Rum: the spirit of the sugar islands

Where did rum come from?

Rum was born on the sugar plantations. Cane spirits were probably being made in Portuguese Brazil first, but the English island of Barbados gave the drink its English name. Planters there switched to sugar in the 1640s. Richard Ligon, an Englishman who lived on the island from 1647 to 1650, described the island’s own drink, made from the skimmings of the copper pans that boiled the sugar, which people called kill-devil.

A Barbados manuscript of 1651 gives it two names, rumbullion and kill-devil, and describes it as a fiery, fearsome liquor. By the late 1650s it was also called rum, probably short for rumbullion, though nobody knows for certain where either word came from. In the 1650s Barbados planters began shipping it from ports such as Bridgetown to North America and then to Europe. No cane spirit had travelled so far as a trade good before.

How was rum made?

Rum was made from things the sugar works would otherwise have thrown away.

• Skimmings. As cane juice boiled in the copper kettles, workers skimmed the scum off the top.
• Molasses. As the raw sugar cured in pots, a dark syrup called molasses dripped out.
• Fermenting. These “sweets” were mixed with water and with dunder, the leftover liquid from earlier batches, and left in vats to ferment.
• Distilling. The fermented wash was boiled in a still in the plantation’s still-house, and the strong spirit that came off was collected as rum.

The first record of adding extra molasses to the skimmings comes from Jamaica in 1687, and over time molasses became the main ingredient. Rum usually earned a planter between a tenth and a fifth of his income; sugar brought in the rest. Like the sugar, it was made on plantations worked by enslaved Africans.

Who made and bought rum around 1715?

By the game’s era rum was big business. In the early 1700s Jamaica alone shipped about 100,000 gallons a year to Britain, an amount that grew about twenty times over by the 1770s.

New England made its own. Boston had a licensed distiller by the 1640s and, from the 1670s, distilleries along the harbour, some of them worked by enslaved people. Their raw material was molasses from the sugar islands. In 1713 France limited imports of rum from its own islands to protect French brandy and wine makers, so French planters sold their molasses cheaply to New England traders. New England rum was thought poorer than island rum, but it was cheap. In the 1730s people in Britain’s North American colonies drank nearly four gallons of rum each a year.

The industry kept growing. By 1750 Boston had 25 distilleries, and by 1764 Newport, Rhode Island, had 22. In 1733 Parliament put a heavy tax on foreign molasses, the Molasses Act, but merchants mostly avoided it by smuggling.

How was rum linked to the slave trade?

Rum was tied to slavery at both ends. In the Caribbean it was made by enslaved people. In New England it became a trade good for buying people. Ships from Boston and above all Rhode Island carried rum to West Africa, where it was exchanged, along with other goods, for captives. The captives were carried to the Caribbean and sold, and ships often came home with molasses to make more rum.

Rhode Island’s first slaving voyages date from the early 1700s. The trade grew through the century until Rhode Island ships made about three in five of all slave voyages from North America, more than a thousand voyages in all.

One person who lived through this trade was a boy named Broteer, later called Venture Smith. He remembered being bought on the African coast for “four gallons of rum and a piece of calico” by an officer of a Rhode Island ship, probably one that sailed from Newport in 1738, a few years after the game’s years. His story was printed in 1798.

Did sailors really get a rum ration?

Yes, but not quite the way it is usually told. Navy sailors were given a daily allowance of drink as part of their food, because stored water soon went bad. In home waters that meant a gallon of beer a day. In the Caribbean beer spoiled and rum was cheap, so from the late 1600s ships there often served rum instead. One naval historian dates the Navy’s official use of Caribbean rum to 1687. The Navy’s rules of 1731 made it official: half a pint of rum, brandy or arrack (a spirit from Asia), or a pint of wine, could take the place of the gallon of beer.

The watered rum called grog came later still. In August 1740 Admiral Edward Vernon, worried about drunkenness, ordered his men’s half-pint mixed with a quart of water and served on deck. Sailors called him Old Grog, said to be after his cloak of coarse grogram cloth, and the drink took his name. The Royal Navy served its last rum ration on 31 July 1970.

The ration was food and drink, not wages, though an extra serving was sometimes given as a reward.

Did pirates really drink rum?

Pirates did drink, often heavily, but they drank whatever they could get: wine, brandy, beer, rum and punch, a big bowl of spirits mixed with water, sugar and citrus. The 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates by “Captain Charles Johnson”, which is partly embellished, says the rules of Bartholomew Roberts’s crew gave every man an equal share of strong drink, and that Roberts himself was a sober man who preferred tea. The same book prints notes it claims came from Blackbeard’s journal, grumbling that the rum had run out; no such journal survives, so nobody can check it.

Records show that drink did help bring some pirates down. In October 1720 Calico Jack Rackham’s crew had been drinking punch with visitors when an armed sloop from Jamaica caught them. In February 1722 many of Roberts’s men were still drunk or hungover from a captured ship’s liquor when the warship Swallow attacked.

The song about fifteen men and a bottle of rum is not a pirate song at all. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote it for his novel Treasure Island, published in 1883, more than 150 years after the pirates of the game’s era.