans were starved or massacred in their fortified settlements. Things had to be done the African way, or not at all. Africans were discriminating in their tastes in trade goods, and these changed from year to year. Their principal demand was for cloth, in very specific colors. The next most important item on their shopping list, more so than guns and gunpowder combined, was rum. It was no use turning up with the wrong goods and expecting to buy slaves. When, for instance, Captain George Scott of Newport arrived with a cargo of bonnets and ribbons, he found few takers, and confided to his diary: “I have repented a hundred times buying . . . dry goods. Had we laid out two thousand pound in rum, bread, and flour, it would have purchased more in value.”

Rum was in demand because, as had been observed by the Portuguese two centuries before, sub-Saharan Africa was populated by drinkers. These consumed alcohol for cultural as well as hedonistic purposes. Most religions in the region postulated life as a voyage undertaken by a soul from and back to the spirit world, and alcohol was thought to ease each soul through the difficult parts of its journey, especially conception, birth, puberty, and death. It was offered to spirits via libations—sprinkled over the foreheads of newborn infants, or on the earth covering a fresh grave. Among the Akan tribe of the Gold Coast, for instance, when a woman gave birth, “all the people— men, women, boys, and girls—come to her. . . . They give the child a name upon which they have agreed, and swear upon it with the Fetishes and other sorcery . . . on which occasion they make a big feast, with merry-making, food, and drink, which they love.” A similar tradition prevailed at burials: “As soon as the corpse is let down into the grave, the persons who attended the funeral drink palm wine, or rum plentifully out of oxes horns; and what they cannot drink off at a draught, they spill on the grave of their deceased friend, that he may have his share of the liquor.” The dead were provided with further drinks at annual ceremonies in their honor. The Akans, who venerated their ancestral stools as being sacred representations of the individuals who once had occupied them, exhibited these heirlooms on specific days every year and splashed them with alcohol. Drink was offered to deities as well as the departed. The serpent gods of Whydah were appeased with gifts of rum, by both native devotees and latterly by visiting slavers, in deference to custom.

Not only was alcohol a trade good in its own right, but it was also an essential
lubricant
of slave trafficking. Time and time again, European merchants found they could not do business without first making presents of rum or similar to local rulers or their representatives. According to a participant in the trade, the African slave seller “never cares to treat with dry Lips.” Once lips had been wetted and negotiations concluded, the newly bought slaves were led off to dungeons or holding pens, and thence to the waiting ships. One of them has left us an account of his feelings as he stepped on board in his shackles:

Some African customs relating to alcohol survived the journey over the Atlantic and took root in the Americas. Slaves on the Caribbean islands were given rum rations by their owners, and although these were meager by the standards of free people—only a gallon or two per head per annum—they managed to hoard some for traditional uses. They were also permitted patches of land on which to grow provisions, and could trade what they grew for drink if they so desired. It seems that when they bought alcohol, they did so to keep their native culture and sense of hospitality alive. Their dedication to these causes was commented on by J. B. du Tertre, a French missionary in the sugar island of Martinique: “I have seen one of our negroes slaughter five or six chickens in order to accommodate his friends, and spend extravagantly on three pints of rum in order to entertain five or six slaves of his country.” Du Tertre also noted that slaves celebrated the birth of their children with drinks and would sell “everything they own” to purchase rum for the occasion. They likewise hoarded alcohol to give the soul a proper sendoff on its journey back to the spirit world at death. In Jamaica, slaves buried their own kin with “a pot of soup at the head, and a bottle of rum at the feet.” An account of one such funeral shows the persistence of African perceptions of the worth of drink: “Taking a little of the rum or other liquors, they sprinkle it [on the grave], crying out in the same manner, ‘Here is a little rum to comfort your heart, good-bye to you, God bless you.’” The toast was returned, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, by the Dahomey nation of the slave coast, who chanted:

“The English must bring guns. The Portuguese must bring powder. The Spaniards must bring the small stones, which give fire to our fire-sticks. The Americans must bring cloth and the rum made by our kinsmen who are there, for these will permit us to smell their presence.”

It was as well that slaves preserved their own ideologies, for they were debarred from participating in the free drinking culture of the English colonies in continental America, where they were prohibited from entering taverns and ordinaries, lest their presence contradict the spirit of equality that was supposed to rule such places. In order to ensure their absence, tavern owners who served them were fined. While slaves were kept more or less dry, free colonists became increasingly bibulous during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Their drinking habits were not homogeneous—a north/ south divide was apparent in the kind of alcohol people consumed and in their respective tolerance of drunkenness.

In Virginia, the huge volume of shipping involved in the tobacco trade carried on its outward voyage a variety of British and continental beers, wines, and spirits to tempt the palates of the planters. The colony also imported Caribbean rum. A certain amount of brewing was carried out locally, but Virginian-made beer was reckoned by its inhabitants to be inferior. In 1666 its price was fixed at four shillings or forty pounds of tobacco per gallon, whereas the imported variety cost three times as much. Poor white Virginians made home brews from molasses, corn, potatoes, pumpkins, and Jerusalem artichokes, but otherwise the Virginians produced little alcohol of their own. They were nonetheless creative drinkers, famed for their penchant for combining different liquors to make a variety of flips, punches, and coolers, each of which was credited with special medicinal or stimulatory powers.

Virginia’s little sister, Maryland, had similar drinking habits. The emphasis, once again, was on imports. In 1663, it was reported that the Marylanders did not brew at all. As in Virginia, foreign brews were purchased with tobacco. Because of the scarcity of locally brewed beer, both Virginians and Marylanders drank proportionally more spirits than the colonies to the north, and this bias was also evident in the Carolinas. In all three places, there was little or no stigma attached to hard drinking. Each was characterized by small settlements, widely dispersed along rivers rather than roads, so that people gathered together less frequently, and when they visited each other, they vied in demonstration of
Southern
hospitality.