by Wayne Curtis
Out of the war, a new republic was born. But the old Republic of Rum had begun to totter.
[ PUNCH ]
Squeeze juice of one-half LIME into glass. Add one tablespoon sugar, one-and-one-half ounces RUM, and two ounces WATER. Mix well. Add ice. Grate NUTMEG lightly on top, and make festive with one or more additions: lemon slice, papaya chunks, fresh mint, pomegranate, pineapple spears, cherries, orange peel or slice, lime wedge, dash of bitters.
Chapter 5
[ PLANTER’S PUNCH ]
New England I know little about, except it be the trade and people….They import large quantities of molasses from the West Indies, which they distill and sell to Africa and the other Colonies, which goes by the name of Yankee rum or Stink-e-buss.
—NICHOLAS CRESSWELL, CA. 1777
The most popular and most democratic beverage in colonial America—consumed in more seasons and in more places than flip—was rum punch.
Punch could be found wherever rum was found—which is to say, everywhere in America within horse cart distance of the West Indian trade. As early as 1682, John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, noted in his records the sale of a punch bowl, which turned out to be a harbinger of the great era of West Indian rum imports and later domestic manufacture. Accounts of eighteenth-century travelers suggest that punch was especially popular in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. William Penn said that the consumption of punch in his colony rivaled that of beer, and when William Black of Virginia traveled to Philadelphia in 1744, he marveled that local dignitaries feted him with “a Bowl of fine Lemon Punch big enough to have Swimm’d a half a dozen of young Geese.”
Benjamin Franklin, who periodically fretted about the overly exuberant drinking habits of his countrymen, penned a small ode to the pleasant ritual of punch drinking:
Boy, bring a bowl of China here,
Fill it with water cool and clear:
Decanter with Jamaica right
And spoon of silver, clean and bright.
Sugar twice-fin’d in piece cut,
Kni[f]e, sieve and glass in order put,
Bring forth the fragrant fruit and then.
We’re happy till the clock strikes ten.
Before the melting pot, America had the punch bowl. A bowl would be ceremonially placed on the table with sufficient cups and a ladle, which in the better homes was crafted with a handle of whalebone or wood. Early punch bowls were typically ceramic, although those wealthy enough might commission a silversmith to fashion an intricate and gleaming bowl. (After 1780, the cheaper glass punch bowls became more common than the ceramic.) Some punch bowls even achieved a small bit of celebrity. The most famous was made by Paul Revere in 1767 to honor a group of rebellious Massachussetts colony legislators. The local legislature had been ordered by the British Crown to rescind a letter they had sent protesting the onerous Townshend Acts. By a vote of 92 to 17, the legislators refused. The “Glorious 92” were honored with an elegant and graceful silver punch bowl, which is today enshrined at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
Punch wasn’t only for swells who could afford the fancy trappings; it was also a drink of ruffians and commoners. Pirates and their hangers-on enjoyed a nice bowl of punch between sackings and pillagings. When Captain Kidd and Captain Hewetson met up in 1689, they prepared a punch of “rum, water, lime-juice, egg yolk, sugar with a little nutmeg scrap’d on top.” The owners of the most rustic North American taverns in the eighteenth century concocted proprietary recipes for rum punch, which they touted, like their flip, to gain a marketing edge. Early tax inventories suggest that at taverns, punch bowls and cups were almost as common as benches and tankards.
Punch was the first global cocktail, a concoction born in the distant ports of India, England, and the West Indies. Some say the name punch evolved from puncheon, the small barrel from which sailors received grog rations. Others claim that the word came from the Hindustani word panch, meaning “five.” John Fryer, a British traveler suggested why in 1673: The “English on this coast [of India] make their enervating liquor called Paunch from five ingredients.” These five were traditionally tea, lemon, sugar, water, and arrack. The last was a liquor distilled from fermented palm sap and was generally considered nasty enough to make even the most fiery rum taste like cognac. Arrack screamed for dilution and sweetening. Punch was the answer.
As the recipe for punch worked its way westward along trade routes, to Europe and on to the New World, an astonishing number of variations surfaced. Sailors substituted new ingredients when they couldn’t obtain the old, and so punch was made with Madeira wine in the eastern Atlantic islands, with gin in England, and with rum in the West Indies and North America. The traditional five-part punch was adapted to local conditions; punch recipes called for as few as three or as many as six ingredients. Punch was sometimes made with milk, sometimes with a mix of green and pekoe tea, sometimes with egg yolks, and almost always with citrus. Fresh batches of imported lemons, limes, and oranges were advertised in North American cities for use as punch “sowrings.” On Barbados as early as 1694, Father Labat noted that punch consisted of two parts rum, one part water, sugar, lemon or lime juice, cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg. A nineteenth-century recipe for “the established corrective of West Indian languor” was to mix “a compound of rum, sugar, lime juice, and Angostura bitters,” which accordingly would be “frisked into effervescence by a stick”—a precursor to the swizzle stick. Pineapple often made it into punch, and at least one Barbados planter preferred his punch made with guava juice.
The most streamlined and enduring recipe for punch called for just four basic ingredients, the recipe distilled to a compact quatrain: “One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak.” The sour was usually lemon or lime juice; the sweet, sugar; the strong, rum; and the weak, water. This recipe was then modified to taste with spices (nutmeg is especially good) or enjoyed as is. It’s a timeless concoction, and variations of it are still the basis of the best rum punches you’ll be served at Caribbean resorts.
The ships that carried sailors and their rum-punch recipes to the New World didn’t travel just one way. Once emptied of their westbound freight in the ports of North America, they loaded up with fresh cargo, including locally distilled rum, and set off for the southern mainland colonies and beyond. Rum had found a comfortable and prosperous home from New England to Delaware, but shrewd colonists were certain that if a market could be cultivated in distant lands, America’s fortunes could only grow.
This is the story of where rum went when it left New England, and what happened when it got there.
* * *
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The summer of 1764 was busy for the Brown brothers of Providence, Rhode Island. John and Nicholas had recently become signatories on the charter for the new Rhode Island College in Warren. (It later moved to Providence and, in 1804, was renamed Brown University.) And much of the summer was given over to preparing the brig Sally for a trading voyage to the African coast. Nicholas—the head of Nicholas Brown and Company—oversaw business in Providence, but sent frequent instructions to John and their two other brothers, Joseph and Moses, who were at Newport helping to outfit the ship. Among the stores loaded aboard were tobacco, brown sugar, tar, candles, and rice. The ship’s manifest also suggests the human cargo it planned to collect when it arrived: a cask of gunpowder, seven swivel guns, eight small arms, thirteen cutlasses, a pair of blunderbusses, a dozen padlocks, three chains, and forty pairs each of handcuffs and shackles. The chief cargo aboard the Sally on the outbound voyage to the West African coast was rum, and dozens of casks were rolled aboard—some 159 hogsheads, plus another six smaller barrels, for a total of 17,274 gallons.
This wasn’t the Brown family’s first venture in the slave trade. Nearly three decades earlier, in 1736, the family patriarch, James Brown, was the first merchant in Providence to sign on w
ith a consortium that backed a slaving voyage to Africa, then onward to the West Indies to trade for coffee and other goods. In 1759, the Browns sent another schooner to Africa, but it was lost, most likely captured by French privateers. At any rate, the Browns certainly had company that summer in the harbors of Rhode Island, where local sea captains were near the peak of their reputation in the booming slave trade.
Rhode Island had little choice but to develop into a trading entrepôt. The southern colonies had their tobacco plantations, and cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York had great rivers and bays that opened to fertile farmlands, making them centers for the export of grain and produce. But like the rest of New England, Rhode Island had long, bitter winters and rocky, inhospitable soils. So Rhode Islanders turned to the thick forests that provided wood for ships and found the sheltered harbors were perfect for warehouses and anchorages. Rhode Island merchants soon became the Dutch of the English colonies, the masters of trade, first to the West Indies and then beyond.
Merchants or their agents on the islands might have gotten the idea to trade rum for slaves after noticing how much of the West Indian liquor was destined for Africa’s coast. The Royal African Company shipped 182,347 gallons of rum from Barbados, Antigua, and Jamaica to Africa between 1700 and 1727. And Rhode Island traders were no doubt aware that rum costing a shilling on the islands could fetch five times that when sent to West Africa.
So the rum and slave trade began to bend northward, as if through some implacable economic magnetism. New England had plenty of rum to trade, and abundant ships to move it. By 1772, about 75 percent of rum exported to Africa came from Boston and Rhode Island.
The Browns had signed a longtime employee (and later Revolutionary War hero), Esek Hopkins, as captain of the Sally and, as was customary on such voyages, had given him a free hand in trading. He was instructed to exchange rum for African slaves or any other goods that he thought might net a profit and then sail for the West Indies—precisely which island was left to his own judgment—where he would sell the slaves and other cargo for “hard cash or good bills of exchange.” (The Browns also requested that Hopkins return with four slaves for their own use.) They asked Hopkins to “dew as you Shall Think Best for our Interest.”
Hopkins and his cargo of rum arrived on the African coast in early November 1764. He discovered he was not alone—it was a busy year for slave traders, hustling to load their cargo because provincial duties on slaves were soon to be imposed in some of the North American colonies. Hopkins had at least one advantage. New England rum had been popular with African chieftains for two decades. “Guinea rum,” as it was called, was produced in New England specifically for the African trade, and was usually double-distilled and sometimes triple-distilled. As with Jamaican rum produced for England, the higher proof made it cheaper to ship. Guinea rum was meant to be watered down before being sold. Watering rum was an art, for too much water would make it of little interest to the Africans. Another trader, a Captain Burton, noted that African traders would visit with his ship between seven and ten each morning for negotiations and drinking rum. “If a glass of watered rum, which they detect more easily than we do watered milk, be offered them,” wrote the captain, “it will be thrown in the donor’s face.”
Hopkins spent nine months trading along the African coast—a long time, but not unusually so. (It commonly took six to twelve months to fill a ship with slaves.) His first trade was on November 10, when he swapped one gallon of rum for some wood. The next day, Hopkins brought three gallons of rum to the local tribal official to begin talks, and three days later he traded one hundred fifty-six gallons of rum and some flour, taking a pair of slaves in return. From then on, the ship’s trade manifest shows that rum left the Sally by the gallon and the hogshead. One hundred ninety-five gallons were traded for a boy and a girl slave in early December. Seventy-five were delivered as a tribute to an African king whom he met “under the palaver tree.” One hundred twelve gallons were traded with the king for a single slave; forty-eight gallons for a girl slave; fifty-two gallons for a boy slave; ten flasks for “country cloths;” three flasks as a reward for the return of a runaway slave; three hundred twenty-eight gallons for three slaves, some cloth, and one hundred sixty-five pounds of beeswax. And rum was distributed liberally as gratuities—a flask to the man who owned a spring and four flasks provided to another functionary to expedite an unspecified task.
As Hopkins learned, slaves could be acquired singly or in lots. Trading along the southern coast of west Africa was often quick and efficient, and enough slaves for a westward voyage to the islands could be acquired within a month or two. Other captains in other years might have acquired slaves in lots of a hundred or more at a single trade. But these tended to be weaker, less desirable slaves. The slaves that brought the best prices in the West Indies were found along the Gold Coast—roughly between Cape Verde and the Bight of Benin—where captains might spend as long as a year trading before the ship was full and readied for the West Indies.
Rum wasn’t the only product in demand at African trading posts. Slave sellers also wanted hardware—copper basins, tankards, and unworked brass—and kegs of tallow. Bolts of cloth were much esteemed, and for some reason African traders clamored for red blankets. Guns and gunpowder—the role of which is often overblown in modern accounts of the slave trade—were useful in tribal raids and for capturing more slaves. Guns were not of the highest quality, as the French learned in 1759. They had purchased a lot of muskets from traders on the island of St. Eustatius to defend against an anticipated British invasion. About three-quarters of the guns exploded violently upon the first shot—the French had made the novice’s error of buying munitions intended for barter in Africa.
Hopkins sold nine of his slaves before he left the African coast, believing he could fetch a better profit with other goods. He traded four young slaves for 270 bars of iron one month, and four old slaves for 240 bars the next; he also traded away a “man slave with his foot bitt of by a shark.” Hopkins hoisted his sails and departed the African coast in late August. He had on board 167 slaves along with his miscellaneous cargo.
New England sailors hated the Africa trade. Malaria, yellow fever, and dysentery were endemic along the Guinea coast, with the summer months especially fatal. While at anchor, the New England ships were a target for vengeful Africans and roaming pirates. And when the trading was completed, the outbound voyages were full of hazard; the chances of slaves rising in revolt in the first few days was considerable. Some slaves were convinced that their fate was to be fed, fattened, and devoured, and they had little incentive to remain docile. At least fifty-five slave uprisings on slave ships were recorded during the slave trade era, with possibly another hundred that went unremarked. Slave ships often departed the African coast with mounted guns aimed inboard and loaded with loose shot, ready to quell unrest. Not until the sight of land vanished over the horizon did the prisoners lose hope. Then the guns were swiveled around for action against pirates.
The Sally was among those ships struck by revolt. A week after departure, the captain and crew had to put down an uprising, when, Hopkins recorded, “Slaves Rose on us [and we were] obliged to fire on them and Destroyed 8 and several more wounded badly.” Another slave died of the wounds he received during a second, smaller revolt three weeks later.
The voyage, of course, was far more dreadful for the captives than the crew. The shortest crossing, from western Africa to Barbados, could be done in as little as three weeks, but it was the rare ship that could arrive with such haste. If hampered by slack winds and dismal conditions, the crossing might take three months. Slave ship captains at first debated whether tight packing or loose packing worked best. The tight packers had higher fatalities during the voyage owing to the less healthful conditions, but a trip with relatively little disease could yield a greater profit. By the middle of the eighteenth century, tight packing was the norm. The space allott
ed the slaves belowdecks was cramped beyond imagination. (“Not so much room as a man in his coffin,” wrote a ship’s doctor about a ship in 1788.) On average, about one in eight slaves died on the crossing; many deaths were ascribed to “fixed melancholy,” in which slaves simply lost the will to live and could not even be forced to eat.
Hopkins’s crossing took about a month and a half, and conditions were worse than average. His slaves had been dying for months—about twenty succumbed before he even left Africa. And the voyage was uncommonly deadly—scarcely a day passed that he didn’t record another fatality. After the failure of the revolts, many of the slaves simply gave up hope. Hopkins wrote that “some drowned themselves, some starved, and others sickened and died.” On at least two days, Hopkins recorded four deaths each. In all, some eighty-eight slaves perished during the voyage—about half his cargo. Those who survived were reported to be in a “very sickly and disordered manner.”
And for them, their arrival in the islands meant one nightmare would end and another would begin.
* * *
—
If not for slavery, sugar might have been a minor economic footnote in the rise of North America. Growing, harvesting, and processing sugar demanded an army of laborers, and planters wouldn’t have cultivated as many fields or reaped a fraction of the profits if they’d had to pay their workers. In any event, the indentured servants shipped over from England and other European countries proved ill-suited for dreary field work under the harsh tropical sun. Africans were less prone to tropical diseases (they died at one-quarter the rate of European immigrants), could be forced to work long hours and, while more expensive than indentured servants to acquire, cost less over time. Without the slaves, sugar would not have been produced in such heroic quantities; and without the molasses from the sugar, rum would not have become such a vital instrument of exchange between the colonies and Africa. Slaves made the rum, and rum made the slaves.
