A History of the World in 6 Glasses (9 page)

The Atlantic islands of Madeira, the Azores, and the Canaries proved to be ideal places to produce sugar, another Arab introduction. But growing sugarcane required enormous amounts of water and manpower. The Arabs had amassed a range of irrigation techniques and labor-saving devices during their westward expansion, including the water screw, the Persian innovation of underground aqueducts, and water-powered mills to process sugarcane. Even so, sugar production under the Arabs relied on slaves, mostly brought in from East Africa. The Europeans captured many of the Arab sugar plantations during the religious wars of the Crusades but lacked experience in growing sugar and needed even more manpower to maintain production. During the 1440s the Portuguese began to ship black slaves from their trading posts on the west coast of Africa. At first these slaves were kidnapped, but the Portuguese soon agreed to buy slaves, in return for European goods, from African traders.

Mass slavery had been unseen in Europe since Roman times, in part for religious reasons, for doctrine forbade the enslavement of one Christian by another. Such theological objections to the new slave trade were overlooked or sidestepped using a number of dubious arguments. At first, it was suggested that by buying slaves and converting them to Christianity, Europeans were rescuing them from the false doctrine of Islam. But then another argument emerged: Black Africans, argued some theologians, did not qualify as fully human, could not, therefore, become Christians, and could be enslaved. They were, according to another theory, "children of Ham," so their enslavement was sanctioned by the Bible. This insidious logic was not widely accepted, at least at first. But the remoteness of the Atlantic islands meant the use of slave labor could be kept conveniently out of sight. By 1500 the introduction of slaves had turned Madeira into the largest exporter of sugar in the world, with several mills and two thousand slaves.

The use of slaves in sugar production expanded dramatically after the European discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus in 1492. He had been looking for a westerly passage to the East Indies but instead found the islands of the Caribbean. There was no gold, spices, or silk to take back to his royal patrons in Spain, but Columbus confidently declared the islands ideal for growing sugar, a business he knew well. On his second voyage to the New World in 1493 he took sugarcane from the Canary Islands. Production was soon under way on the Spanish islands of the Caribbean and on the South American mainland, in what is now Brazil, under the Portuguese. Attempts to enslave the indigenous people failed, as they inexorably succumbed to Old-World diseases, so the colonists began importing slaves directly from Africa instead. Over the course of four centuries, around eleven million slaves were transported from Africa to the New World, though this figure understates the full scale of the suffering, because as many as half the slaves captured in the African interior died on the way to the coast. Distilled drinks played a central role in this evil trade, which intensified as the British, French, and Dutch established sugar plantations in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century.

The African slavers who supplied the Europeans with slaves accepted a range of products in exchange, including textiles, shells, metal bowls, jugs, and sheets of copper. But most sought-after by far were strong alcoholic drinks. The Africans in different regions already drank alcoholic drinks such as palm wine, mead, and various varieties of beer, all of which dated back to antiquity. But alcohol imported from Europe was, in the words of one trader, "everywhere called for," even in Muslim parts of Africa. In the early days of the slave trade, when it was dominated by Portugal, African slavers acquired a taste for strong Portuguese wines. In 1510 the Portuguese traveler Valentim Fer-nandes wrote that the Wolofs, a people from the Senegal region, "are drunkards who derive great pleasure from our wine."

Wine was a convenient form of currency, but European slave traders quickly realized that brandy was even better. It allowed more alcohol to be packed into a smaller space inside the cramped hold of a ship, and its higher alcohol content acted as a preservative, making it less likely than wine to spoil while in transit. Africans valued distilled spirits because they were far more concentrated, or "hot," than their own grain-based beers and palm wines. Drinking imported alcohol became a mark of distinction among African slavers. Textiles were often the most valuable component of the packages of goods exchanged for slaves, but alcohol, and brandy in particular, was the most prestigious.

It soon became customary for Fmropeans to present large quantities of alcohol, known as
dashee
or
bizy,
as a gift before beginning negotiations with African traders. The Europeans and Africans conversed in a pidgin language derived from Portuguese, several examples of which were transcribed by a French trader, including
qua qua
(linen) and
singo me miombo
(give me some strong liquor). According to John Atkins, a British naval surgeon who chronicled the slave trade, the African slaver "never cares to treat with dry lips." William Bosman, a Dutch slave trader, recommended that captains of slave ships should make daily gifts of brandy to local leaders and principal traders. The Africans of Whydah, he warned, would not do business at all unless they had first been presented with sufficient
dashee.
"He that intends to trade here, must humour them herein," he wrote.

Brandy oiled the wheels of the slave trade in other ways, too. One account records that the canoemen who ferried goods to and from European ships were paid a bottle of brandy a day as a retainer, plus an extra two to four bottles on days when they worked, and a bonus bottle on Sundays. The guards who marched slaves from holding pens on the coast down to the shore were also paid in brandy. The connections between spirits, slaves, and sugar were further strengthened following the invention of a powerful new drink made from the waste products of the sugar-production process itself. That drink was rum.

The First Global Drink

On a September day in 1647 an Englishman named Richard Ligon caught his first glimpse of the Caribbean island of Barbados from the deck of the ship
Achilles.
"Being now come in sight of this happy island, the nearer we came, the more beautiful it appeared to our eyes," he wrote in an account of his voyage. Appearances proved deceptive, however, for when Ligon and his fellow travelers disembarked they discovered that Barbados was in the midst of an outbreak of the plague. This disrupted the travelers' plans, so that having only intended to stay for a few days, Ligon remained on the island for three years. During his stay he compiled a detailed account of the island's many plants and animals, the customs of its people, and the workings of its sugar plantations.

The first English settlers had arrived on Barbados in 1627 to find the island uninhabited. They set about trying to grow tobacco, which had become popular in their homeland and had proved to be a profitable crop for farmers in the new North American colony of Virginia. But Barbados tobacco was, Ligon observed, "the worst . . . that growes in the whole world." So the settlers brought in sugarcane, equipment, and expertise from Brazil instead. During Ligon's stay, sugar established itself as the island's most important crop. The industry was heavily dependent on slave labor. Ligon ran into the religious logic used to justify slavery when a black slave, to whom he had explained the workings of a compass, asked if he could convert to Christianity, "for he thought that to be a Christian was to be endued with all those knowledges he wanted." Ligon relayed this request to the slave's master and was told that slaves were not allowed to convert—since "by the Lawes of England . . . we could not make a Christian a slave"—so any slaves who were allowed to convert would have to be freed. And that was unthinkable, since it would have stopped the lucrative sugar business in its tracks. Within a decade Barbados dominated the sugar trade, making its sugar barons among the richest men in the New World.

The planters on Barbados gained more than just sugarcane and equipment from Brazil; they also learned how to ferment the by-products of the sugar-making process and then to distill the result to make a powerful alcoholic drink. The Portuguese called it cane brandy, and they made it from the foam skimmed off the boiling cane juice or from the cane juice itself. This process was further refined on Barbados, however, where the cane brandy was made from molasses, the otherwise worthless leftovers from sugar making. This made it possible to make cane brandy far more cheaply and without any reduction in the output of sugar. The planters of Barbados could literally have their sugar and drink it too.

According to Ligon, the resulting drink, known as "kill-devil," was "infinitely strong, but not very pleasant in taste. . . . The people drink much of it, indeed too much; for it often layes them asleep on the ground." Wine and beer were costly to import, and liable to spoil while in transit from Europe, but kill-devil could be made locally in large quantities. Ligon noted that kill-devil was sold on the island itself "to Planters, as have no sugar-works of their own, yet drink excessively of it, for they buy it at easie rates," and also to passing ships, "and it is transported into foreign parts, and drunk by the way." Only after Ligon's departure was kill-devil given the name by which it is known today. A traveler who visited Barbados in 1651 observed that the islanders' preferred drink or "chief fudling" was "Rumbullion, alias Kill-Devill, and this is made of sugarcanes distilled, a hot, hellish and terrible liquor." Rumbullion, a slang word from southern England that means "a brawl or violent commotion," may have been chosen as the drink's nickname because that was frequently the outcome when people drank too much of it.

Rumbullion, soon shortened to rum, spread throughout the Caribbean and then beyond. It was given to newly arrived slaves as part of the "seasoning" process, which weeded out the weak and subdued the unruly. Slaves were encouraged to become dependent on regular rations of rum, both to withstand the demands placed upon them and to blot out the associated hardship. It was also used as an inducement. Slaves were rewarded with extra rum for catching rats or performing particularly unpleasant tasks. Plantation records suggest slaves were typically issued two or three gallons of rum a year (but in some cases as much as thirteen gallons), which they could either drink themselves or barter for food. As a result, rum became an important tool of social control. Ligon noted that it was also used as a medicine, and that when slaves were unwell, the doctor gave to each one "a dram cup of this Spirit, and that [was] a present cure."

Rum also became popular among sailors, and from 1655 was adopted as a substitute for the traditional ration of beer on Royal Navy ships in the Caribbean. Within a century it became the navy's preferred drink during long cruises. Replacing the usual gallon of perishable, weak beer with a half pint of rum had predictable consequences for discipline and efficiency, however, and prompted Admiral Edward Vernon to issue an order that the rum should be mixed with two pints of water. Diluting the rum had no effect on the total amount of alcohol consumed, though it made the sailors more inclined to drink the otherwise unpalatable water available on board ships. What turned out to be far more important was Vernon's idea to add sugar and lime juice to the mixture to make it more palatable. He had invented a primitive cocktail that was immediately named in his honor. Vernon's nickname was "Old Grogram," because he wore a waterproof cloak made of grogram, a coarse fabric stiffened with gum. His new drink became known as grog.

The problem remained that the strength of rum varied widely, and sailors who saw their rum being watered down to make grog felt shortchanged. Before the invention of an accurate hydrometer in the nineteenth century, there was no easy way to measure the strength of an alcoholic drink. So the navy's pursers, who were responsible for distributing the rum ration, measured the strength of the unmixed rum beforehand using a rule of thumb said to have been devised at the Royal Arsenal. They mixed the rum with a little water and a few grains of black gunpowder, then heated the mixture using a magnifying glass to concentrate the rays of the sun. If the gunpowder failed to ignite, the mixture was too weak, and more rum would be added. Only when the gunpowder just barely ignited was the mixture deemed to be the correct strength, which corresponds to 48 percent alcohol. (If the mixture was too strong, an explosion could ensue, and tradition has it that the sailors were then entitled to help themselves while the purser was incapacitated.)

The use of grog in place of beer played an unseen role during the eighteenth century in establishing British supremacy at sea. One of the main causes of death among sailors at the time was scurvy, a wasting disease that is now known to be caused by a lack of vitamin C. The best way to prevent it, discovered and forgotten many times during the eighteenth century, was to administer regular doses of lemon or lime juice. The inclusion of lemon or lime juice in grog, made compulsory in 1795, therefore reduced the incidence of scurvy dramatically. And since beer contains no vitamin C, switching from beer to grog made British crews far healthier overall. The opposite was true of their French counterparts, for whom the standard drink ration was not beer but three-quarters of a liter of wine (the equivalent of a modern bottle). On long cruises, this ration was replaced by three-sixteenths of a liter of eau-de-vie. Since wine contains small amounts of vitamin C but eau-de-vie does not, the effect was to reduce the French navy's resistance to scurvy, just as the British navy's resistance was increasing. The Royal Navy's unique ability to combat scurvy was said by one naval physician to have doubled its performance and contributed directly to Britain's eventual defeat of the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in 1805. (It also meant that British sailors became known as "limeys.")

All this was far in the future, however, when rum was first invented. Its immediate significance was as a currency, for it closed the triangle linking spirits, slaves, and sugar. Rum could be used to buy slaves, with which to produce sugar, the leftovers of which could be made into rum to buy more slaves, and so on and on. Jean Barbot, a French trader, observed on visiting the west coast of Africa in 1679 that he found "a great alteration: the French brandy, whereof I had always had a good quantity abroad, being much less demanded, by reason that a great quantity of spirits and rum had been bought on that coast." By 1721 one English trader reported that rum had become the "chief barter" on the slave coast of Africa, even for gold. Rum also took over from brandy as the currency in which canoemen and guards were paid. Brandy helped to kick-start the transatlantic trade in sugar and slaves, but rum made it self-fueling and far more profitable.