by Wayne Curtis
By 1970, it was hard to ignore the clamor to eliminate the Royal Navy’s daily rum ration. The House of Commons debated the matter; the secretary of the navy, sensing a looming defeat, lobbied for just compensation. In lieu of rum rations, a lump sum of £2.7 million was donated to the Sailor’s Fund, which paid for such things as excursions for sailors in foreign ports and improved equipment for discotheques on naval bases.
July 31, 1970, is known in British naval circles as Black Tot Day—that last day rum was officially rationed out to sailors. On British navy ships around the globe, sailors wore black armbands and attended mock funerals. Among the more elaborate affairs was a ceremony aboard the HMS Fife, a guided-missile destroyer then in port at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It was the closest ship to the international date line and thus the last in the Royal Navy to serve rum. The crewmen mustered on the top deck, tossed back their rations, and heaved their glasses overboard, along with the whole rum barrel. The historic moment was marked with a twenty-one-gun salute. And so ended a 325-year tradition.
Naval rum had a second, somewhat debased life. In 1980, the Admiralty Board voted to release the secret formula for the blend to Charles Tobias, an American entrepreneur who believed that it would find a ready market among retired sailors and a public intrigued by its lore. In exchange, Tobias pledged to pay ongoing royalties from rum sales into the Sailor’s Fund. The rum was called Pusser’s, slang for “purser.” This heavy, flavorful spirit is still manufactured and sold throughout much of the world.
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There is one further matter to address. Where did the most famous rum-related phrase come from, and what does it mean? You know the one: “Yo-ho-ho and…” Well, if you don’t know how it goes, flip to the cover of this book. The phrase goes back to at least August 1881, the month that a thirty-one-year-old writer settled in with his young family at a holiday cottage in Braemar, Scotland. His name was Robert Louis Stevenson, and his fame at the time had as much to do with his family—noted lighthouse keepers—as for anything he had written. One stormy, rain-lashed afternoon, Stevenson came upon his twelve-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, drawing a fanciful map of a make-believe island to pass the hours. Stevenson scribbled some place-names and wrote “Treasure Island” in an upper corner. The map seemed to call for more elaboration, so he set about composing a story to go with it, reading it aloud in the evenings over the following two weeks. The dull parts were edited out by Lloyd, who, like any sensible twelve-year-old, was interested only in untimely deaths, the discovery of duplicity, or both. Stevenson later described the process as “not writing, just drive along as the words come and the pen will scratch.”
A houseguest suggested Stevenson send the story to Young Folks, a magazine for boys. The editor bought it for £30 and published it as a serial in the fall and winter of 1881 and 1882 under the pseudonym of Capt. George North. The tale didn’t attract much attention until it was republished in book form in 1883 and became one of the bestselling books of all time.
Treasure Island shaped the public perception of pirates, and so did the American artist N. C. Wyeth, who illustrated a popular edition of it. In 1904, Stevenson’s countryman James Matthew Barrie created Captain Hook in Peter Pan. Pirates would no longer be portrayed as murderous bandits who forced innocents to eat their own offal. They became figures of romance: one-legged scoundrels with foppish hats, squawking parrots, and hooks instead of hands. They became caricatures, and caricatures they would remain.
Rum didn’t make its literary debut in Treasure Island—Robinson Crusoe discovered “three large runlets” of it on his fictional island in 1719. But Stevenson uses it as a motif. The pirate Billy Bones displays an abiding fondness for the stuff. (“I lived on rum,” he tells the young protagonist, Jim. “It’s been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me.”) It’s a predilection shared by other pirates, among them the unfortunate Captain Flint, who died on the gallows in Savannah bellowing for rum, not unlike Captain Kidd.
But the most defining appearance of rum is the nonsensical ditty first muttered by Billy Bones and repeated (and repeated) by the other pirates:
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the Devil had done for the rest
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”
It’s a dark and odd little rhyme, evidently composed by the author—although some have speculated that it was based on a traditional sea chantey, now lost. Although it doesn’t make much sense, it fired the public imagination, becoming the nineteenth-century equivalent of an Abba song, something that becomes lodged in one’s brain quite against one’s will. Ten years later, Young E. Allison, the American editor of a trade journal called the Insurance Field, stretched those lines out into a much longer narrative poem entitled “On Board the Derelict.” A decade after that, Allison’s poem became the basis of a Broadway play and anchored itself in the popular imagination. To this day if you say “yo-ho-ho” to any native English speaker, the odds are that they’ll complete it.
Pirates and rum would never be separated again.
[ FLIP ]
Mix one cup BEER (a stout like Guinness works best), two tablespoons MOLASSES, and one ounce Jamaican-style RUM into a mug or tankard. Heat loggerhead to red hot in an open fire (a fireplace poker knocked clean of ashes will do), then thrust into the drink and stir. Keep loggerhead immersed until foaming and sputtering ceases. Drink hot.
Chapter 3
[ FLIP ]
Have been genteely treated and am now going to be drunk. This is the first time.
[ November 30, 1775 ]
All of us got most feloniously drunk.
[ January 6, 1776 ]
Went to bed about two o’clock in the afternoon, stupidly drunk.
[ January 7, 1776 ]
Spent evening at the Tavern….A confounded mad frolic.
[ February 19, 1776 ]
Got most feloniously drunk. This is a bad preface to the new volume of my diary.
[ October 1, 1776 ]
A very mad frolic this evening. Set the house on fire three times and broke Mr. Dream’s leg…got drunk and committed a number of foolish actions.
[ November 19, 1776 ]
—FROM THE JOURNALS OF NICHOLAS CRESSWELL, A BRITISH TRAVELER IN THE NORTH AMERICAN COLONIES
Dr. Alexander Hamilton—not to be confused with Mr. Alexander Hamilton of the $10 bill—was faring poorly in late 1743. A Scottish physician who had left cosmopolitan Edinburgh for the more rustic colonial life of Annapolis, Maryland, Hamilton had been plagued by “fevers and bloody spitting” and “an Incessant cough,” and had nearly died from consumption. But by early 1744, his health was on the rebound. To complete his cure, Hamilton prescribed for himself an outsized dose of fresh air. So off he went on a four-month, sixteen-hundred-mile journey through the northern colonies, traveling as far as the province of Maine (then part of Massachusetts) before heading home. He spent most of his time in the cultural citadels of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, traveling between them by horse and boat, and laying over at taverns in smaller towns and along rural byways. Hamilton’s detailed journals capture a colorful slice of mid-eighteenth-century tavern life.
Shortly after he set off, Hamilton wrote of arriving at a Maryland tavern called Treadway’s, where he found a drinking club concluding its order of business. “Most of them had got upon their horses and were seated in an oblique situation,” he wrote, “deviating much from a perpendicular to the horizontal plane, a posture quite necessary for keeping the center of gravity within its proper base for the support of the superstructure; hence we deduce the true physical reason why our heads overloaded with liquor become too ponderous for our heels. Their discourse was…an inarticulate sound like Rabelais’ frozen words athawing, interlaced with hiccupings and belchings.” The tavern’s landlord offered s
ome excuses for the rowdy behavior of his guests. “While he spoke thus,” Hamilton continued, “our Bacchanalians, finding no more rum in play, rid off helter skelter as if the devil had possessed them, every man sitting his horse in a see-saw manner like a bunch of rags tyed upon the saddle.”
Hamilton discovered on his tour what most colonists well knew: The British North American colonies had become a Republic of Rum. Starting about 1700, the colonial taste for home-brewed beer and hard cider began to fade and was displaced by an abiding thirst for stronger liquors. Rum turned up everywhere, in homes and doctor’s offices, in clattering seaports and rough-edged inland villages. With its arrival came a fundamental shift in the colony’s political, economic, and social alignments. If grog was an emblem of the triumph of order over disorder on the open seas, rum—especially in the form of a popular drink called “flip”—was a symbol of the new order displacing the old in the colonies.
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The first Puritans to settle the northern colonies brought not only a thirst for drink, but the drink itself. When the Pilgrims arrived in New England in 1620, beer was among their supplies. When they exhausted it, they started brewing it. It was a story repeated throughout the colonies, as settlers from England, Holland, France, Sweden, and Germany arrived with their Old World tastes intact. The beer favored in many northern colonies was typically 6 percent alcohol, heavy and dark. Enterprising colonists loath to sacrifice good grain made beer from Indian corn and pumpkin, sometimes flavoring it with birch or spruce bark.
Also found in the better colonial cabinets were imported wines, especially Madeira, which could be shipped directly from the Portuguese islands off the coast of Africa without roundabout routing or fraudulent paperwork. (Trade with most wine-producing nations was prohibited by the British Navigation Acts; an exception was made for the Atlantic islands.) The Madeira was not of the highest quality—it wasn’t fortified to develop its distinctive flavor until later in the eighteenth century—but it was still a welcome luxury, and one that most of those who were eking out a life in the colonies could ill afford.
Hard cider was the most popular drink among the settlers, at least from the apple-growing regions of Virginia northward. It could be made with almost no effort or investment. A single tree could produce enough apples for five or six barrels of cider, and then a farmer needed only patience for it to ferment. Even without a still, cider could be made into higher-proof applejack in winter just by leaving it outdoors to freeze, then skimming off the watery slush. Hard cider was versatile: A mug served warm in winter chased away the chill, and in summer could be diluted and flavored with nutmeg. But cider was less than ideal: It caused gastric distress if consumed too early, and was vinegary if drunk too late. And as Israel Acrelius wrote in his 1753 history of Swedish settlements in North America, some colonists believed that cider “produces rust and verdigris, and frightens some from its use, by fear that it may have the same effect in the body.”
Alcohol’s appeal was enhanced by the colonists’ deep-seated distrust of water. This apprehension had been imported from Europe, where crowded, contaminated cities made free-flowing water unfit to drink. The pristine lakes and tumbling rivers of the New World were regarded with a similarly dark suspicion—concerns not eased by stories of the first Virginia settlers in 1607. “They have nothing but bread of maize, with fish; nor do they drink anything but water,” wrote one appalled visitor. As a result, “the majority [were] sick and badly treated.” Once the long-suffering colonists in Virginia started to import alcoholic beverages, their health improved markedly. Water, it was thought, was suitable for hogs and cows, but for human consumption only in dire emergencies.
The leaders of the early colonies, including the famously dour Puritan elders, gave their stamp of approval to the drinking of fermented beverages, and regarded beer, cider, and wine, like sunshine and apples, as gifts to be revered. “Drink is in itself a creature of God,” said minister Increase Mather in 1673, “and to be received with thankfulness.”
And then came rum.
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Various strong spirits had arrived in the northern colonies before rum. When John Winthrop sailed aboard the Puritan ship Arbella in 1630, he groused that “a Common fault in our yonge people [is] that they gave themselves to drink hot waters very immoderately.” (He failed to specify what those spirits were.) A crude whiskey made out of the leavings of fermented beer was allegedly distilled by a Dutchman near Manhattan as early as 1640; by 1648, rye whiskey was being made in Massachusetts. And primitive backyard stills, called “lembics,” were not uncommon in the colonies; they were useful for making spirits out of fermented honey and pears and, in the southern colonies, from peaches.
But this petty dabbling in strong drink did little to prepare colonial society for the arrival of the vast merchant fleets trafficking with the sugar islands. Barrels of rum soon clattered through teeming colonial ports of Boston, Philadelphia, and Newport, shipped in from the West Indies in great wooden casks from which storekeepers and taverners could dispense smaller quantities by jug or mug. The cost of imported Barbados rum fell by about a third between 1673 and 1687 as the supply soared, then rose slightly before leveling off. In current dollars, a fifth of rum cost about $4 in 1700, or half the price of a bottle of inexpensive rum today. Cotton Mather, the son of Increase Mather, lamented that it took but “a penny or two” to get drunk on rum.
Almost overnight, rum found its way into nearly every aspect of colonial life. A colonist would toss back a dram in the morning to shake off the night chills and to launch the day in proper form. Steeplejacks would clamber down from their labors for dinner at midday and, in the words of Rev. Elijah Kellogg, “would partake of rum, salt-fish, and crackers.” During the bleak northern winters, alcohol provided tinder to warm one’s insides, and in the sweltering southern summers rum aided in perspiration and cooling. In the evenings, a dram of rum helped with digestion at supper, and afterward a few rounds of rum cemented the bonds of friendship at a local tavern. Rum was not just a diversion; it was nutritionally vital to colonists who labored to coax a meager sustenance out of a rocky, stump-filled landscape and cold seas. Alcohol has fewer calories per ounce than straight fat but about the same as butter. It’s five times more caloric than lean meat, and has ten times the calories of whole milk. A bottle of rum squirreled away in a Grand Banks fishing dory provided the energy to haul nets and aided in choking down hardtack and salt cod. Farmers, timber cutters, coopers, and shipbuilders soon learned that a dram of rum made a long day shorter.
Rum was embraced in sickness and in health, and for better or worse. Rum was the first remedy when feeling punky and was taken liberally as a restorative. Leaves of the tansy plant were steeped in rum to create tansy bitters, which was a popular cure-all in colonial homes. Children were given rum to cure minor ailments, and rum was employed to soothe the chills and fevers from malaria in the southern colonies. A colonial diarist wrote that following an illness his doctor told him to drink “a little more Rum than I did before I was sick” and warned him that “being too abstemious” was likely the cause of his problems. Swedish traveler Peter Kalm noted that by 1750 rum had come to be considered far healthier among English North American colonists than spirits distilled from grain or wine: “In confirmation of this opinion they say that if you put a piece of fresh meat into rum and another into brandy, and leave them there for a few months, that in the rum will keep as it was, but that in the brandy will be eaten full of holes.”
Rum was always on hand for emergencies. Published instructions for reviving victims of drowning in Massachusetts called for blowing tobacco smoke up the victim’s rectum (machines were built specifically for this purpose) while bathing the victim’s breast with hot rum. If rum failed to restore you to life, it would be served to those who attended your funeral, even if you were poorly off, since the purchase of spirits for a final
send-off had priority over paying off your creditors.
Rum ingrained itself in the emerging civic culture of the colonies. A major public building project always meant drinking, and rum was doled out liberally to citizens who helped raise a barn or meetinghouse. It was also widely accepted as currency in cash-poor colonies, swapped for insurance premiums, for the construction of new buildings, and used to tip workers for services well done. Employers budgeted for rum and molasses; hires expected it both as payment and as a liquid enticement to remain on task. A 1645 law in Massachusetts sought to forbid colonists from paying workers with drink, but the decree was ignored. When the economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, he noted that ship carpenters earned “ten shillings and sixpence currency, with a pint of rum worth sixpence sterling.” And the records show that in the mid-eighteenth century, Paul Revere’s mother, recently widowed, paid her rent with a mix of cash, rum, and a silver thimble.
If shipments of rum overwhelmed the local market and contributed to a brief price drop, merchants could warehouse it; not only was it not perishable, but it also improved—and could be sold for more—with age. The larger peril was receiving a shipment of rum so bad that no one would take it. Certain islands developed reputations, some favorable and some not. Rums from Barbados, Antigua, Montserrat, and Grenada, and increasingly from Jamaica, were considered among the finest, and commanded higher prices in the colonial seaports. Rums from Tobago were regarded as reasonably palatable. Rums to be avoided included those from St. Vincent, Dominica, and Nevis, islands that were known to cheat their customers by shortchanging their fermentation tanks of molasses. (If a distiller used less than one gallon of molasses to make one gallon of rum, it was thought to result in a more wretched product.)
