Drink (25 page)

This all-or-nothing attitude was also recorded by French missionaries in Canada. To the Indians, there was “only one sort of drunkenness worthwhile, the sort which they call
‘Gannontiouaratonseri,’
complete insobriety. And when they begin to feel the effects of the brandy they rejoice, shouting, ‘Good, good, my head is reeling.’” The tribespeople themselves acknowledged that alcohol was ruining them. A Delaware Valley Indian, speaking in 1685, lamented that “when we drink it, it makes us mad. . . . We do not know what we do, we abuse one another; we throw each other into the fire, Seven Score of our People have been killed, by reason of the drinking of it, since the time it was first sold [to] us.”

The problem was exacerbated by cultural factors. The Native Americans considered drunkenness to be an excuse for any crime— even murder: “A drunken man is a sacred person. According to them it is a state so delicious that it is permitted, even desirable, to arrive at; it is their paradise. Then one is not responsible for his acts.” Some observers accused Indians of taking advantage of this exemption, claiming that they got drunk “very often on purpose to have the privilege of satisfying old grudges.”

Despite the evident damage that alcohol, especially spirits, was causing to Native Americans, and despite colonial laws against selling it to them, they continued to receive it by the keg. Booze was as essentialto the fur trade as to slaving, and the fur trade was likewise a seller’s market. The English colonies and the French in Canada competed to buy pelts and found they had to offer rum or brandy in order to secure business. The issue was the subject of an exchange of letters in 1668 between a French official and Governor Dongan of New York. The Frenchman appealed to his rival, on the grounds of piety, to rein in the fur traders who sold liquor to Indians: “Think you, Sir, that Religion will progress whilst your merchants supply, as they do, Eau de Vie in abundance which converts the savages, as you ought to know, into Demons and their cabins into counterparts and theaters of Hell?” Governor Dongan’s parry-riposte made the issue one of liberty: “Certainly our Rum does as little hurt as your Brandy and in the opinion of Christians is much more wholesome: However, to keep the Indians temperate and sober is a very good and Christian thing, but to prohibit them all strong liquors seems a little hard.”

Commerce was more important than sobriety. When François de Montigny, bishop of Quebec, intervened on the Indians’ behalf in 1660 and excommunicated a pair of traders who sold spirits to them, he set off a power struggle with the civil authorities, who insisted that if traders could not offer brandy to Indians there would be no trade at all. The bishop responded with further excommunications in 1662, and in 1668 went one step further by declaring that all brandy sellers were mortal sinners. In the event, pragmatism triumphed over dogma and sales continued.

As the eighteenth century progressed and the Europeans entered into more or less continuous treaty negotiations with various tribes, it became a tradition to offer alcohol as a gift or sweetener, so that in many cases the officials of colonies that prohibited the sale of drinks to Indians broke their own laws when attempting to enlarge their territories. Benjamin Franklin has left a picture of one such encounter— the negotiations held with the Delaware tribe at Carlisle in 1753—which illustrates, with a certain black humor, the double standards of the age. The Indians were told “if they would continue sober during the Treaty, we would give them Plenty of Rum when Business was over.” The colonials kept their word, and once negotiations had ended, the Indians set to painting the town red: “They had all made a great Bonfire in the Middle of the Square. They were all drunk Men and Women, quarrelling and fighting. Their dark colour’d Bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy Light of the Bonfire, running after and beating one another with Firebrands, accompanied by their horrid Yellings, form’d a scene the most resembling our Ideas of Hell that could well be imagined.” The Indians sent a delegation of elders to apologize the next day, who also offered an explanation for their behavior, as follows: “The Great spirit who made all things made every thing for some Use, and whatever Use he design’d any thing for, that Use it should always be put to; Now, when he made Rum, he said, LET THIS BE FOR INDIANS TO GET DRUNK WITH. And it must be so.”

13 GIN FEVER

The Native American obsession with self-destructive drinking was considered by Europeans to be a significant point of difference between their respective cultures. It was unthinkable that white Christians could surrender en masse to the same style of inebriation. However, the unthinkable happened in London in the first half of the eighteenth century, when a significant percentage of its population took to drunkenness with an abandon that would have made the most fanatical Native American inebriate wince in shame.

In 1700, with 575,000 inhabitants, London was the largest metropolis in Europe. It was an amalgamation of two cities: London itself, the commercial capital comprising the square mile within the Roman walls, and Westminster, where the court and Parliament were based. The space in between was built over gradually, creating both slums and elegant squares. Affluence and poverty existed side by side in London, especially in its West End, where real estate was booming and mansions and tenements were being thrown up in the few remaining fields. The wealthy found themselves neighbors to laborers: “A Tallow Chandler shall front my Lord’s nice
Venetian Window;
and two or three naked Curriers [leather dressers] in their pits shall face a fine lady in her back closet, and disturb her spiritual thoughts.”

London was not just the largest, but probably also the most exciting city in the West. It sent ships to India, Finland, Zanzibar, Canada, New England, and the Caribbean, some for commodities, others for luxury goods. It was packed with places to drink, including pleasure gardens, theaters, and its traditional inns, alehouses, and taverns. The Tabard, from which Chaucer had launched his pilgrims, still brewed ale and rented rooms; the Boar’s Head, the favorite of Falstaff, still sold sack in Eastcheap. Such now-venerable institutions were augmented by a host of new hostelries, for the collective thirsts of Londoners seemed unquenchable. Beer had overtaken ale as the people’s choice, and the average English man, woman, and child got through seventy-five gallons of it each year.

The British prided themselves on their drinking. John Bull was born in 1712 from the pen of John Arbuthnot, and a penchant for inebriation was a part of his and the national character. Foreigners marveled at their consumption. A Swiss traveler wrote home: “Would you believe it, though water is to be had in abundance in London, and of fairly good quality, absolutely none is drunk? The lower classes, even the paupers, do not know what it is to quench their thirst with water. In this country nothing but beer is drunk. . . . It is said that more grain is consumed in England for making beer than for making bread.” The same correspondent also listed the kinds of brew that Londoners drank, which ranged from small beer at a penny a pot, to a new brew named porter, which was a “thick and strong beverage” as potent as wine, and cost threepence the pot.

This passion for alcohol was lampooned in
The Spectator,
a daily newspaper founded in 1711 and dedicated to “merriment with decency,” which chronicled contemporary manners and foibles in its pages. It documented the drinking preferences of various social classes in a series of articles on English clubs. Londoners rich and lowly were forming convivial associations—aristocrats and intellectuals patronized the Beefsteak and the Kit Cat; the Freemasons were a growing force among tradesmen. The
Spectator
added a few of its own invention, including the
Everlasting Club,
whose hundred members organized a duty rota so that the club was open for drinking 24/7, 365 days per annum. “By this means a Member of the Everlasting Club never wants Company; for tho’ he is not upon Duty himself, he is sure to find some who are; so that if he be disposed to take a Whet, a Nooning, an Evening’s Draught, or a Bottle after Midnight, he goes to the Club and finds a Knot of Friends to his Mind.” Over the century that the Everlasting was supposed to have been in existence, its members had “smoked fifty Tun of Tobacco; drank thirty thousand Butts of Ale, One thousand Hogsheads of Red Port, Two hundred Barrels of Brandy, and a Kilderkin of small Beer.”

Both British and foreign perceptions of their drinking habits were that they drank hard but could hold their liquor, and that drunkenness, though common, was a benign or comical condition. However, this bibulous idyll of clubs and alehouses, of red noses and good cheer, was wrecked in the 1720s by the appearance of a new kind of reckless and nihilistic drinking, centered on the consumption of
gin
. Gin was the English name for Dutch
Genever,
a distilled spirit flavored with juniper, which had been perfected in Holland around 1650 and introduced to England after the Glorious Revolution (1688), when William of Orange was placed on the throne and the Catholic James II ousted.

England had a glut of grain at the time—prices had collapsed after a series of plentiful harvests, to the detriment of England’s landowners. Since these comprised the voting class, and new King William owed his throne to them, measures were necessary to prop up their incomes. William had witnessed the phenomenal demand Genever could create for grain in his native Holland and hoped the same might occur in his new kingdom. An “Act for the Encouraging of the Distillation of Brandy and Spirits from Corn”
²¹
was passed, which allowed anyone in England to distil alcohol using English cereals, upon ten day’s notice to HM Excise and payment of a small fee.

The act was a great success, and stills sprang up all over the country. In 1710, the London Company of Distillers issued a celebratory pamphlet, which declared that “the Making of [spirits] from Malted Corn and other Materials, hath greatly increased, and been of service to the Publick, in regard to her Majesty’s Revenue, and the Landed Interest of Great Britain.” Not only did the new appetite for gin support the general price of corn, it also utilized the damaged grain that bakers and brewers would not buy, thus increasing farmers’ and landowners’ returns. This useful function encouraged Parliament in 1713 to make explicit the freedom of absolutely anyone to produce spirits: “Any person may distil . . . spirits from British Malt.” All sorts of people tried their hands, using facilities ranging from purpose-built copper stills to converted washtubs. Among them they produced a torrent of gin, which was sold from shops, houses, the crypts of churches and inside prisons, from kiosks, boats, wheelbarrows, baskets and bottles, and from stalls at public executions. In the London parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, whose fields were now slums, one house in every five retailed gin. Most of it was offered by the
dram,
or quarter pint. It was generally drunk neat and often downed in one. Gin was a cheap, and above all a quick, way of getting drunk. Why work your way through porter at three pence a pot when the same money would buy a pint of gin?

In 1700, the average English adult drank a third of a gallon of gin per annum. By 1723, statistics suggested that every man, woman, and child in London knocked back more than a pint of gin per head per week. This alarmingly high level of consumption generated shocking levels of drunkenness in the capital. Liquor shops were all over town:

The problem was aggravated by the squalid living conditions in the slums. Tenement houses were packed from their cellars to their rafters. People dossed down ten to a room, and the only recreation or relief they could afford was drinking gin. A rare account from 1725 of why working women drank is a poignant reminder of how raw London was: “We market women are up early and late, and work hard for what we have,” and “if it were not for something to clear the spirits between whiles, and keep out the wet and cold; alackaday! It would never do! We should never be able to . . . keep body and soul together.”

The first critics of the
gin craze,
as it came to be known, were the brewers. Despite their new wonder product—porter—they were losing business to gin vendors. In 1726 they sponsored the publication of a satirical pamphlet—
The Tavern Scuffle.
The scuffle of the title was between
Swell-Gut,
a brewer, and
Scorch-Gut,
a gin distiller, who, according to his opponent, was “Scorch Gut by nature; for that his damn’d devil’s piss burnt out the entrails of three-fourth’s of the King’s subjects.” Such low blows on gin were countered with reminders from distillers that “the Landed Gentleman must be sensible the distillers work for him, since the distilling trade in and about London only, consumes about 200,000 quarters of corn, and that corn necessarily employs 100,000 acres of land.”

Notwithstanding the good news for landowners, all the gin sloshing around London was being linked to a rising crime rate. Britain was an unstable place during the decades when gin drinking was on the rise. There were pretenders to the throne; politics were fiercely bipartisan: The Whigs and the Tories were equally corrupt when in power and equally virulent when in opposition. Religious dissent was on the rise; there had been civil war in the north in 1715 when James Stuart, son of the ousted Catholic king, tried to regain his father’s kingdom; and England was at war on the continent between 1702 and 1713. The country was thronged with displaced and discontented people who gravitated toward London.