by Wayne Curtis
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Today, Captain Morgan serves as something of a mascot to the rum industry, thanks to the continuing success of Captain Morgan rum, which accounts for about one-third of the billion-dollar premium rum market in the United States. It was introduced in 1945 on Jamaica, where the Seagram Company decided to market a high-end rum made by blending rums from other distillers. In the fall of 1949, Captain Morgan rum was imported for the first time to the United States amid great marketing hullabaloo; in New York, it was touted in newspaper ads with an illustration of a statuesque pirate wearing a malicious grin in front of the Manhattan skyline, as if about to set out in search of Wall Street bankers to hang by the testicles.
The brand caught on. In 1953, Seagram acquired its own rum distillery in Jamaica to supply the growing demand. Captain Morgan rum was then a light rum designed for mixing. (“Lighter, cleaner,” boasted the first ads, “especially designed for the American taste.”) When Americans drifted off in favor of even lighter white wine spritzers and light beer in the 1980s, Seagram set about tinkering with the brand, adding spices and flavorings and reinventing Captain Morgan as a spiced rum. Today, it’s produced and sold by Diageo, the world’s largest producer of liquor.
Although rum and pirates are like smoke and fire (you rarely find one without the other), the marriage was actually the product of the Victorian era (about which more later). The spectacular plunderings of the real Captain Henry Morgan would not have involved rum for a simple reason: It wasn’t a common spirit in the Spanish colonies he raided. While the Spanish did have sugar plantations and a surplus of waste molasses, rum hadn’t taken off as it had on the British islands, because Spanish winemakers and brandy distillers made sure that it didn’t. Afraid of competition from cheap rum, they prevailed upon the Spanish crown to ban spirits exports from the islands. So when buccaneers sacked villages, they found Madeira and Canary wines and brandy in the cellars and storehouses, but little rum. Being pirates and not terribly picky, they were happy to guzzle it down.
After they sacked a village and tortured or sent its inhabitants into flight, Morgan’s men broke into the storerooms and drank with gusto. Following the conquest of Portobelo, Exquemelin wrote, the men “fell to eating and drinking, after their usual manner—that is to say, committing in both these things all manner of debauchery and excess.” The spectacle of drink and mayhem lasted two full weeks. Exquemelin conjectured that a Spanish contingent of “fifty courageous men” could have routed the besotted pirates, who numbered nearly ten times as many. The beleaguered Spanish mustered no such force.
During the long march to Panama City, “fifteen or sixteen jars of Peruvian wine” were uncovered in one village along the way. The men fell upon it “with rapacity” and consumed it without pause. No sooner was the wine emptied than the drinkers began vomiting copiously. Suspecting that the wine had been poisoned, the soldiers sat back moaning and awaited their grim fate. Remarkably, no one died. Exquemelin suspected that the reaction was from drinking too hastily on very empty stomachs.
As the planters of the sugar islands planted more cane and built more windmills to meet the clamor for sugar in Europe, they scrambled to find an outlet for their growing rum surplus. Rum was consumed eagerly and prolifically by islanders, but local consumption couldn’t absorb all of it, nor did local imbibing provide useful hard currency to pay off overseas debts and expand trade. Moreover, sugar planters had devoted nearly every acre of arable land to sugarcane and produced virtually no food to feed themselves or their slaves. They were much in need of anything edible. So livestock and produce sailed south from the northern colonies, and rum, in turn, began to sail north. “Good Rume and Mallasces…is most vendable heare,” wrote a Newport, Rhode Island, merchant to his Barbados agent in the 1660s.
Demand for rum grew steadily. By 1699, the British writer Edward Ward noted that “rum, alias Kill Devil, is as much ador’d by the American English….This is held as the Comforter of their Souls, the Preserver of their Bodys, the Remover of their Cares, and Promoter of their Mirth; and is a Sovereign Remedy against the Grumbling of the Guts, a Kibe-heel [chilblains on the heel], or a Wounded Conscience, which are three Epidemical Distempers that afflict the Country.”
By the early eighteenth century, the most popular West Indian destinations for northern colonial merchant ships were Antigua or Barbados, since rum was most easily obtained in trade there. In 1738, Philadelphia merchant Robert Ellis instructed the captain of the Sarah and Elizabeth to consider selling his cargo at St. Kitts if a good price could be had for his cargo, but added he would “rather yould dispose of it at Antigua for you’ll be more likely to get rum there.” More than 90 percent of rum exported from Barbados and Antigua headed to mainland North America; on other islands, rum exports to the northern colonies were often 100 percent, since no market had yet emerged in England or Europe. Export figures from 1726 to 1730 show that the most important rum exporter was Barbados, which shipped 680,269 gallons of rum to the northern colonies; this was followed by Antigua with 235,966 gallons, and St. Kitts and Montserrat, which together shipped about 14,000 gallons of rum. Benjamin Franklin, the publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette, printed up 228 words and phrases that were slang for being drunk. These included “cock’d,” “juicy,” “fuzl’d,” “stiff,” “wamble crop’d,” “crump-footed,” “staggerish,” and one other: “Been to Barbados.”
The pirates, increasingly disappointed by the spoils of the waning Spanish empire, gradually moved north to harass British traders. When they found rum, they consumed it with gusto. After the pirate George Lowther captured a ship in 1722 en route from Barbados to Boston, he took pains to inventory his haul: five barrels of sugar, six slaves, a box of English goods, and thirteen hogsheads of good rum.
As the eighteenth century progressed, rum came to displace wine in accounts of pirate debauchery—and to be associated with disorder and mayhem on the seas.
“I soon found that any death was preferable to being linked with such a vile crew of miscreants,” wrote Philip Ashton, a ship’s captain captured by pirates in 1724. “Monstrous cursing and swearing, hideous blasphemies, and open defiance of Heaven” appalled him deeply, as did one other bad habit: “prodigious drinking.”
Captain George Roberts of London was overtaken by the Boston pirate Ned Low. The psychopathic Low was precisely the person you would prefer not to meet on the high seas; he reportedly forced one captive to eat his own ears freshly sliced from his head and another to eat the fresh-plucked heart of a fellow sailor. Low evidently took a small liking to Roberts. Not only did he not force him to eat his own organs, he served him claret and a rum punch mixed up in a two-gallon silver bowl.
Roberts’s account of the ordeal suggests an uncommon interest in rum on the part of his pirate captors. They passed their idle time boasting, then “drinking and carousing merrily, both before and after dinner, which they eat in a very disorderly manner, more like a kennel of hounds, than like men, snatching and catching the victuals from one another.” At night, after Low had turned in, Roberts stayed up drinking with the other men to maintain their good favor. “We took a dram of rum,” Roberts reported, “and enter’d into discourse with one another, on different subjects; for as a tavern or alehouse-keeper endeavors to promote his trade, by conforming to the humours of every customer, so was I forc’d to be pleasant with every one, and bear a bob with them in almost all their sorts of discourse, tho’ never so contrary and disagreeable to my own inclinations; otherwise I should have fallen under an odium with them, and when once that happens to be the case with any poor man, the lord have mercy upon him, for then every rascally fellow will let loose his brutal fancy upon him…artificially raised by drinking, passion, & c.” Low kept Roberts captive ten days before setting him adrift in a boat.
Pirate life wasn’t all anarchy and the snatching of food. Pirates were often bound by charters they signed when the
y joined a crew—miniature constitutions that governed life aboard the ship and dictated the distribution of the spoils. Some of these even codified the rules of drinking. The charter of Bartholomew Roberts, better known as Black Bart, had a provision stating that each man “has equal title to the fresh provisions or strong liquores at any time seized, and may use them at pleasure unless a scarcity make it necessary for the food of all to vote a retrenchment.” (Curiously, Roberts himself was a teetotaler, and his ship’s charter also prohibited drinking belowdecks after eight o’clock in the evening. His sobriety may have helped his career; he captured some four hundred vessels and is generally regarded as one of the most successful of pirates.) During one string of attacks in the West Indies in 1720, Roberts and his crew captured so much liquor that an observer wrote that “it was esteemed a crime against Providence not to be continually drunk.” Two of his crew members were noted to be particularly dissolute; Robert Devins was always in his cups and scarcely fit for any duty, as was reported at his trial after he was captured. And crewman Robert Johnson became so thoroughly incapacitated that at one point block and tackle had to be employed to remove him from the ship like a sack of yams.
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The de facto capital of the British pirate world was Port Royal, Jamaica’s chief port, situated across the harbor from present-day Kingston. After the British vanquished the Spanish in 1655, enterprising colonists established a makeshift town on a long sandspit at the mouth of the harbor. Jamaica would eventually become a sugar superpower, but the island economy was founded on trade, much of it illegal, with Port Royal serving as an entrepôt for contraband goods and treasure seized by privateers and pirates.
Port Royal made an especially appealing base for pirates since island governors were happy to turn a blind eye to their activities. The pirates were a useful nuisance. They brought in gold and silver to buoy the local economy—so much that the notion of establishing a British mint was considered in 1662—and served as an ad hoc naval defense force at no cost to the governor. With its abundance of captured gold, Jamaica was an inviting target for French or Spanish marauders. But a harbor teeming with heavily armed pirate ships manned by predatory seamen greatly reduced the odds of such an attack.
After his raids, Captain Morgan and his men would sail to Port Royal to whore and drink and spend their money. The more carelessly they could rid themselves of their gold, the happier they were. “Wine and Women drained their Wealth to such a Degree that in a little time some of them became reduced to Beggary,” reported pirate chronicler Charles Leslie. “They have been known to spend 2 or 3000 Pieces of Eight in one Night; and one of them gave a Strumpet 500 to see her naked.” Morgan “found many of his chief officers and soldiers reduced to their former state of indigence through their immoderate vices and debauchery.” Then they would pester him to get up a new fleet for further raids, “thereby to get something to expend anew in wine and strumpets.”
The port was ungoverned at the outset, and in short order became ungovernable. Literate visitors engaged in a sort of informal competition to best describe the sheer hellishness of the place. It was the “most wicked and sinful city in the world,” wrote one British man of the cloth. Another English clergyman, eager to begin the Lord’s work in reforming the city, instantly abandoned his hopes of salvation. “This town is the Sodom of the New World,” he wrote, and “the majority of its population consists of pirates, cutthroats, whores, and some of the vilest persons in the whole of the world.” He left aboard the same ship that brought him.
Edward Ward took the prize for the most colorful description, describing Port Royal as “the Dunghill of the Universe, the Refuse of the whole Creation, the Clippings of the Elements, a shapeless Pile of Rubbish confused’ly jumbl’d in to an Emblem of Chaos, neglected by Omnipotence when he form’d the World into its admirable Order….The Receptacle of Vagabonds, the Sanctuary of Bankrupts, and a Close-Stool for the Purges of our Prisons. As Sickly as a Hospital, as Dangerous as the Plague, as Hot as Hell, and as Wicked as the Devil.”
Port Royal had a density of taverns that made the tippling houses of Barbados appear woefully inadequate. Even discounting the unlicensed and undocumented rumshops—of which there were surely many—Port Royal had one legal tavern for every ten male residents. In one month—July 1661—the local council granted forty licenses for new taverns and punch houses. A governor of Jamaica noted that the Spanish often wondered why the British were always suffering from extravagant illness, “until they knew the strength of their drinks, but then wondered more that they were not all dead.”
All sorts of liquor could be had in Port Royal. The reasonably well off drank Madeira wine, and the “servants and the inferior kind of people”—wrote one visitor in a letter in 1664—drank rum. Another visitor wrote that kill-devil was the “main drink sold in the taverns,” but other popular pirate drinks included bumboo or bombo, a mix of rum, water, sugar, and a bit of nutmeg.
(Modern archaeology has done little to contradict the idea that Port Royal residents lived in a state of constant pottedness. In the early 1970s, the archaeologist Robert Marx excavated a portion of Port Royal now underwater. A thick mantle of silt covered everything, but he uncovered hundreds of “onion bottles,” so called because they consisted of a round bulbous bottom attached to a long tapering neck and were traditionally used for putting up rum. Sadly, no potable rum was recovered.)
Port Royal offered sanctuary to Captain Morgan between his raids in the late seventeenth century, and in retirement it became his home. After he quit attacking the Spanish, he was lionized as a hero in England. Knighted, he returned to Jamaica as lieutenant governor and acquired a plantation in the nearby parish of St. Mary, eventually amassing twelve hundred acres. Now nostalgic for the Welsh countryside he was once eager to leave, Morgan named his estate after his old home, Llanrumney. He constructed a handsome house atop a hill, equipping it with stout stone walls and shutters thick enough to repel bullets. Morgan had acquired many enemies, and for them he was ready.
After giving up his post in 1682, Morgan mounted a vigorous defense of his sullied name. He sued two English publishing houses for libel when Exquemelin’s account of his exploits was translated into English, collecting just £410 but winning the retractions he sought. One publisher, William Crooke, wrote that Morgan did not torture a fool on the rack, did not torture a rich Portuguese citizen, did not force a Negro to kill several prisoners, and did not engage in “the hanging up of any person by the testicles.”
Most of all, retirement meant that Morgan could now frequent the rumshops more often, regaling all with tales of his past adventures. But soon his health declined, and even visits to the rumshops became too taxing for him. He was confined to his estate, where he spent his days drinking with the few friends who hadn’t abandoned him. Each morning began with a bout of vomiting. His legs were so swollen that he couldn’t walk. He was unable to urinate and often weak from diarrhea. The naturalist Hans Sloane described him as “lean, sallow-colored, his eyes a little yellowish and Belly jutting out or prominent.” Captain Morgan’s later life goes unmentioned in the marketing material for his namesake rum.
On August 25, 1688, Captain Henry Morgan died at age fifty-three. He was given a state funeral and a twenty-one-gun salute; a brief amnesty was declared in Port Royal to allow outlaws to surface and pay their final respects. Morgan was buried in the Port Royal cemetery.
Four years later, on the morning of June 7, 1692, the first of three fierce earthquakes hit Port Royal. In a matter of minutes, 90 percent of the city was destroyed, most of it gulped down by an unstable earth. Houses that once lined cobblestone lanes were suddenly below water as the ground opened up and swallowed whole city blocks. A tsunami followed, sweeping the ships into the rubble of the city. Washed up on the ruins like little arks, grounded ships served as sanctuaries in the coming weeks, until the port could begin to rebuild. About two tho
usand people were killed in the first moments after the quake; the fresh dead floated in the harbor with the old dead, as cemeteries opened and disgorged corpses. Captain Morgan’s remains may have been among them. Just as his life began with mystery, so, too, it concluded.
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Pirate activity in the Atlantic peaked around 1720, when some fifteen hundred to two thousand pirates were estimated to be plying the waters between New England and the West Indies. Pirates were not viewed as colorful outlaws but a worrisome drag on the expanding commerce trade between the mainland colonies and the islands. Pirates went from the hunters to the hunted. Some sailed off to ransack ships in the Indian Ocean, with Madagascar the new Port Royal. Those who remained were hunted down by fleets commissioned by colonial governors, then hanged in mass executions.
Between 1716 and 1726, an estimated four hundred to six hundred Anglo-American pirates went to the gallows. In 1718, eight pirates “swang off” at one hanging in the Bahamas. In July 1723, twenty-six pirates were hanged in Newport, Rhode Island, on a single day. England passed a law that harshly punished even passing contact with pirates, making it a capital offense. Six turtle fishermen were hanged in 1720 when they had the misfortune of being caught sharing a rum punch with the pirate John Rackham.
Captured pirates ascending to the noose were offered a last chance to repent their wayward life, and some experienced gallows conversions. Before being executed in 1724, John Archer said that the “one wickedness that has led me as much as any, to all the rest, has been my brutish drunkenness. By strong drink I have been heated and hardened into the crimes that are now more bitter than death unto me.” John Browne, hanged at Newport in 1723, instructed all youth to obey their parents, to “beware the abominable Sin of Uncleanliness,” and, above all, “to not let yourselves be overcome with strong drink.” (These deathbed entreaties have the whiff of the temperance movement about them, and one suspects the heavy hand of an editor.)
