Bittersweet

by Peter Macinnis

  The Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1888, suggests rum is a corruption of brom, a Malay word said to mean arak, the spirit distilled from palm juice, but this is not so. That word is beram, and while this would be pronounced rather like b’rum, the Malays’ beram is actually brewed from rice or tapioca. This is a long way from rum which, according to the Jamaican Excise Duty Law No. 73 of 1941, can be described as ‘spirits distilled solely from sugar cane juice, sugar cane molasses, or the refuse of the sugar cane, at a strength not exceeding 150 per cent proof spirit’—which means 75 per cent alcohol.

  To Richard Ligon, rum was a ‘a hot, hellish and terrible liquor’ also known as kill-devil, and before long the French called it guildive, corrupted without understanding from kill-devil, while the Danes called it kiel-dyvel.

  Rum today is produced from sugar cane by yeast fermentation. The ‘wash’ that is produced is about 6 per cent alcohol, and this distils to a clear, colourless liquid with up to 80 per cent alcohol and a sharp taste. Commercial white rums are essentially this product diluted back to 40 per cent alcohol, while gold rum is the same product after it has been aged in small (40 gallon) oak barrels. The ageing process sees some of the pungent volatile components evaporate, while chemical reactions between the rum and the oak add flavour. As well, some oxygen probably finds its way in to convert some of the alcohol to aromatic esters, compounds which give a variety of ‘fruity’ tastes.

  If sugar made the planters a profit, it was rum that sustained them. Even when sugar prices fell, rum was there to provide cash income, and if the price of rum fell it could be stored, or used to drown the planters’ sorrows. It could also serve to sweeten a sailor’s harsh life, a life that Dr Johnson likened to being in gaol, enlivened with the prospect of being drowned.

  The chorus ‘fifteen men on the dead man’s chest, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum’ reminds us that rum was one of the few creature comforts available to pirates, especially when they were at sea. Captain Kidd is said to have landed fifteen crew on the smallest of the Virgin Islands (supposedly coffin-shaped) to bury his treasure, and killed them all to keep his secret safe. Perhaps he gave them extra rum, or poisoned it to make them a pushover, and then pushed them into the hole—there were many ways rum could kill a sailor.

  ‘OLD GROG’

  Admiral Edward Vernon, born in 1684, was a captain in the Royal Navy at 21, and a rear-admiral at 24. He served successfully for many years until (according to his supporters) he was forced out because he was right too often. By then he had won many famous battles, but none so famous as his battle against rum for sailors. Too many Jack Tars went aloft, he argued, with too much good Jamaica rum under their belts, made a false step—and died.

  ‘Good Jamaica rum’, Vernon may have called it, but all too often it was the distillers’ bilge water, lees and rubbish that merchants could not dispose of in any other way, sold on to conniving clerks, landsmen leeches who were ostensibly in the pay of the Admiralty but simultaneously were more lucratively in the pay of the merchants. These men grew rich on the payments they had for taking third- and fourth-rate stuff.

  At least the sailors could test the rum for the amount of spirit. They just poured some on a pinch of gunpowder and set a spark to it—if the rum was proof or better, the water in it boiled off as steam, the powder dried, there was a flash as the powder burned, and the rum passed the proof, or test. Underproof rum left the powder damp and unfired.

  Thus the sailors could make sure the rum contained enough spirit to warm a man’s belly—but that was also enough to make him careless-footed when aloft, and slow to react in battle. Before the 1650s, wine and beer were given to sailors, then brandy was used for a while, but by the 1680s, after Britain took Jamaica from the Spanish and expanded sugar production, somebody had to use all the rum that was being made. Since rum, unlike wine and beer, did not go bad at sea, it was added to the range of acceptable beverages.

  Still the rum killed men, so Admiral Vernon ordered that it be watered before it was issued. The men already called him ‘Old Grog’, on account of the waterproof boat cloak he wore made of a cloth called grogram or grosgrain; by extension, the watered rum gained the name of grog. The word passed into the English language, even as the sailors complained that Old Grog was depriving them of an essential of life.

  In 1740 Vernon ordered that the daily allowance of one pint of rum per man be mixed with one quart of water in a scuttled butt, a barrel with one end removed kept for that purpose. This was to be done on deck, in the presence of the lieutenant of the watch, who was to see that no man was cheated of his proper allowance.

  Grog could also be used as a reward for sailors who carried out complex and difficult tasks. The mainbrace was a fearsomely heavy cable which controlled the mainsail, and if this parted and needed to be joined, a long splice was required, a form of joining that would allow the cable to pass through the blocks (pulleys to landsmen). Until the mainbrace was spliced, the ship had to be held on one tack, so the men who carried out this task needed to work fast and well, and thus earned an extra ration of grog. When there was a general bonus issue, the crew was also said to ‘splice the mainbrace’.

  Where rum was used on ships after Vernon wrote his order, throughout the navy the daily allowance of one pint of rum mixed with one quart of water was issued in two parts: one in the forenoon and the other in the evening. In 1824, the evening issue was stopped and in 1850 the ration was cut to one gill (one-eighth of a pint) of rum with two gills of water per man per day. In 1937 the amount of water was halved, and in 1970 the ‘grog era’ ended when the Royal Navy’s rum ration was cut altogether.

  RUM, SUGAR AND TAXES

  In the eighteenth century, rum was important wherever English was spoken. While Longfellow’s story of Paul Revere’s ride may have glossed over his stop at Medford, the famous silversmith and equestrian was more open about it, and recalled later that he ‘refreshed himself’ at Medford, leaving no doubt that he had taken some of the New England rum centre’s most famous product. George Washington is reputed to have gained election to the Virginia House of Burgesses as a result of his judicious sharing of 75 gallons of rum among the voters.

  In the infant colony of Australia rum was important because the colony at Botany Bay was run by naval men while the soldiers who guarded the convicts were marines. Both naval officers and marines (a separate service) had a high regard for rum, and the marines especially saw it as a way to make money. Rum became a major item of currency in the settlement at Sydney Cove. William Bligh, of Bounty fame, and later the governor of the colony, noted:

  A sawyer will cut one hundred timber for a bottle of spirits—value two shillings and sixpence—which he drinks in a few hours; when for the same labour he would charge two bushels of wheat, which would furnish Bread for him for two months.

  Convinced that rum was an evil, Bligh ran foul of the marines—known locally as the Rum Corps—who had gained a stranglehold on the small colony. He seized an illegally imported still and provoked the Rum Rebellion, a mutiny which should by rights have led to the hanging of those responsible, but did not. The Rum Rebellion, and the English government’s varied responses to it over two decades, led in the end to the colony of New South Wales gaining a measure of self-rule.

  Rum and sugar meant money, and money meant power, so rum and sugar influenced the way power was used, and not just by way of dispensing strong spirits to the voters. Because of the wealth it brought, and the way that wealth was used, the sugar trade can be credited with (or blamed for) the large number of people of African origin in the Americas and Britain today, the spread of English-speaking influence across North America, and much more. It is even possible to make the case that today’s political world was shaped by events and forces associated with sugar. This process can be readily traced in England, where members of Parliament were often elected by ‘rotten boroughs’, localities which might once have had many voters but now had a bare handful who did as the
y were told.

  All forms of sugar were highly taxed, and the English government (amongst others) took the view that as much profit as possible should be returned to the ‘home’ nation. This meant that the sugar colonies were forced to send raw sugar back to Europe, where the value-added procedures of refining could be carried out. As those who are taxed always do, the planters complained, and sought relief from the taxes, which they saw as adding to the price—or worse, filching their profits. Not unnaturally, they felt that all the money paid by the end consumer should go to them, the sugar producers. In England, because the planters were rich (even with the taxes they were paying), ‘sugar interests’ were able to buy up many of the rotten boroughs, in order to force changes favourable to them, by holding the balance of power.

  In 1767 Lord Chesterfield tried to buy a rotten borough for his son, but found that the cupboard was bare, according to a borough-monger who said that ‘there was no such thing as a borough to be had now; for that the rich East and West Indians had secured them all, at the rate of three thousand pounds at least; but many at four thousand; and two or three, that he knew, at five thousand’. In the longer term, this abuse of the rotten boroughs helped to build up the pressure for electoral reform, leading to a more democratic Britain. The connection with sugar and rum is small, but they did play a part.

  Around 1780, King George III was riding in a carriage with the then Prime Minister, Pitt the Elder, when he saw a carriage far outclassing his. He asked who the owner was, and learned that it belonged to a West Indian planter. According to the tale, the King, who was not always dotty, said, ‘Sugar, sugar, eh? All that sugar. How are the duties, eh, Pitt, how are the duties?’ The tale may be apocryphal, but it illustrates the nature of sugar wealth, and how it was seen as a source of revenue.

  This was the pattern of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England that Jane Austen showed us in Mansfield Park, where a plantation-owning family had become immensely rich and bought themselves an estate. The ‘new rich’ were looked down on by their neighbours, but as they spent their way into power and influence, so the West Indian plantocracy managed to infiltrate the lower ranks of the aristocracy, and to become, at the least, suitable for marrying to younger sons and daughters.

  There was a major difference between the French sugar islands—which were a market for French brandy—and the English islands—which provided rum for the English drinker. While Jamaica and the other English islands used all of their molasses to make rum for a market they controlled, the French planters needed to dispose of their molasses somewhere away from France, so quite a lot of it ended up in what were then Britain’s American colonies.

  Much French molasses was shipped to Rhode Island, where it was converted to rum and smuggled to the other colonies. Here we find one of the major causes of the American Revolution— but to place it properly, we need to consider the Seven Years’ War of 1756–1763, mainly involving Britain and France in a struggle for world supremacy. It was a worldwide conflict fought in Europe, North America and India, with Austria, Russia, Saxony, Sweden and Spain joining with the French, and Prussia and Hanover supporting Britain. It ended with the defeat of the French.

  In the peace negotiations that followed, neither side cared much about who ended up with the Canadian colonies, but the sugar colonies were valuable. There were those in England who thought in terms of tax revenues, and argued that Britain should hold on to the captured French islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia. Against this, England’s ‘American interests’ wanted the French out of North America. The sugar interests realised that sugar from a British-owned Guadeloupe would compete in the English markets on equal terms with their own sugar, and they argued for the return of the Caribbean islands to France. In the end, England offered an exchange: some of the sugar islands for all of Canada (an offer which Voltaire mocked as exchanging sugar for snow).

  This exchange had far-reaching consequences, but it was only part of the war settlement. To prevent the entire Louisiana territory falling to the British, in 1762 the French had secretly ceded (under the Treaty of Fontainebleau) the area west of the Mississippi and the Isle of Orleans to Spain. The Treaty of Paris (the 1763 peace treaty) ceded all French territory east of the Mississippi, except the Isle of Orleans, to the British, which meant that it would soon become part of the new United States. In an 1800 treaty, Spain transferred the land west of the Mississippi back to France, setting the scene for the Louisiana Purchase. The cards were dealt, the play was about to begin—and once again, the play revolved around sugar.

  Returning to the Seven Years’ War: after 1763, Britain continued to hold the ‘ceded islands’ of Dominica, Grenada, St Vincent and Tobago, which were still allowed to import timber from Canada and the New England colonies, and to export molasses and rum to those places. The next year England made an unwise move, when Parliament passed the Sugar Act of 1764. The effect of this was to continue the Molasses Act of 1733 and place a duty

  . . . for and upon all white or clayed sugars of the produce or manufacture of any colony or plantation in America, not under the dominion of his Majesty . . .; for and upon indico, and coffee of foreign produce or manufacture; for and upon all wines (except French wine) for and upon all wrought silks, bengals, and stuffs, mixed with silk or herba, of the manufacture of Persia, China, or East India, and all callico painted, dyed, printed, or stained there; and for and upon all foreign linen cloth called Cambrick and French Lawns, which shall be imported or brought into any colony or plantation in America, which now is, or hereafter may be, under the dominion of his Majesty . . .

  Other parts of the Act placed duties on rum, spirits and molasses, and the Americans suddenly realised that England was surplus to their requirements. The merchants of Rhode Island had lost a great deal of shipping in the Seven Years’ War and now were suffering from a tax that cut directly into their profits— and they did not like it. The smugglers of Rhode Island also found themselves under threat, and in 1764 the excise schooner St John was driven off by fire from a shore battery—Rhode Islanders still claim these as the first shots in the coming war. Another excise schooner, the Liberty, was burned by the people of Newport in 1769. In 1772 a third schooner, the Gaspee, was lured onto a sandbar and the Rhode Islanders went out in longboats and burned the ship.

  Britain had been able to get away with taxing the American colonies when the French in Canada were a threat, but now, because of Britain’s own choices under the Treaty of Paris, the colonies no longer felt at risk, and concluded that they were free to control their own destiny. It was sugar politics that had cleared the major part of the North American continent of other European powers; and it was sugar politics that led to the formation of an independent nation that could buy the land west of the Mississippi from the French, and so extend the realm of the English speakers across the whole continent. That in turn allowed the expansion of the United States, so early nineteenth-century sugar politics and policies can be said to have played a very real part in the shaping of the balance of power in the twentieth century.

  On a much smaller scale sugar also shaped the future of Fiji. While formal power had been ceded to the British by the islands’ chiefs in 1874, the Governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, was determined to avoid the land alienation that had happened in Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand. To make sure planters and other immigrants did not take over all the land, he formalised the Bose Levu Vakaturaga, the Great Council of Chiefs, to advise the governor on ‘Fijian affairs’. The tensions now seen between the descendants of Indian indentured labour and modern Fijians stem from this decision.

  SEA POWER, SUGAR AND WAR

  One curious effect of the American War of Independence was the British build-up of naval power. After a fleet of 24 French ships stopped a British fleet from entering Chesapeake Bay to relieve the army of Lord Cornwallis in September 1781, Britain’s navy went into a decline which saw most of the British sugar colonies picked off by the French until Admiral Rodney’s
victory at The Saints in 1782 stopped the French taking Jamaica, the greatest prize of all. Whatever interpretation we put on the French role in America’s war, the French had no doubts of what it was really about: the control of sugar colonies and sugar incomes.

  After the peace of 1783, Britain began to rearm, building 43 new ships of the line, repairing 85 others, establishing a base in Australia and another on Norfolk Island in the nearby Pacific Ocean. (The French had looked at the island and dismissed it as only ‘fit for angels and eagles to reside’, because it lacked safe anchorages.) While Norfolk Island was useless as a naval base, the British saw the Norfolk Island pines as timber for masts and spars, and they set about growing flax as the raw material for sail canvas. They ‘imported’ (that is, kidnapped) two Maori men to weave the flax, not realising that among the Maori, weaving was done only by the women.

  Most Australians believe their nation was created solely as a dumping ground for convicts, but the authorities also saw it as establishing a base that might support the British navy in the East Indies, still very much a theatre of war. James Matra, a Loyalist who had sailed to the Pacific and visited Norfolk Island and the Australian coast and Botany Bay with Cook in 1770, argued in 1783 for an Australian settlement, drawing in timber from New Zealand for naval purposes, and growing spices:

  . . . as part of New South Wales lies in the same latitude with the Moluccas, and is very close to them, there is every reason to suppose that what nature has so bountifully bestowed on the small islands may also be found on the larger. But if . . . it should not be so . . . as the seeds are procured without difficulty, any quantity may speedily be cultivated.