The Curious Bartender's Rum Revolution E-Book

Tristan Stephenson

• Herausgeber: Ryland Peters & Small
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Discover why rum is becoming the hottest spirit in the world right now with the latest and greatest offering from bestselling author and master mixologist Tristan Stephenson.

Leseprobe

THE CURIOUS

BARTENDER’S

RUMREVOLUTION

THE CURIOUS

BARTENDER’S

RUMREVOLUTION

TRISTAN STEPHENSON

Designer Geoff Borin

Commissioning Editor Nathan Joyce

Head of Production Patricia Harrington

Picture Manager Christina Borsi

Art Director Leslie Harrington

Editorial Director Julia Charles

Publisher Cindy Richards

Prop Stylist Sarianne Plaisant

Indexer Vanessa Bird

First published in 2017 by

Ryland Peters & Small

20–21 Jockey’s Fields

London WC1R 4BW

and

341 E 116th St

New York NY 10029

www.rylandpeters.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Text © Tristan Stephenson 2017

Design and photographs © Ryland Peters & Small 2017 (see page 256 for full credits)

The author’s moral rights have been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-84975-823-9

eISBN: 978-1-78879-007-9

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

US Library of Congress CIP data has been applied for.

Printed in China

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART ONE THE HISTORY OF RUM

PART TWO HOW RUM IS MADE

PART THREE THE RUM TOUR

PART FOUR RUM COCKTAILS

Glossary of Distilleries

Glossarys

Index

Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

Introduction

It was with equal parts of excitement and expectation that I embarked upon writing this book, the fifth in the series, and by far the most ambitious. Why? Because this is rum, of course, the most diverse, contentious and fascinating of all the world’s drinks… not to mention the most geographically dispersed!

As such, my journey has taken me across over 20 countries and dozens of islands. I’ve travelled to distilleries on horseback across active volcanoes, through rivers in a 4x4 and around tiny islets by boat. The lingering taste of rum has coated my mouth as I watched the sun set over the Amazon, and as the sun rose on the Virgin Islands. Rum made me dance the salsa in Cuba, drink all night with locals in Barbados and swim in the sea at dawn in Martinique. I’ve bought rum for $10 a gallon and $100 a shot. I’ve met people who depend on rum for the livelihood of their families, and have encountered islands that depend on rum for the livelihood of their communities. Is there another drink that offers such a taste of the human world?

Of course, this was never rum’s intention. Rum is a spirit that has soaked into the history books and is bound to the places that make it. When we talk about terroir in wine and spirits, we refer to the impact of climate and geography on the taste of a drink. Rum’s terroir is its past, and the flavour of many of the rums we drink today are an echo of island history more than they are the intentional formation of taste and aroma compounds. Rum does not need to be aged in cask to taste old – it is a multi-sensory mouthful of an era of discovery, conquest, colonization, exploitation and trade.

But rum is more than just a quaint artefact of history’s tectonic shifts. On many occasions, rum was there, making the history. Rum was the fire in the bellies of armies and navies, and the shackles that bound generations of slaves. It gave cause to revolutions: on plantations and across nations. It helped to establish global trade networks, kept the weak in bondage and turned rich men into gods.

In the 21st century, we are still living in the aftermath of the colonial era, and as rum struggles to find its place in the world, we need to remember these things more than ever. Rum is a rich tapestry of styles, and each island or national style is an intricate cultural pattern, described by tradition, technology and trade.

This means that rum style varies a lot. For better or for worse, “rum” is a loose category, vaguely strung around sugarcane and the 50-or-so countries that currently make it – bad news if you’re looking for a neat summary; good news if you like being surprised and enjoy exploring new flavours.

I believe there’s something for everyone in this spirit. Drunk neat, rum is a marvel. In mixed drinks, it is magical. Virtually any cocktail will willingly have its base spirit substituted for (the right) rum, but the stable of classics in this category speak for themselves: Daiquiri, Mojito, Piña Colada and Mai Tai to name but a few.

So let’s go to the Caribbean and to some of the most beautiful places on earth. It won’t always be pretty though as rum is far from a picture postcard. This is raw spirit – a spirit with real character. A free spirit, you might say.

PART ONE THE HISTORY OF RUM

HUMBLE ORIGINS

While it’s likely – but by no means certain – that rum and sugarcane spirits originated in the Americas, the same cannot be said for the cane itself. Sugarcane, a fast-growing species of grass, is the base material from which all rums are made, whether it’s in the form of the juice of the plant itself, the concentrated syrup made from the juice, or the molasses – the dark brown gloop that is leftover when you crystallize sugar out of the juice.

Over half of all the countries in the world grow sugarcane today, but 10,000 years ago you would have needed to travel to the island of New Guinea in the South Pacific to find any. We know that sugarcane is indigenous to the island, thanks to a unique ecosystem that exists there, of which sugarcane is a key component. Sugarcane is the sole source of food for the New Guinea cane weevil, a native species of beetle that bores into the cane stem and munches through the sweet fibrous interior. Also a resident of New Guinea is a type of tachinid fly that parasitizes the cane weevil with its larvae. The fly is dependent on the beetle for survival and the beetle is reliant on the sugarcane. For such a fruitful piece of symbiosis to have developed between the two insects, it is likely that sugarcane must have been growing on New Guinea since the last ice age.

For early indigenous communities of New Guinea, known as the Papuans, the sugarcane offered an abundance of calories in the simplest possible form of energy: sugar. Early human settlers gnawed on the rough stem of cane, before developing tools to extract the juice, either with a couple of rocks, or with a pestle and mortar. The juice of the cane offered a nice, instant hit of energy, but the high sugar content that made it so desirable was also one of its major drawbacks. When combined with the tropical environment, the juice was prone to fermenting within a matter of days. The answer was to boil the juice down into a kind of honey, or to heat it until dark brown sugar crystals formed on the sides of the pan.

It has been theorised that sugarcane was first domesticated as a crop in New Guinea around 6000BC.

Of the hundreds of heirloom varieties of cane that grow wildly in New Guinea, only the sweetest, Saccharum officinarum, also known as Creole cane, was selected for cultivation. It was transported west to Indonesia, the Philippines and mainland Asia, and east to Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii and Easter Island.

Sugarcane was widely cultivated in India too, which was something Persian Emperor Darius I discovered when he invaded in 510BC. When Alexander the Great arrived in India in 325BC, one of his generals was in awe of the plant that could “bring forth honey without the help of bees, from which an intoxicating drink can be made.” Later, around the second century AD, the first recorded sugar mill was built in India and scholars documented how to manage a cane plantation. Sugarcane infiltrated Indian society on many levels; it was used medicinally for humans and as food for elephants, and the juice was fermented into wine known as gaudi or sidhu. It also became a symbol used in Hindu and Buddhist faiths. It’s also India that we must thank for the word “sugar”, which is thought to be derived from the Prakrit word sakkara, meaning sand or gravel.

Sugarcane is still consumed by many modern-day Papuans, and for a few it forms a key component of their diet.

Sugar was extremely rare in northern Europe until the 11th century, when Christian crusaders brought the sweet tasting spice back with them from the Holy Lands.

SUGAR ARRIVES IN EUROPE

Having conquered India and infiltrated China and Japan, in around 600AD, cane was transported west, to Persia. The timing was exquisite, as the rise of the Islamic faith would soon serve as a vehicle for sugar’s journey further westward to Europe.

The Arabs were a well-organised and technologically impressive bunch. The vast scale of their rapidly growing empire meant that trade between regions was fluid. Their agricultural prowess and advanced water management systems allowed plantations to flourish like never before. By the turn of the eighth century AD, the Umayyad Empire stretched from Pakistan to Portugal and all along the north of Africa. Sugarcane was grown on the banks of the River Nile, and was cultivated by the Moors on Sicily, Malta and southern Spain. The island of Cyprus became a vivid green Arab sugar garden. One Italian traveller wrote of Cyprus in the 15th century that “the abundance of the sugarcane and its magnificence are beyond words.”

Arabic physicians used sugar in a variety of medicinal preparations, such as shurba (sherbet), which back then was sweet hot water taken as medicine; rubb, a preserve of fruits in sugar; and gulab, a rose-scented sweet tea.

Those who were committed to the Islamic faith abstained from drinking, so fermented cane juice was off the table. There is no evidence that the Arabs or the Moors ever distilled fermented cane products either, but given that it was the Moors, who introduced distillation to Europe by way of Italy, and considering the freedom of access to sugar products that these people enjoyed, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to speculate that the experiments of an Islamic alchemist might have resulted in the world’s first proto-rum.

The earliest types of commercial Indian sugar mills were effectively giant garlic presses. The extracted juice flowed out of the crucible into a receiving vessel.

Northern Europe would have to wait until the Crusades before they got their first real taste of sugar. Crusaders brought sugar back to England from the Holy Lands, and by 1243 the Royal Household of Edward I was getting through nearly 3,000 kg (6,600 lbs) of sugar in a single year. At that time in Europe, sugar was regarded as a spice, valued as highly as vanilla or saffron today. A 1-kg (2.2-lbs) bag of sugar would have set you back the equivalent of £100 ($125) in today’s money. Reserved only for those with sufficiently deep pockets, sugar was used by the wealthy as an extravagant signifier of status, added even to savoury dishes just because, well… why not? The hunger for sweetness was not limited to the upper classes, though. The compulsion for sugar was universal, and the human brain was wired to want it.

As European powers clambered to reclaim lands from the Moors, they discovered areas dedicated to growing sugarcane. Learning the secrets of cane cultivation, they planted more wherever it would grow. But besides the most southerly islands, Europe was not particularly well suited to growing sugarcane. Winters were too cold and the rainfall was insufficient. Rhodes, Crete, Cyprus, and Malta operated plantations under Christian rule, and the cane was shipped to Venice for refinement into sugar.

The early 15th century saw Portugal conducting increasingly adventurous voyages along the west coast of Africa. In 1421 the island of Madeira was sighted by sailors passing by the west coast of Morocco. This island, which would prove to be a vital step (both physically and commercially) toward the colonial plantation system, was very well suited to sugarcane cultivation. The first shipments of sugar arrived in Bristol, England in 1456, and 50 years later, Madeira was producing 1,800 tons (2,015 US tons) of sugar a year: equivalent to around half of all the sugar consumed in Europe at that time.

Another crucial development in the story of sugar and of rum occurred at around the same time. In 1444 the first boatload of 235 slaves was shipped out of Lagos by the Portuguese. A cheap workforce would prove to be an essential component of plantation economics, and these were the first of millions of African slaves whose lives would be lost to sugar.

NEW WORLD ORDER

Christopher Columbus’s historic first voyage of 1492, after securing the support of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, was intended to plot new trade routes with the East Indies. The Spanish had been slower at entering the spice and silk trade than the Dutch or English, owing to the protracted Reconquista of the Iberian peninsular from its Muslim occupants.

Columbus proposed a radical shortcut to the east (by heading to the west) and with it presented the opportunity to gain a competitive edge over rival European powers in the hunt for gold, silk, pepper, cloves and ginger.

“I know you’ve been getting along fine without us Europeans, but it’s time for a change around here. Now – tell me where the gold is”.

On the first voyage, the trade winds propelled the navigator across the Atlantic in five weeks, first sighting land at San Salvador in the Bahamas (which Columbus was convinced was Japan), then Cuba (which he thought was China) and then Hispaniola. The island of Hispaniola – now shared between Haiti and the Dominican Republic – was of particular interest to Columbus because he believed a wealth of gold lay hidden there. He encountered the friendly indigenous Taíno people and wrote about them in his letters to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Columbus received small gifts of gold and pearls from the Taíno, and even left a party of 39 men behind to establish a small colony.

Upon his return to Spain, Columbus was welcomed as a hero. He presented the Spanish monarchs with tobacco, pineapples, a turkey, and a hammock, all of which were previously unknown to European culture. On his second voyage in 1493 Columbus returned to Hispaniola, this time with a fleet of 17 ships, 1,200 men and 1,500 sugarcane shoots.

Many history books include accounts of Columbus and his son Ferdinand, who oversaw the planting of sugarcane on Hispaniola on the second voyage. Columbus’s father-in-law was a sugar planter on Madeira and Columbus was no doubt aware of the crop’s value in Europe. He was a man driven by greed as much as he was adventure, and in the back of his mind was a promise from the Spanish crown of a 10% share of all profits generated by newly established colonies. But according to Fernando Campoamor in his landmark 1985 book El Hijo Alegre de la Cana de Azúcar, the explorer was unable to conduct the cultivation experiments he intended because the delicate plants did not survive the sea crossing. What is certain is that seven years later, in 1500, Pedro di Atienza successfully transported and planted sugarcane seedlings on Hispaniola. It was probably only then that the early settlers discovered that sugarcane flourished in the tropical Caribbean climate.

Gold, on the other hand, remained elusive. So too did the promised spices and silk. These lands were not the East Indies after all, although the likes of Christopher Columbus would go to their death beds still believing it so. The absence of any immediate value is one of the reasons that the Spanish defended the Caribbean so poorly over the 100 years that followed, instead directing their attentions to the precious metals that Central America offered. This allowed the Dutch, English and French to swoop in and pick up their share of the island booty. The Europeans realised the potential of sugarcane. Consequently, the plantation system and the sugar-refining industry, rather than the harvesting of spices and silk production, were destined to shape the economy and society of the West Indies and Brazil.

The method for making sugar in the Caribbean remained almost unchanged for over three centuries.

As the sea spray settled on the shores of the Caribbean region, it must have seemed a place of enormous agricultural potential to the European settlers: fertile lands, clear waters, year-round sunshine, and a trusting native populace just waiting to be put to task – there was a problem with that, however.

Within the space of a single generation the indigenous Carib, Warao and Arawak people who occupied most of the Caribbean islands were almost entirely eradicated. As colonies expanded, tens of thousands melted away panning for gold in rivers, in fruitless mining operations, or on plantations, and those who resisted slavery were slaughtered by European forces (mostly Spanish) who possessed superior weaponry and a greater knowledge of how to use it. Many, it seems were executed under orders from Christopher Columbus himself. The biggest killer of all, however, was disease. Measles, mumps and smallpox plagued the indigenous populace, who lacked the antibodies and medicine to combat European viruses effectively. The Dominican Friar Bartolomé de las Casas wrote that when he arrived in Hispaniola in 1508, “there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery and the mines.” He added: “Who in future generations will believe this?”

FAST-GROWING GRASS

In the early 1500s, the Portuguese established the first sugar plantations in South America. They were in the states of Bahia and Pernambuco, on Brazil’s moist eastern coastline. The grass flourished, and by 1550 there were five sugar refineries in Brazil, and the Portuguese were shipping sugarcane presses and vats over from Europe to aid the pursuit. But compared to other tropical commodities, like cotton or tobacco, sugarcane was a much tougher beast to manage. A sugar planter needed a superior understanding of agricultural practices, factory management skills, the ability to deal with agricultural diseases, a huge supply of water and enough money to bankroll the whole operation as lands were cleared and crops planted. But more than anything, a planter needed a cheap and plentiful labour force. Brazilian natives were hunted down for this purpose in expeditions called bandeiras. Once captured, these men and women were put to task, but as was the case in Hispaniola, they quickly succumbed to diseases. A bigger, more dependable workforce was needed, and fortunately for Portugal, they had access to one.

The West African slave trade had been held in state of near monopoly by the Portuguese since the 1440s, so the next logical step was to connect the dots between their trading outpost in Elmina (on Africa’s Gold Coast) and their developing colonies in the Americas.

Prior to earning his title as “Protector of the Indians”, Bartolomé de las Casas participated in slave raids and military expeditions against the native Taíno population of Hispaniola.

That “Middle Passage”, as it is known, was sailed for the first time by Portuguese mariners in 1510. These sailors brought black slaves with them and recorded their presence on the ship’s manifest. Thousands more slaves followed over the next 378 years.

The “first in, last out” approach was a consistent theme in the history of slavery. Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico were all early adopters of African slaves and among the most reluctant to give it up (some would argue that the Dominican Republic still hasn’t - see pages 91–92) and they too required the manpower to manage their extensive sugarcane plantations. Spain’s obsession with gold had spread their empire thinly across the Central American belt. With the Spanish weakened by the endeavour, the British, Dutch and French made it their business to harass both their ships and settlements persistently through the unofficial employment of bucaneros and privateers (see pages 23–24). Naturally the mercantilist Spanish were none too keen for their colonies to trade with rival nations, and these embargoes stunted the growth of the Spanish sugarcane industry to the point where the crop didn’t become dominant on any of their occupied islands until the 19th century.

Back to the 17th century, and sugar production in Brazil was showing no signs of abating. This was partly thanks to the Dutch West India Company, which had seized the colonial territory of Pernambuco from the Portuguese in 1630 and began rampantly planting more cane. Ten years later, the Dutch began shipping slaves from equatorial Africa, which became a critical juncture in the establishment of further Dutch plantations, as well as securing sugar’s position in the infamous triangular trade (see pages 20–21). In 1612, the total production of sugar in Brazil had reached 14,000 tons (15,400 US tons). But by the 1640s, Pernambuco alone had 350 refineries, exporting more than 24,000 tons (26,500 US tons) of sugar annually to Amsterdam.

Despite being the largest Caribbean island, the scale of sugar production on Cuba didn’t truly ramp up until the late 19th century.

Sugar was becoming difficult to ignore as a New World commodity as demand for sugar in Europe continued to rise. It was around this time that the British and French Caribbean took a greater interest in sugarcane cultivation. The British established a settlement on Barbados in 1627 and the French followed suit on Martinique in 1635. The first plantations on these islands were used to grow cotton and tobacco, or fustic wood and indigo (both used in the manufacturing of dyes). Early settlers persevered with these crops for the better part of two centuries, but in the 1640s, there was a rapid shift towards sugarcane. This came about after the Portuguese recaptured Pernambuco from the Dutch West India Company, who immediately sought to establish trading opportunities in the Caribbean.

And so it was that Dutch traders sailed north. Spilling into the Caribbean, they presented the English and French a complete commercial and logistical solution for sugarcane, along with a century’s worth of combined practical know-how of how to run a plantation. The seed was planted, and once established the sugar production in the Caribbean increased at a furious rate. Barbados’s sugarcane production grew from 7,000 (7,700 US tons) to 12,000 tons (13,200 US tons) in the second half of the 17th century, while on Guadeloupe, exports grew from 2,000 tons (2,200 US tons) in 1674 to 10,000 tons (11,000 US tons) in the space of 25 years.

In Brazil, on the other hand, large-scale sugar production was relentless from the late 16th century onwards.

Over the next 100 years, sugar would become the most valuable trading commodity in the world; it became very much the oil of its day. But more than just a commodity, sugar production provided one of the original means and motivations for European expansion, colonization and control in the New World, precipitating a course of events that would forever shape the destiny of the Western Hemisphere.

RUM’S SLOW BIRTH

By the middle of the 17th century, sugar was being grown on most of the islands of the Caribbean, and it was during this period that the first British and French rums were distilled. Exactly where and when this happened is a matter that we shall debate shortly, but one thing that we can be sure of is that rum was not the first alcoholic beverage enjoyed by New World booze hounds.

Richard Ligon, an English colonist who lived in Barbados between 1647 and 1650, gives us one of the best insights about life on the island during its early English colonization. In his book A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, he wrote, “The first [drink], and that which is most used in the Island, is Mobbie, a drink made of potatoes.” Mobbie was a kind of potato beer, produced using a variety of fermented red (sweet) potatoes known to the native Caribs as mâ’bi. It was the job of the women to boil the potatoes and mash them up, then add them to large earthenware vessels along with water, molasses and spices, such as ginger. The mixture would then naturally ferment over a period of a few days and your efforts would be rewarded with a kind of spiced potato beer.

Similar drinks to this were made from the crop cassava. Known as oüicou in the Carib language, in Barbados cassava wine was called parranow or perino. According to Ligon, its taste was comparable to “the finest English beer”. Many Carib women wound up toothless after a lifetime’s oüicou-making, which involved chewing on a mouthful of grated cassava, then spitting it into a calabash (a container formed from the shell of a gourd-like fruit) filled with water and more cassava. The enzymes in the women’s saliva converted the starches into fermentable sugars and airborne yeast took care of alcohol production. The acid in the raw cassava was responsible for the tooth decay.

A 17th-century woodcut print depicts the “personal involvement” of manufacturing cassava wine on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.

Other wines and beers were enjoyed too, produced from the fermentation of plantain, bananas, plums, oranges, limes, wild grapes and tamarind. Pineapple wine – which even on paper sounds delicious – got a thumbs up from Ligon, with the ever-enthusiastic colonist describing it as “the Nectar which the Gods drunk”. The French missionary Père Labat also remarked on the “extremely agreeable” taste of pineapple wine.

Delicious as some of these drinks may have been, there is no evidence to suggest that any of them were ever distilled into strong spirits, and there’s a very good reason for that. At the turn of the 17th century, distillation in Europe was seldom practised by anyone other than physicians who were generally trying to uncover the next big medicinal cure-all or the secret to eternal life. But strong alcohol was about to enter a transitional phase that would see it graduate from the medicine cabinet to the bar room.

Distillation was introduced to Europe by the Moors in the 11th century – yes, the same people that brought sugarcane to the Europeans’ attention – after which it was documented by scholars at the earliest recorded medical school in Salerno, southern Italy, before migrating north to Antwerp, Amsterdam, and other places that didn’t necessarily start with an ‘A’. The precursor to whisky, aqua vitae (“water of life”), had found its way to Ireland and Scotland by the middle of the 15th century, where it was renamed in the Gaelic language uisge beatha. Meanwhile, the Dutch, who were among the earliest practitioners of distillation in Europe, were experimenting with brandewijn (“burnt wine”): a grape-based spirit that would later be known as “brandy”.

Critical to a distillation operation was the still itself, which would heat the fermented beer or wine, evaporating the alcohol (which has a lower boiling point than water) and condense it into a crystal clear concentrate. In Europe, the first commercial distilleries were purpose-built to manufacture genever, whisky and brandy. In the Caribbean, they came about as supplementary operations to a sugar refinery. The oldest pot stills were generally under 450 litres (100 US gallons) in size and made from hammered copper. Brazil was ground zero for distillation in the Americas, probably receiving stills by way of Madeira, and it was most likely sugarcane that was used as the base material for their experiments. In 1533, when sugar mills were established at São Jorge dos Erasmos, Madre de Deus, and São João, the planters also installed copper alembic stills to produce aguardiente de caña (“fire water of cane”), which is the earliest example of the spirit that would later be known as cachaça. The ruins of Brazil’s first cachaça distillery at São Jorge dos Erasmos have been excavated recently by archaeologists and designated as a historical site. In fact, the uptake of distillation in Brazil was so frenzied that, according to some historical accounts, Brazil had 192 distilleries in 1585, and that number was set to double by 1630.

Unlike this large 19th-century distillery, the first Caribbean rum plants were merely addenda to sugar mills.

For close to 100 years, Brazil remained the only place in the Americas producing cane spirits. As inconceivable as this may seem, it’s a solid depiction of the extreme isolation that the earliest New World colonies experienced, and the poor exchange of knowledge that came as a result. This was the dawn of globalization, but it was also a time where journeys took weeks not hours and the dissemination of knowledge took decades.

The British and French had a fairly good excuse of course – they weren’t farming sugarcane during this period – but the Spanish? The Spanish Empire were operating sizeable sugarcane plantations in Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, as far back as the 1550s. There’s no record of distillation in any Spanish colonies until the 1640s, however, which more than anything is indicative of the Spanish Empire’s isolationist approach to global domination.

Prior to the invention of the vacuum pan, sugar was made by ladling boiling juice between successively smaller pans.

The rise of Caribbean rum ultimately came as a result of that most dependable of all ocean trading people, the Dutch. Holland dominated international commerce in the 17th century – their East and West Indies Trading Corporations arguably became the world’s first mega corporations. This was a nation that wasn’t motivated by discovering gold, or by a desire to convert the godless natives to Christianity. The Dutch were capitalists, driven by the commercial opportunity and saleable commodities like coffee, spices and sugarcane. Sugar’s exit route from Brazil came via the Dutch, who, when forced to relinquish Dutch Brazil in the 1640s (see page 15), required immediate action to keep their sugar empire running. It would be the Dutch who would later supply most of the copper stills in the Caribbean, too.

In 1644, a Dutchman by the name of Benjamin Da Costa brought sugar refining equipment to Martinique and it’s possible that he brought alembic stills with him too. It’s also possible that they were already there, as a manuscript from 1640 (when the colony was only five years old) states that the slaves were drinking a “strong eau de vie that they call brusle ventre [stomach burner].” Since it’s unlikely that slaves would have access to imported brandy, one would have to assume that this brusle ventre was distilled from a locally grown source of fermentable sugar – and yes, it was probably sugarcane.

In Barbados, however, it seems that distillation might have preceded the full-scale arrival of sugarcane to the island. Sir Henry Colt, a British traveller, visited the four-year-old colony of Barbados in 1631, when there were scarcely more than a few hundred inhabitants on the island. Colt reported that the people were “devourers upp of hott [sic] waters and such good distillers thereof.” Whether these spirits were made from cane or some other vegetable or fruit remains a mystery, but five years later, the Dutch émigré Pietr Blower brought distillery equipment to Barbados from Brazil. This was a crucial step in the development of rum, as it is alleged that Blower was the man who introduced the concept of distilling spirits from waste from the sugar-refining process, rather than valuable cane juice.

For centuries, sugar refineries had been converting sugarcane juice into sweet crystals, but nobody had found a good use for the molasses – the thick, dark syrup that was left behind. Up to 40% of the weight of the molasses was pure sugar, but the technical practicalities and associated costs of extracting the remaining sugar meant that it wasn’t worth the effort. Like a tightly locked chest containing a wealth of sweet treasure, as long as the chest remained locked, it was worthless. For many islands, molasses was deemed too bulky and not cost-effective to ship abroad.

This map of Barbados was drawn in 1683, by which time the British had already controlled the island for over 55 years.

In some cases it was simply discarded into the ocean – enough to “make a province rich” according to one Hispaniola official in 1535 – or used as a fertilizer for the next season’s sugarcane crops. Sometimes it was used as animal feed, or reboiled to make a cheaper form of sweetener known as peneles, which was used to make gingerbread. In most instances it contributed to the diets of slaves, whether as food itself, or as a fermented drink. The tropical climate, coupled with high levels of sugar in the molasses, meant that fermentation was inevitable – especially given that molasses was commonly left lying around for weeks at a time. The consumption of fermented molasses was not limited only to slaves, either. Colonial life was tough on everyone, and alcohol an essential distraction to the hardships of the age of discovery. In a part of the world where beer, wine and spirits were all imported at great expense, one couldn’t be too discriminating over the source of the intoxicant.

One of the earliest references of colonists consuming molasses wine comes from 1596 when English chaplain Dr Layfield reported that the Spanish colonies in Puerto Rico enjoyed a drink called guacapo, which was, “made of Molasses (that is, the coarsest of their Sugar) and some Spices”. This molasses wine was known as guarapo and guarapa to the Spanish, garapa to the Portuguese (in Brazil) and grappe to the French.

KILL DEVIL

Once sugarcane spirit becoming a regular feature in the plantations of the New World, it was only right that they were given a proper name. It should have been a simple affair, but this was booze birthed out of effluent made by slaves – it was never going to be an easy process. Sadly, history is not so complete that all the colloquial terms and slang references to this spirit that would later be known as rum are available to us. The road to a liquor called “rum” was no easier than any of the rest of rum’s turbulent passage through time. What we do know is that before rum there was “kill devil”.

Why the spirit was called kill devil is not clear. Probably because it was strong – perhaps strong enough to kill a devil? – but more likely through a corruption of language of one sort or another. The French referred to the stuff as guildive, which is probably a compound of the old French word guiller (meaning “fermentation”) or the Malay word giler (“crazy”) and diable (“devil”). When the English heard it spoken they distorted into the suitably dangerous sounding kill devil.

Kill Devil bears no resemblance to “rum”, of course. “Rum” is cited by most historians as an abbreviation of “rumbullion”: a word originating from the county of Devon, England, meaning “a great tumult or uproar” and may have been used by Devonian settlers in Barbados. Rumbullion was first mentioned in 1652 by Barbados resident and wealthy sugar planter Giles Silvester, and it’s the only time we see the word linked with kill devil. He was clearly not a fan of rumbullion: “the chiefe fuddling they make in the island is Rumbullion, alias Kill-Devil, and this made of suggar [sic] canes distilled, a hot, hellish, and terrible liquor.”

For me, a more likely scenario than the borrowing of a faintly appropriate Devonian word, is that rumbullion came about as a fusion of different English and French words. In 16th-century England, the word “rum” was used to mean “excellent, fine or good” and was informally coupled with “booze” to form the Elizabethan slang term “rum booze”, which was used colloquially to reference wine (though appearing very little in texts). John P. Hughes, a linguistics expert and the author of The Science of Language suggests that at the time, “rum booze” was popularly pluralized into the word “rumboes”, which, in turn was singularised into “rumbo” to refer to “strong punch”. Rum was simply a shortened form of “rumbo”. The word rumbullion may have emerged from the amalgamation of rum and the French word bouillon (meaning “hot drink”), referring to a hot, strong, punch. If this is beginning to sound confusing, we’re not quite done yet.

Roemer glasses were popular drinking vessels among Dutch navigators and traders – could the name of this glass be where rum got its name from?

There are other competing theories about the origin of the word rumbullion, however. Some historians suggest that rumbullion derives from the large drinking glasses used by Dutch seamen known as a roemer. Others think that rum could also be derived from the word aroma or the latter part of the Latin word for sugar: saccharum. Some researchers have posited that the word rum heralds from the Sanskrit roma (“water”), an opinion shared by many 19th-century dictionaries. Other etymologists have mentioned the Romani word “rum”, meaning “strong” or “potent”. However the word “rum” came about, it was also the basis of “ramboozle” and “rumfustian”, both popular British drinks in the mid-17th century. Neither was made with rum, however, but rather eggs, ale, wine, sugar and various spices.

The first recorded use of the word “rum” to describe a sugarcane spirit comes from 1650, and it also comes from the island of Barbados. A deed for the sale of the Three Houses Plantation in the parish of St Philip, Barbados included in its inventory “four large mastick cisterns for liquor of rum.” Further confirmation that rum was here to stay (and indeed that it was on the move) comes from English traveller George Warren’s 1667 book An impartial description of Surinam upon the continent of Guiana in America: “Rum is a spirit extracted from the juice… called Kill-Devil in New England!”

This blunt, monosyllabic word seemed a fitting sound to describe a drink of such humble origins. “Rum” was quickly adopted by planters in the Spanish- and French-speaking colonies of the Caribbean, translating to rhum and ron respectively.

Slave ships varied in size and capacity, but the larger models could transport up to 200 slaves, albeit in wretched conditions, in a single voyage.

THE TRIANGULAR TRADE

Triangular trade is the name given to a trading system conducted between three specific areas. The best-known triangular trade route was the commercial platform that linked the Caribbean and American colonies with their European colonial powers and the west coast of Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries. This trading system was necessary because of the regional demand for the goods generated by the other regions in the triangle, and was propelled by the powerful trade winds that traversed the Atlantic – for an African slave it must have seemed that even the planet itself was aligned against them.

In the Caribbean, ships were loaded with sugar, rum, coffee and spices, which were sent to Europe where the ship’s captain traded for manufactured items, such as textiles, cutlery and weapons. Leaving Europe, the ships next sailed south to Africa, where they traded for human cargo. The slaves were transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean, where they were sold at auction and sent to work on the plantations, growing sugar and ensuring the continuation of the cycle. As the colonies of North America became better established, a second triangular trading system was developed that effectively cut Europe out of the equation. Both systems are paramount to the history of sugar and rum because an estimated two-thirds of the 1.5 million African slaves who made the voyage between 1627 and 1775 were put to work on sugarcane plantations.

Although the slave trade was abused to its fullest and most abominable extent by European powers during the 17th and 18th centuries, the African slave trade existed in Africa and the East Indies as far back as the 1100s. Operated by the kings of West Africa, tribesmen from Central and South African regions were kidnapped and sold by chiefs from Angola and the Ivory Coast, often in exchange for akpeteshie or burukutu – a type of date palm wine.

This fondness for fermented alcoholic beverages among the kings of Africa was important, as along with cloth, gunpowder and ironware, it would later be leveraged by European traders keen to exchange rum for slaves. Distilled spirits were unknown in Africa, so when these supercharged liquids called rum, rhum, aguardiente and cachaça were offered to the kings, they were keenly received. Whether it was rum or some other manufactured commodity from Europe or the colonies, this exchange of product for human cargo is cited by some historians as the birth of capitalism and the global economy.

During the six-week voyage across the ocean, on average one-third of all slaves perished en route. Those that didn’t die were often malnourished, ill and/or psychologically traumatized. Traders recognized this, so they compensated for their lost human cargo by overcrowding their ships, which really only had the effect of worsening the problem. The slaves were chained into the hold so tightly that there was no room to move. Men were afforded a space of 180 x 37 cm (6 x 1¼ ft), and women even less. Water and food were heavily rationed, and buckets provided the only means of disposing of human waste. The gruesome living conditions lead to outbreaks of typhoid, measles and yellow fever. In some extreme instances, 90% of a ship’s hold were pronounced dead upon arrival in port. On some occasions, entire ships were lost, as slaves mounted insurrections against their captors. Some of these mutinies were successful, such as the Clare in 1729, and others resulted in the death of everybody on board.

The crew, which generally comprised lowlifes and criminals, really didn’t have it much better. They were just as vulnerable to contracting diseases, but also bound to the backbreaking tasks that filled their days and weeks.

GREAT RUMBLINGS

Despite the availability of molasses, the earliest rums were often made from the sucrose-rich skimmings or scum that were collected during the sugar refining process. Now this stuff really was useless, and the collection and subsequent fermentation of the skimmings illustrates, more than anything, the thriftiness of the early sugarcane planters. There are reports of distilleries in both the French and British Caribbean making rum in this way through the 1640s, until molasses finally became the de facto base material across all Caribbean islands.

As is the case with most things in rum’s history, this came about as a result of economics more than good taste. Most plantations in the mid-1600s made two types of sugar: dark muscovado; and low-quality peneles. This approach resulted in the maximum quantity of sugar with as little as possible waste, which, in turn, limited the quantity of rum that could be manufactured. Semi-refined white sugar sold for twice the price of muscovado, but it also generated more waste. As the demand for rum increased, planters on every island in the Caribbean turned to molasses.

The earliest account of rum-making in Barbados comes from Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of Barbados (1647). Ligon offers detailed drawings of a sugar mill and still-house, which comprised two pots and a cistern. The cistern was likely made from mastic wood (in a time when the forest of Barbados were still being cleared) and was presumably used for fermenting the sugar skimmings from the mill. The pots differ in size, suggesting a similar routine to that which is used in the production of malt whisky, where the larger of the two pots was used for the principal distillation of “low wines”, and the smaller used for the second distillation of high-strength spirit. This is a surprisingly sophisticated setup for the 17th century, and far more elaborate than the stills being employed on Martinique during the same period.

Jean-Baptiste du Tertre, who toured Martinique in the 1640s, describes in his 1654 book Histoire Générale des îles Saint-Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, de la Martinique et autres de l’Amérique a single pot-still that he calls a vinaigrerie. It is connected to a worm-tub condenser and is operated by slaves, who made an “intoxicating liquor” using sugar skimmings for personal consumption.

Over the 50 years that followed rum’s uneasy birth, the spirit swept across the Caribbean like a tropical typhoon. What had, at first, been a drink for slaves, was now starting to fill the punch bowls of white planters, but this wasn’t all that it was filling – rum soon took its rightful place aboard ship’s manifest, stored in barrels and stacked in the cargo hold of every trading ship across the region.

The steep rise in rum consumption through the Caribbean and later in Europe meant that rum needed to get its game face on. The 17th century would see rum reinvent itself time after time, evolving from skimmings-based moonshine to a fully fledged industry that would make fortunes for the planters in Barbados, Jamaica and Sainte-Domingue.

This 1823 drawing forms part of the series “Ten Views in the Island of Antigua” and shows slaves loading barrels of sugar onto boats.

Speaking of Barbados, the esteemed distiller William Y-Worth wrote an account of a Barbadian rum recipe in 1707 in which the product was fermented “together with the remains of the former distillation”. This is the first reference to the use of “dunder” (the residual liquid after distilling rum) in rum production. It’s interesting that the recipe does not herald from Jamaica, where the practice would become a hallmark of the Jamaican style (see page 48).

Samuel Martin, an Irish immigrant with plantations in Antigua, operated an estate that covered 245 hectares (605 acres), of which 160 hectares (400 acres) was used for growing cane in 1756. Martin published “An Essay on Plantership” in 1786 that includes a recipe for rum comprising,“one-third scum from cane juice, one-third of water from washing the coppers, and one-third lees.” This was left to ferment for 24 hours, after which molasses is added gradually to build up the yeast cell count and “yield a due proportion of rum”.

With more plantation operators recording their recipes, further refinement and specialization ensued. The late 18th century is full of accounts from experienced distillers (especially in Jamaica) who were, for the first time, aware of terroir, the importance of pH in fermentation, consistency and more refined distillation techniques. Rum had well and truly evolved beyond the second-thought hooch to an art that required careful consideration and documentation. Why? Because it made money, of course.

RUMMING AROUND THE BRITISH ISLES

The 18th century was a period of massive growth for the Caribbean rum industry, which saw exports to Britain, North America and parts of Northern Europe increase at an astonishing rate. In 1690, little if any rum was imported into the UK. In 1697, a measly 100 litres (26 US gallons) or one-quarter of a sherry barrel arrived on British shores. By 1750, 4.5 million litres (1.2 million US gallons) of rum arrived in British ports, and that number was set to triple over the next two decades to the point where rum accounted for 25% of all the spirits consumed in British Isles in 1780.

The sheer volume of rum available to the British drinker didn’t do much to elevate the spirit’s reputation, and for the time being it occupied a curious position in the eyes of the 18th-century drinker. This was a spirit that was labelled by its challengers as a drink for slaves or common men, and yet it was being manufactured by wealthy plantation owners with strong connections to the British aristocracy. As such, the upper classes, whose focus remained fixated on wine and brandy, saw rum as a quaint, yet potentially dangerous and exotic novelty. The lower classes stuck with the “bang for your buck” mantra, which, in London at least, meant gin – 45 million litres (12 million US gallons) of it in 1750 alone. That just left the middle classes, who were priced out of the brandy market and keen to avoid genever so as to disassociate themselves from the gin-guzzling masses.

Glasgow’s second sugar refinery, called the Old Sugar House, was erected in 1669 by a group of Glasgow merchants to refine sugar imported from the Caribbean.

But this was more than just a case of class and financial resources. Availability played a big part in the decision-making process, too, and nowhere more so than in the lesser populated extremities of the British Isles, especially towns and cities on the western coastline, like Bristol, Liverpool and Falmouth, which developed into industrial trading hubs for Caribbean imports. The availability of rum in these towns lead to some entrepreneurial types establishing blending houses. Amazingly, there are accounts of sugar refineries and distilleries opening in Glasgow, Liverpool and London, as far back as the 1670s. Given that so little (if any) rum was imported into Britain at that time, it’s quite possible that the first taste of rum for many British people was in fact British rum!

As volumes grew through the latter part of the 1700s, one thing remained fairly steady: around 85% of the rum imported was Jamaican, and most of the remaining 15% was from Barbados, who at the time exported more to the colonies in North America.

But not all the rum that flowed into Britain was destined to stay there. British rum drinkers had a preference for the higher strength Jamaican rum. Barbados rum was mostly re-exported to other European territories. Demand was especially high in Ireland, which consumed more rum than England and Wales combined in the latter part of the 18th century.

YO HO HO

It’s almost impossible to talk about rum without referencing pirates, but the significance of piracy in the story of rum is hugely overplayed. Real pirates were little more than rag-tag packs of ocean-going militia, comprising wandering criminals, social outcasts, and debtors, with bills that no honest man could pay. Some pirates operated as “privateers” – a form of legally sanctioned pirating, introduced by Elizabeth I to disrupt Spanish colonial efforts. Some of the famed wrongdoings of pirates and privateers are as legendary as they sound (see Captain Morgan on pages 192–93), but many of our perceived pirate stereotypes are either dramatic embellishments of the truth or just pure fiction.

The golden age of pirating came about at the end of the 17th century, which coincided with the first sugar plantations establishing themselves in the Caribbean. Rum was in a nascent state during this time; it was in production and available locally, but not yet the widely traded international commodity that it would soon become. The merchant ships of the late 17th century were more often packed with wine, French brandy and Dutch genever. And it’s those drinks – not rum – that typically “shivered a pirate’s timbers”.

In fact, the association between pirates and rum was all but nonexistent until 1883, when Robert Louis Stevenson penned Treasure Island. Originally serialized in a children’s magazine, the novel was written around 50 years after the last pirate had walked the plank. Stevenson probably had less reference material concerning rum and pirates to go on than we do today, and while the geographical connection between piracy and rum is easy to establish, it’s highly unlikely that pirates were as committed to rum drinking as Stevenson would have us believe.

The word “rum” appears 57 times in Treasure Island (“brandy” appears just 14 times), and most famously on the opening page:

“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest - Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

This sea shanty, like most of the rest of his book, was a product of Stevenson’s imagination, and these words were never consciously spoken by a pirate, or anyone else, until Treasure Island appeared on book shelves. It’s alleged that Stevenson found the name “Dead Man’s Chest” among a list of Virgin Island names in a book by fellow novelist Charles Kingsley, possibly in reference to the Dead Chest Island off Peter Island in the British Virgin Islands. It’s likely that Stevenson’s “bottle of rum” is the single greatest contributor to the rum-swigging pirate cliché, but rum wasn’t the only piece of pirate mythology perpetuated by Stevenson. Treasure maps, gravel-throated west-country accents, and walking around with a parrot on one’s shoulder are all creations of Stevenson’s.

A (barely) walking cliché of what a pirate probably wasn’t. Except for the fact that in this instance, he is uncharacteristically without a bottle of rum.

The image of the rum-guzzling pirate has proved a difficult one to shake. Stevenson’s book, along with fictional characters that it has influenced, such as Captain Hook from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and more recently Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, offer a glamorous portrayal of criminality on the high seas, where morals are loose and the rum flows freely. My favourite line from Treasure Island that concerns rum is delivered by Long John Silver himself. While recovering from a sword fight Silver refuses medical attention, insisting that rum will suffice, “I lived on rum, I tell you. It’s been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me”.

A RUM RATION

In the spring of 1655, English Vice-Admiral William Penn set sail from Barbados with a fleet of 37 war ships and several thousand soldiers. His intention was to take the island of Hispaniola from the Spanish, but the attack was ill-prepared and mismanaged. Penn was reluctant to return to Barbados with his tail between his legs, however, so he opted instead to sail further west, and attempt to seize the less desirable Spanish colony of Jamaica. This time he was successful, resulting in the establishment of what would, by the early 1700s, surpass Barbados as Britain’s most valuable Caribbean territory. The capture of Jamaica on May 17 1655 also marked the start of a Royal Navy tradition that would remain in place for over one-third of a millennium: the rum ration.

By the time this illustration of Port Royal in Jamaica was undertaken in 1865, the Royal Navy had been administering rum rations to its sailors for some 200 years.

Or so the story goes. In fact, there is no documented evidence to confirm that rum was rationed to troops in Jamaica. What we do know is that Jamaica was a tobacco island under Spanish rule, and grew only a token gesture of sugarcane to satisfy the local market. We also know that there are no accounts of rum production or rum consumption on the island prior to the arrival of the British in 1655. So it seems strange that the capture of Jamaica, of all places, served as the catalyst for the Navy rum ration, and especially so when one considers that the fleet had just sailed from Barbados – an island that was known to be producing cane spirits at that time! Even if rum was being made in Jamaica in 1655, it would only have been for local consumption, and in 1654 the population of Jamaica was just 2,500. Where then, would stocks of rum sufficient to fill the bellies of seven thousand British sailors be conjured up from?

There are solid historical references to rum rationing on ships at Port Royal, Jamaica, in the 1680s, and it’s fair to assume that the practice was going on in Jamaica for some years prior to that. Given the island’s dominance in both sugar and rum production in the 18th century, it would have been convenient for some historians to establish a link between the Royal Navy arriving there and rum appearing on-board their ships. But I for one think that it’s likely that rum was not new to sailors in 1655 and that it was issued to them before the capture of Jamaica as well as afterwards.

One thing’s for sure though: life on a 17th-century Royal Navy ship was a living hell. Squalid living conditions, biscuit rations, strict punishment and the constant fear of death by disease or hostile encounter. Alcohol was a necessary antidote on these voyages, and the traditional maritime appetite for alcohol was never more voracious than during this period when men were spending longer at sea than ever before. Sailors were dispensed beer rations at an agreeable rate of one gallon per day, but the beer was prone to turning sour after a couple of weeks at sea and that left only slimy water as a source of refreshment. Some time in the middle of the 17th century, sailors became acquainted with rum. In those days, Royal Navy ships operated autonomously and there was no standard regulations or code of instructions (seamen and even officers wouldn’t have standardized uniform for another 100 years). So the practice likely began on a micro-level then spread steadily throughout the rest of the fleet as rum became more available. Rum (and other spirits) was the natural choice of refreshment for sailors, because on long voyages it didn’t go sour in the barrel – indeed, it improved!

Then there was the fact that it was strong stuff, which the sailing men no doubt approved of. We can only guess at the real strength of the spirit back then, though. Distillation techniques were mostly rather crude in the 17th century, and it wasn’t until 1816 that Sikes’s hydrometer was invented and the ability to measure strength (proof) accurately became a reality. The term “proof” (in its capacity as a gauge of alcoholic strength) originated in the Royal Navy, and more specifically with regard to rum. It was the task of the ship’s purser (the supplies handler) to assess the quality of all incoming food and drink stocks from the port, as well as to manage their rationing among the men. Where rum was concerned, this meant testing the alcohol content to ensure that the liquid wasn’t diluted by some unscrupulous trader wishing to squeeze some extra cash out of his client. The test was conducted using gunpowder, wherein the rum was mixed with a small quantity of the powder and heated with an open flame. The burning of the gunpowder was observed by the purser, who gauged the ferocity of the flame to calculate the strength of the rum. There were no percentages or degrees on his scale, however — rum was either deemed strong enough or not. The test became known as the “proof” test. Rum that burned like dry gunpowder was “proven” to be of adequate strength, and that strength happened to be 57% alcohol by volume. Rum burning hotter or brighter than gunpowder was clearly stronger, and those rums were labelled “over-proof”.

Edward Vernon: Royal Navy Admiral, mixologist and grogram coat advocate.

The Royal Navy demanded that all rums stored on Navy ships were over-proof. Perhaps this was because a barrel of “under-proof” rum spilt its contents all over an adjacent cask of gunpowder causing the gunpowder to burn poorly and rendering a ship defenceless. Or perhaps it was just the mariners hankering for the burn of strong spirit. The Navy’s policy changed in 1866 when all Navy rum was prescribed at 4.5 under-proof, which is where it stayed for the duration of the ration.

From the mid-1600s until the 1730s, rum was rationed to sailors without rules or guidelines. In fact, there are very few accounts of rum rationing at all until the 18th century, and those that do exist are rather vague. In February 1727, Captain Gascoigne of the HMS Greyhound, which was stationed at Port Royal, wrote to the Navy Board suggesting that a “double allowance of rum” might encourage the men under his command to work harder.

In 1731, the first documented regulations “Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea” were published, which reveal both what a daily rum ration constituted and that the ritual had spread beyond the Caribbean, into wider Royal Navy operations. The regulations stated that a standard issue gallon of beer was equivalent to “a pint of wine or half a pint of brandy, rum or arrack”. Whether rum, brandy or arrack (which would have served as a substitute for rum or brandy in the East Indies), a half pint of strong spirit a day is equivalent to ten double shots (50 ml or 2 oz) – every day.

With that much alcohol flowing through a sailor’s veins, it’s amazing that sailors felt the need to smuggle extra stocks of rum on-board during shore leave. One trick commonly employed by shrewd seamen in the Caribbean involved emptying coconuts of their milk and refilling them with rum before boarding the ship. Extra drams were also occasionally issued by officers as rewards for exemplary service or acts of heroism. Before going into battle, captains sometimes ordered a “tot” (a ration) for the crew to make them more “brave and willing.”

Not content with inventing “grog”, Admiral Vernon achieved what Hosier couldn’t, capturing Portobello in 1739.

RUM, GROGGERY AND THE LASH