by Wayne Curtis
The number of slaves imported to the islands was staggering. They outnumbered Europeans immigrating to the New World throughout the whole of the eighteenth century and nearly half of the nineteenth. The population of Europeans on Barbados peaked at about 20,000 from 1650 into the 1770s. The number of slaves, meanwhile, grew to about 50,000 by the 1680s—about 2 per arable acre—a number that would hold steady for more than a century. The typical West Indian sugar plantation had at least 50 slaves, but commonly had 200 to 300. (Compare that to the United States: In the 1850s, fewer than half worked on plantations with more than 30 slaves.)
For the planters, life on a sugar plantation was, not surprisingly, very agreeable. Father Antoine Biet visited Barbados in 1654 and noted that a great bowl of punch was often brought out after the midday meal, and toasts were offered all around until the punch bowl was dry. “The afternoon passes thus, in drinking and smoking, but quite often one is so drunk that he cannot return home,” Biet reported. “Our gentlemen found this life extremely pleasant.”
Life was not so pleasant outside the walls of the great houses. (The perimeter was often planted with lime trees, which not only provided fruit for punch, but had thorns that kept the slaves at a distance.) Slaves planted and harvested the sugar fields and ran the boiling houses and distilling operations, working long hours in conditions that ranged from almost tolerable to beyond wretched. Slaves on Jamaica typically had Saturday and Sunday off, but they were expected to farm their own food during those days. On Barbados, they had only one day off, but at least got most of their food from their overseers. That food, however, was dreadful. Slaves were often fed the worst of the salt cod from Newfoundland (the best went to Europe), and the salted pork from the southern mainland colonies was generally ill prepared. It was customary on the English islands for slaves to get the carcasses of cattle and horses that had died of disease. They were also given about a gallon and a half of molasses each year, although that ration was gradually eliminated as molasses became more valuable for export and distillation.
For the slaves, rum provided nutrition, currency, and entertainment. At some plantations, they were expected to barter their allowance of rum for food, but many typically drank it and suffered, as a result, from malnutrition. Rum could also be a reward. Slaves that turned in other slaves for stealing might be paid, as one plantation visitor noted in 1833, a “trifle in money, flesh, fish or rum.” At Codrington Plantation on Barbados, a captured runaway slave would earn the capturer a gallon of plantation rum.
The rum rations given to the slaves varied from plantation to plantation, and from island to island. If the weather was especially disagreeable or the work unusually hard (such as digging the holes for cane planting), an overseer with a reputation for some humanity might take pity and provide an extra ration or two. Among the more generous plantations was Worthy Park, in St. John’s Parish on Jamaica. Each week some of the slaves—including the three drivers, three carpenters, four sugar boilers, the cooper, the blacksmith, and the watchman—were given a full quart of rum. The children’s field nurse, the midwife, and the potter got a pint each week. In 1796, some 922 gallons went to Worthy Park slaves over the Christmas season—about two quarts each, which might have made for a merrier Christmas than usual. (Frederick Douglass, who grew up a slave in eastern Maryland in the early nineteenth century, observed that holiday debauches in which liquor was liberally provided to slaves were “useful in keeping down the spirit of insurrection” by allowing the slaves to equate freedom with an incapacitating hangover. “When the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field—feeling upon the whole rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom.”)
While a little rum might keep the slaves content, a lot could have the opposite effect, provoking rebellion. And island colonists, who were greatly outnumbered by Africans, lived in constant fear of being awakened in their bedrooms by a band of slaves bent on retribution. Among the early laws on Barbados was one that required a planter to hire one white servant for every ten slaves, to ensure that enough free men were available to respond to uprisings. One of the great reasons the British West Indies didn’t join their cousins to the north in rebelling against the English Crown—after all, they, too, labored under heavy-handed taxation without representation—was the planters’ desperate need of the British navy. Whereas the northern colonists resented the redcoats on their soil, the planters knew that without a heavily armed navy prowling the islands, slaves would be more liable to rise up against their European masters.
And rebellions did occur—they’re listed and dated in island histories like notable hurricanes: in Barbados in 1685, 1692, 1702, and 1818; in Antigua in 1736; at Demerara in 1823 (twice); in Jamaica in 1831 and 1832. As many as seventy-five rebellions broke out in the British West Indies before 1837.
The year 1736, for instance, was uncommonly dry in the Caribbean, and this resulted in shortages of water and food on Antigua. The slaves suffered most, naturally. Outnumbering the whites eight to one—24,000 to 3,000—slave leaders plotted to pack gunpowder beneath the floor of a ballroom, then, during the king’s birthday ball on the evening of October 20, blow the island’s elite into the blue Caribbean sky. The explosion that echoed around the island would serve as a signal to slaves on other plantations to slay all the whites they encountered.
October came and a bloodbath ensued, but it wasn’t the one slaves had envisioned. Planters got wind of the conspiracy and launched a brutal campaign of torture to root out every slave involved. Slaves were wrapped in chains and left to die, broken on the rack, and burned alive. In all, eighty-eight slaves were killed. More would likely have died had not the island treasury exhausted its funds to reimburse planters for slaves who were executed or died during questioning.
The great arrows of the Triangle Trade depicted in history textbooks—New England to Africa to the West Indies and back to New England again—serve as a simple illustration of how the rum trade kept the great mechanism of colonial economic development humming along. The rum-to-slaves-to-molasses trade brought untold fortunes to merchants and sugar planters, as well as African chieftains selling captured slaves. H. F. Willkie noted the triangle’s perpetual-motion-like quality in 1947, when he wrote, “Slaves worked in the sugar-cane plantations, preparing the molasses from which rum was made to buy more slaves.” Another historian called the trade “the backbone of New England prosperity,” and yet another wrote that it’s “probably not an exaggeration to say that the slave trade was the lubricating oil that kept the machinery of the colonial [New England] economy moving smoothly.” The Triangle Trade even left its mark on popular culture, most memorably in the 1969 Broadway musical 1776, whose hit song was “Molasses to Rum.” (“Molasses to rum to slaves, Oh what a beautiful waltz, You dance with us, We dance with you, Molasses and rum and slaves…”)
The Triangle Trade was horrifically elegant, easy for teachers to explain to students, and readily comprehended by sixth-graders. As an historical fact, it lacks only one thing: truth. The smooth-running and sinister New England Triangle Trade is, in large part, an overblown myth.
For starters, no New England traders are known to have completed a single circuit of that triangle. Historian Clifford Shipton spent years of sifting through hundreds of New England shipping records, yet couldn’t recall “a single example of a ship engaged in such a triangular trade.” (Another historian drew the same conclusion after an exhaustive review of Philadelphia shipping records.) Even the Sally was engaged in just two legs of the trade. She failed to load up on molasses in the West Indies. Instead, the Browns demanded cash.
An historian taking a longer view might look at the larger picture and conclude that a variation of the Triangle Trade did exist. After all, some ships brought New England rum to Africa to trade for slaves, other ships brought slaves to the West Indies to trade for molasses, and
some other ships—many, actually—traded for molasses to bring back to New England. But did this amount to a powerful economic engine that fueled the emerging economy?
Not likely. Compared to overall global trade, between the colonies and with the greater world beyond, the value of the rum-for-slaves trade was minimal. It didn’t come close to providing an economic engine for early New England. More molasses went into pudding, beer making, and baked beans than into rum for the slave trade. As rum historian John McCusker puts it, “the involvement of the Continental Colonies in the slave trade [during the later colonial period] was insignificant by every measure we can apply but a human one.”
Rum, it turns out, was welcome but not terrifically esteemed at African slave stations. It was useful in African ceremonies commemorating the dead and in tribal rites where it was poured down the throat of the corpse. (This was typically followed by a three-day celebration in which the tribesmen would consume it freely to remember—or forget—the past.) But there’s little evidence that the Africans took to guzzling rum with anything like the zeal of their North American counterparts. If rum had been the central engine of the slave trade, the quantities exported would have turned the African coast into an alcoholic swamp. As it was, traders complained about temporary rum surpluses on the slave coast, as in 1777 when the price went so low as to make trade untenable. (This was during the Revolutionary War and was likely the result of West Indian rum being diverted to Africa after North American markets were largely closed off.) In the end, exports from New England to Africa accounted for less than 4 percent of all rum produced in and imported to the northern colonies.
Even if one takes rum out of the triangle, the New England involvement in the slave trade was relatively limited. Historian Jay Coughtry identified 934 voyages, carrying more than 106,000 Africans, from Rhode Island to Africa between 1709 and 1807. That’s a large number, but still less than 1 percent of all the slaves brought across the Atlantic. British ships alone carried 2.5 million. Rhode Island was a bit player. Indeed, fewer than 1 percent of cargo ships sailing from the northern colonies were destined for Africa and the slave trade.
The simple truth is that the slave trade wasn’t very profitable, with or without rum. It was risky, and the money made from a successful voyage wasn’t enough to compensate. Rhode Island’s Nicholas Brown sent two other ships to Africa in addition to the money-losing Sally. One was lost at sea and the other managed only a very slight profit. Brown abandoned the slave trade and looked for business elsewhere.
So where did this notion of a vast, smoothly ticking Triangle Trade originate, and how did it become so ingrained in popular history? As with many legends, it started small, first suggested (vaguely and inconclusively) in an 1866 book by George H. Moore on the history of slavery in Massachusetts. In 1872, it was picked up by another historian, George C. Mason. But the idea didn’t come into full flower until 1887, when American businessman and historian William B. Weeden presented a lecture that creatively interpreted the previous two studies. Weeden held up a few isolated examples of the New England slave trade and, in the absence of other records, extrapolated from them aggressively. “We have seen molasses and alcohol, rum and slaves, gold and iron, in a perpetual and unwholesome round of commerce,” Weeden wrote. “All society was fouled in this lust; it was inflamed by the passion for wealth…” His argument found a receptive audience, and McCusker suspects this was because of a “morbid and somewhat flagellant fascination on the part of late nineteenth century New Englanders with the sins of their forefathers.”
The myth found further traction thanks to various political and social movements of the time. Southerners who fought against the abolition of slavery hauled out the idea of the Triangle Trade to show the rank hypocrisy of New England abolitionists. Their argument went like this: Northerners could criticize slavery and call for its end, but only because they had already made their fortunes with slavery and the rum trade. Abolition was thus only a matter of economic selfishness. One southern magazine in 1855 referred to the “morbid sensibility evinced in the northern section of our Union upon the subject of slavery,” noting that northerners liked to ignore “the substantial fact” that Rhode Islanders were as late as 1808 “trading rum on the coast of Africa for negroes!”
The temperance movement later exploited the Triangle Trade in its crusade against Demon Rum. Booze could be presented as the instrument of enslavement for millions of unfortunates. An investigator with the Church Missionary Society in Africa in the 1880s reported solemnly that he’d seen churches with pews made of liquor boxes, and “canoes in hundreds coming down by river laden with the most precious products of the interior and returning with nothing but filthy drink.”
Rum is not untarnished in the long, sour history of the slave trade, but neither is it the kill-devil so often portrayed. As so often is the case, the shadow proved more alarming than the object that cast it.
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Like flip, the classic punch—whether made from rum, brandy, or wine—began to fall out of fashion in the nineteenth century and was consigned to live out its retirement at regimental reunions and college dances. The working class increasingly took up beer, and the upper classes became enamored of a new breed of sophisticated cocktail that included the Manhattan, the martini, and the whiskey old-fashioned. The punch bowl was stashed away in the closet, to be replaced by Collins glasses and coupes.
But punch wasn’t out yet. A small punch craze surfaced in the 1930s, following Prohibition, when planter’s punch emerged as a wildly popular new drink. It actually wasn’t all that new; variants of it had appeared decades earlier. The Planter’s Hotel (now defunct) in St. Louis claimed credit for the invention of planter’s punch based, not implausibly, on its connection with Jerry Thomas, head bartender at the hotel in the mid-1800s and the author of the first bartender’s manual. But the hotels’ proprietors also claimed credit for the Tom Collins, forcing one to discount their credibility. In fact, Thomas included a great many punch recipes in his early cocktail books, but none for planter’s punch. (Another Planter’s Hotel in South Carolina has also claimed credit for the punch.)
At any rate, planter’s punch is a class of drink rather than a single cocktail, with hundreds of variations floating around, and more invented daily. Each bartender and each generation has variously added to, subtracted from, improved, and spoiled the drink.
Here’s the starting point. The New York Times ran this ditty in 1908 under the title “Planter’s Punch,” providing a somewhat modified classic punch recipe.
This recipe I give to thee,
Dear brother in the heat.
Take two of sour (lime let it be)
To one and a half of sweet.
Of Old Jamaica pour three strong,
And add four parts of weak.
Then mix and drink. “I do no wrong—
I know whereof I speak.”
The drink had been around long enough that as early as 1920, a writer in a Jamaican paper groused that the planter’s punch “has fallen off in strength from what it was in the great days of old when it comes to drinking.” Yet few agreed on what went into one. During Prohibition, a writer insisted planter’s punch needed to have grenadine and should be topped off with soda water and served in a tall, frosted glass. Most recipes called for lime juice. Others called for the addition of grapefruit juice, orange juice, or both. Varied and assorted fruits have joined the parade. Charles Baker’s cocktail guide (1939) abandons any pretense of sorting it all out and lists ten recipes for planter’s punch. Island resorts today have their own recipes, and many are quick to claim their own as the original.
If there’s a standard planter’s punch, I’m guessing it can trace its origins back to the 1920s and to the Myrtle Bank Hotel in Kingston, Jamaica, arguably the most elegant hotel on the island in its day. “I soon found myself in the Myrtle Bank Hotel, and a
planter’s punch soon found itself in me,” wrote a theater columnist for the New York World of his visit to Kingston in 1921. He went on: “A planter’s punch is made of pure Jamaica rum, a little cane syrup, cracked ice along with a slice of native pineapple and orange to make it more attractive. If one is at all fussy one can have a cherry in it too. The price is the same with or without the cherry at the Myrtle Bank bar.”
The drink was popular enough that the Jamaican distiller who made Myers’s rum went on to label its as “Planter’s Punch Rum,” words still emblazoned on some bottles today. The popularity of dark Jamaican rum was such that even distillers in Puerto Rico and Cuba, famous for their lighter rums, started producing a dark rum specifically to meet the demand for planter’s punch cocktails.
To my mind, the final word on planter’s punch appeared in 1936 in the New York Times. “For many people seem to feel that there are only two recipes—the right one and the wrong,” wrote Jane Cobb of the ongoing controversy. “In the Ritz-Carlton [in New York], for example, Planter’s Punch may appear made with lime juice or lemon juice, white sugar or brown, a dash of brandy or a dash of Angostura bitters, all depending on which of the three bars it is served at. The chances are ten to one that most people who drink the punches like them very much, no matter which version is served. Anyway the sensible thing to do is to drink slowly and stop fussing.”
If rum is the archetypal New World drink—protean, varied, inconsistent—planter’s punch is its cocktail equivalent. Try inventing one yourself. Start with something basic, then adapt it: Give it a college degree and better clothes. Try exotic fruit or maybe some bitters. It doesn’t really matter what you do. Planter’s punch can be constantly reinvented. It’s owned by whomever wants to claim it.
