Bittersweet (14 page)

Like Dundonald, Grainger failed because he failed to stick to the simple facts. Many of the islands had poor soil, and without compost the cane eventually grew poorly because vital elements were not returned to the soil. In some parts of Brazil the planters could move to new land as the old land was exhausted, but on the smaller islands this was simply not possible.

Whatever the reason, the sophisticated people of London laughed at Grainger's attempts to instruct, and he never reaped the hoped-for reward from his efforts. English readers missed what he meant in his oblique descriptions, while those in the islands who might have benefited either thought they knew it all, or were far from bookish.

The medical side of the poet comes to the fore when Grainger writes of caring for slaves. As far back as 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had written from Constantinople to describe how the Turks dealt with smallpox by infecting themselves when they were healthy:

The small-pox, so fatal and so general among us, is here entirely harmless, by the invention of
ingrafting
, which is the term they give it. There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox . . .

The ingrafting, or variolation, was carried out with smallpox material from survivors, and so would have been a slightly weaker strain of the virus. This contributed to its successful use in Boston by Cotton Mather before his death in 1728—and he claimed to have learned about the practice from African slaves. Even George Washington arranged to have his troops variolated before they went into battle.

Later, it was this practice of variolation which allowed Edward Jenner to test the effect of cowpox, when he first gave the young James Phipps the harmless cowpox and then followed the completely routine practice of variolation. The common modern claim that Jenner was in some way unethical in ‘deliberately giving a young boy smallpox' is based on gross ignorance of the medical norms of his day.

But if we have forgotten about ingrafting now, it was well known back in Grainger's time, which makes it odd that he should feel the need to advise his readers of what they should have known:

Say, as this malady but once infests
The sons of Guinea, might not skill ingraft
(Thus the small-pox are happily convey'd;)
This ailment early to thy Negroe-train?

Grainger also offered sound advice on industrial safety that might have helped Macandal a few years earlier:

And now thy mills dance eager in the gale;
Feed well their eagerness: but O beware;
Nor trust, between the steel-cas'd cylinders,
The hand incautious: off the member snapt
Thou'lt ever rue, sad spectacle of woe!

He also provided advice on allowing the slaves to drink cane juice during the harvest:

While flows the juice mellifluent from the Cane,
Grudge not, my friend, to let thy slaves, each morn,
But chief the sick and young, at setting day,
Themselves regale with oft-repeated draughts
Of tepid Nectar; so shall health and strength
Confirm thy Negroes, and make labour light.

And he inveighed against wicked Frenchmen who adulterated their sugar, something no true Britisher would do (though G. K. Chesterton seemed to think English grocers did it all the time). According to Grainger:

False Gallia's sons, that hoe the ocean-isles,
Mix with their Sugar, loads of worthless sand,
Fraudful, their weight of sugar to increase.
Far be such guile from Britain's honest swains.

If the planters had paid more attention to Grainger's sound advice, or if Grainger had couched his sound advice in less complex terms, how many lives might have been saved? Grainger wrote on a variety of worms and their treatment, depression, nutrition and more, all directed at keeping slaves healthy and working—but above all, alive. Grainger even provided notes to the work, to explain, for example, that ‘[T]he mineral product of the Cornish mine' was in fact tin, which he pointed out could be used as a vermifuge (a treatment for worms) in either powder or filings form.

In the end, Grainger's poem fell badly between two stools. By 1860 George Gilfillan could include Grainger among the ‘less-known poets'. In 1930 he was included in
The Stuffed Owl
, an anthology of bad verse. Neither of these was quite as damning as it sounds: Gilfillan's list of lesser known poets included John Donne, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Smart and Jonathan Swift, and the alleged bad versifiers in
The Stuffed Owl
included Burns, Byron, Keats, Longfellow, Smart again, and Wordsworth.

All in all, not bad company in which to find a Scottish doctor on the make.

FOR WORMS

Give a child one year old 15 drops of spirits of turpentine on sugar, fasting, for three mornings in succession; follow the last dose with a good dose of castor oil; this forms an excellent vermifuge. The dose of spirits of turpentine for a child two years old is 20 drops, three years old 25 drops, four years old 30 drops, &c.

Daniel Young,
Young's Demonstrative Translation
of Scientific Secrets
, Toronto, 1861

7
RUM AND
POLITICS

Approval given to Mr Waterhouse to supply King James's ships at Jamaica with Rumm instead of Brandy, he takeing care that the good or ill effects of this proof, with respect as well to the good Husbandry thereof as to the Health and Satisfaction of our Seamen, be carefully inquired into by you and reported to us within a yeare or two (or sooner if you find it necessary for our further satisfaction in the same).

Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Navy, 3 March 1688

Throughout the ages, wherever people have looked to add some intoxicating interest to life, they have remembered or rediscovered the art of getting zing from sugar. When Captain Cook took his men to Hawaii in 1779, he described his way of treating cane juice:

Having procured a quantity of sugar-cane, and finding a strong decoction of it produced a very palatable beer, I ordered some more to be brewed for our general use. But when the cask was now broached, not one of my crew would even so much as taste it. I myself and the officers continued to make use of it whenever we could get materials for brewing it. A few hops, of which we had some on board, improved it much. It has the taste of new malt beer; and I believe no one will doubt of its being very wholesome. Yet my inconsiderate crew alleged that it was injurious to their health.

The ship had taken on four casks of rum at Rio, so maybe the men wanted none of the ‘beer' because there was still rum left. Or maybe they thought it was just another of Cook's cures for scurvy, like his ‘portable soup' and ‘sour krout'. Christmas was approaching, and that was a time when Cook's crew would normally make merry, as they did on his first voyage to the South Sea. Here is part of Joseph Banks's journal entry of 25 December 1768, just ten years earlier, which suggests that on that voyage at least, Cook's ship had enough liquor for all:

Christmas day; all good Christians that is to say all hands get abominably drunk so that at night there was scarce a sober man in the ship, wind thank god very moderate or the lord knows what would have become of us.

Cook's official account was more understated: ‘Yesterday being Christmas day the People were none of the soberest.' Neither Banks nor Cook indicates what the liquor was; rum was used on ships earlier, but it was only in 1775 that it became the standard issue liquor for sailors in Britain's navy. Before then, a variety of alcoholic drinks were in common use, so we find Banks recording that when the crew of
Endeavour
‘crossed the line' (passed over the equator for the first time), the first-timers could accept being ducked, or ‘give up 4 days allowance of wine which was the price fixd upon'. But standard or not, rum was a common tipple for British sailors for a long time.

Distillation is the oldest chemical craft in the world—the earliest surviving piece of chemical equipment, a distillation apparatus for separating perfume ingredients, has been dated to 3600 BC. Islamic chemists knew all about distillation (we get our word ‘alcohol' from Arabic), and had taken the knowledge to Spain. So while rum is usually associated with the Caribbean or the Americas, it is quite possible that an alert Spaniard had noted that sugar juice, left to stand, was in the habit of fermenting into Cook's ‘beer'; from there it would be but a small step to producing some rum-like liquor on the quiet.

Although the origin of its name is obscure, rum has been known since the English settled in Barbados in 1627, and the Spanish and Portuguese were possibly involved in distilling spirits on their sugar plantations even earlier than this. The art of distillation is often said to have come into the islands with the Jewish refugees from Brazil, who had learned to make
cachaça
, which is distilled from the raw cane juice rather than from molasses, as rum is. The only snag here is that the dates do not add up, since the Jews did not flee Brazil until around 1654, by which time rum was common on Barbados.

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'.