Punch (5 page)

But there was a counterweight to this conservatism. In Thomas Dekker’s 1623 tragicomedy
The Welsh Ambassador
, there’s a scene where several characters drink to the King of England’s health, each in the preferred tipple of his people. Eldred, the king’s brother, is disguised as a stereotypical Welshman (don’t ask) and therefore chooses metheglin, a spiced honey wine especially prized in Wales, while another brother, disguised as an Irishman, will pledge “in usquebagh or nothing.” But the Clown is an Englishman and, as he says,

He wasn’t exaggerating. In 1587, Harrison reckoned that some fifty-six different dry, or “small,” wines and another thirty-odd of the stronger sweet wines were being imported from places as nearby as France and as far afield as Persia. For those who had no access to or interest in such foreign bellywash, there were beers and ales in profusion—from the weak “small beer” everyone drank instead of water to the eccentrically named varieties of strong ale favored by Harrison’s liquor-lugging maltbugs—the “huffcap, the mad-dog, father-whoreson, angels’-food, dragons’-milk, go-by-the-wall, stride-wide, and lift-leg, etc.” There were many more.
^h
Add ciders, perries and other fruit wines, and the many and various honey wines (Sir Kenelm Digby, who died in 1665, left behind a collection of over a hundred different recipes for them), and factor in the unusual variety of ways in which they were sweetened, spiced, bittered and mixed, and we have the portrait of a land that had a long-standing and unusual interest in maintaining a varied and balanced diet of alcoholic beverages—with, of course, the sole exception of aqua vitae.

Flavoring strong drink with herbs, spices and fruits might be as universal as alcohol and almost as old, but this, too, the English approached with an unusual thirst for variety. Wines were sweetened, spiced, bittered, mulled or whipped up with cream and eggs to make Possets and Syllabubs; ales were buttered (if unhopped), bittered, sweetened, spiced—in fact (not coincidentally), pretty much everything that was done to the gentleman’s wine was done to the yeoman’s ale or beer. One example among many: if you steeped wormwood and other herbs in strong ale for a few weeks, it made “purl,” a popular eye-opener. Replace the ale with wine, and you had “purl royal.” Downstairs, upstairs. There were even, it must be noted, drinks that made limited use of aqua vitae in their compounding: since the 1400s, small amounts of it had occasionally been used in preparing hippocras (a spiced wine popular throughout Europe), where its extractive power came in handy, and braggott, an overstrength, spiced ale, where its advantages would have been obvious. Yet even then, it wasn’t a standard ingredient in either. When the poet and soldier of fortune (a combination no longer often seen, alas) George Gascoigne needed an example of up-to-date mixology to rail against in his
A Delicate Diet for Daintie Mouthde Droonkardes
, the temperance tract he wrote in 1576 as penance for his past transgressions, the most recherché mixture he could pro-duce was wine with “Sugar, Limons and sundry sortes of Spices . . . drowned therein.”

Perhaps Gascoigne had quit his roistering too soon: by the end of the 1500s, the barriers to aqua vitae’s popular acceptance were beginning to totter. Not only was it passing rapidly through the Self-Medication phase, with distillation becoming part of the apothecary’s and even the grocer’s skill set, but people were even beginning to turn their minds toward how it might be used to make a pleasing mixed drink. Take, for instance, the suggestion made by Sir Hugh Platt in his 1595
Jewel House of Art and Nature
, that

While one must admire the mixological spirit displayed here, five or six spoonfuls of anise-flavored booze in a quart of water is weak sauce indeed, particularly when compared to the heady compounds lurking over the horizon. But it’s a start.

Spirits were also beginning to slink into the bar. In 1572, an establishment turns up in London property records that not only foreshadowed the eventual solution to the problem of where to drink spirits but also served as a signpost for the route by which they would infiltrate and, for a time, subdue the highest reaches of English society. In a run-down row of stone buildings in Petty Wales, just east of the Tower of London, tucked in between a pair of alehouses known as the Ram’s Head and Mother Mampudding’s, stood the Aqua Vitae House.
ⁱ
Its location was no accident: behind Petty Wales, you see, lay the quays of the Thames, where cargo ships unloaded. And sailors—well, as an anonymous French freebooter observed in 1620, the sailor’s way of celebrating anything “
est du boire l’eau-de-vie
”—“is to drink aqua vitae.” Under Queen Elizabeth I, England suddenly had a lot of celebrating sailors.

“PUNCH BY NO ALLOWANC”

As the sixteenth century began to shade into the seventeenth, England sailed forth into the world, the Virgin Queen’s canny hand loosely on the tiller. In the process, her mariners laid the foundations of what would become the greatest maritime empire the world has ever known. Having been too embroiled in internal strife to participate in the first part of the Age of Exploration, when Spain and Portugal mapped the globe and snapped up the richest parts of it, England had a latecomer’s determination to pick up what hadn’t yet been nailed down and, if possible, to un-nail a few things that had already been nailed. At first, ships were sent forth to America in the West and Muscovy in the East (the Queen and Ivan the Terrible were longtime correspondents, and he even proposed marriage to her; one shudders) in the hopes of finding a northern route to the riches of Asia, one that wouldn’t be infested with Spaniards and “Portingales” and Hollanders and other dangerous pests of that ilk. When such a thing could not be found, they broke out the crowbar and set to un-nailing.

In 1577, Sir Francis Drake sailed for the Spanish-held west coast of the Americas, bent on exploration and plunder. He returned via the Pacific and the Cape of Good Hope, thus leading the second mission to successfully circumnavigate the globe. Unlike Ferdinand Magellan, he survived his voyage. Better yet, he came back rich with pirated Peruvian gold. Two years after his return, some of the queen’s inner circle tried to capitalize on what he had learned and launched the country’s first attempt at direct trade with Asia (with perhaps a little unofficial slaving and piracy at Iberian expense along the way). Led by Captain Edward Fenton, this expedition “for China and Cathay” dissolved into squabbling and disharmony and never made it out of the Atlantic. Ten years later, after the fight against the Spanish Armada had boosted England’s confidence and professionalism at sea, another mission was sent east. This one actually reached Asia but left no permanent English presence there.

That would soon change. In 1600, a group of hard-nosed London merchants obtained a royal charter to form the English East India Company. The company’s first trading mission reached the spice-rich islands of Sumatra and Java in 1602, but unfortunately the Hollanders had beaten them to it.
^j
Nonetheless, despite Dutch harassment and interference, they still managed to establish a small “factory” (the contemporary term for trading post) there. In 1608, one of the company’s men first set foot in India, although it would be another seven years before its “factors”—traders—would be able to gain a secure commercial foothold. By 1632, anyway, the company had factories dotted up and down India’s southeast and northwest coasts and was on the verge of setting up its first outpost in the rich province of Bengal, where, 125 years later, its private troops would defeat a French army at the battle of Plassey and seize effective control of the entire Indian subcontinent, thus ushering in the age of Britannia Triumphant.

But already, in those first thirty years of England in Asia, the opportunistic, even semipiratical cadre of sailors, soldiers and merchant-adventurers that the company sent out had made a mark on world culture that time cannot erase nor age destroy. We know this from a letter sent on September 28, 1632, from Armagon, one muggy, mosquito-ridden pinprick on the Coromandel Coast, to Pettapoli, another.
^k
In it Robert Addams, one of the company’s men-at-arms, thanks Thomas Colley, a “factor,” for a favor and wishes him well on the upcoming mission to Bengal, on which Colley was slated to be second in command to Ralph Cartwright. “I am very glad you have so good compani to be with all as Mr. Cartwright,” Addams wrote, and “I hop you will keep good house together and drincke punch by no allowanc.” Thus Punch makes its debut in the written records of history. As far as debuts go, it’s not much: a name let fall in a passing comment without definition or explanation (in this, it is not unlike the first mention of a drink named cock-tail, in a 1798 London newspaper, which tells us only that it is “vulgarly called ginger”). About all that we can be sure of from this famous letter is that Punch was already a known drink and that there were those who feared it—and that Englishmen were often savage spellers.

As with the Cocktail, it would take a few years before someone would bother to define the drink for those playing the home game. Punch got there in 1638, when Johan Albert de Mandelslo, a young German adventurer, washed up at the company’s factory in Surat. There he found the factors irrigating themselves with “a kind of drink consisting of aqua vitae, rose-water, juice of citrons and sugar.” “
Palepuntz
,” he called it in the account of his wanderings published a few years later; ungarbled, that’s “bowl o’ Punch,” or—as the French traveler François de La Boullaye-Le Gouz, who visited the same factory eleven years later, called it, “
bolleponge
.” The Frenchman’s de-scription of it (sugar, lemon juice, “eau de vie,” mace and toasted biscuit) more or less tallies with Mandelslo’s, give or take a spice (and, of course, the toast garnish, traditional in English ale-based bowl drinks but a little odd here). Add the one given by François Bernier, who encountered “
bouleponge
” in Bengal in the 1660s (“aqua vitae . . . with lemon juice, water and a little nutmeg grated on top”), and we have a pretty clear idea of what these Englishmen were drinking. Aqua vitae, watered down to a more quaffable strength, soured with citrus juice, sweetened with sugar and spiced with whatever was handy, be it nutmeg, mace, rosewater or what have you—simple enough, considering that it’s the foundation stone upon which all of modern mixology rests.

If the what is plain, the who, when and where are anything but. The problem is, as far as we can tell from what has come down to us almost four hundred years later, of all those early factors, of all the men who carried them from port to port, supplied them, protected them, not one took a few minutes to scribble down the origins of this new tipple. But then again, they had more pressing things to attend to than the curiosity of distant generations about their refreshments—like, for example, attempting to get the servant of the Chinese-Javan drinking-house keeper who has just tried to tunnel into your warehouse and steal your goods to give up where his master has hidden himself, a task that Edmund Scott attempted by shoving hot irons under the servant’s nails and then tearing them all off, shredding his flesh with rasps, causing “cold iron screws to be screwed into the bones of his arms, and suddenly snatched out” and a dozen other demonic things (Javanese servants are tough; the man still wouldn’t talk, or even cry out). Admittedly, that was in 1604, in Java, not 1632, in India, but it gives us a pretty good idea of the sort of person we’re dealing with. They were not mixographers.

They certainly did like their Punch, though. Take our friend Thomas Colley. Evidently poor Mr. Colley—a rather sporty youth from London, it appears from the scant notices we have of his life—did not choose to heed Richard Addams’s advice, and he probably should have: he died on August twenty-fifth, less than four months after he set foot in Bengal. He was not alone. In the first year of the factory there, four more of his companions were laid to rest, as was one of their replacements. “The Chiefe Occasion of this disease,” one of the company’s captains reported to his bosses in London, “is doubtless Intemperancy . . . for ’tis a place that abounds with Racke and ffruit [
sic
], and these immoderately taken Cannot Chuse but ingender Surfeits.”

Once thirst and enforced sobriety weaned them of their native beverages, the English factors took to the native ones wholeheartedly; as early as 1618, some factories were already including arrack among their standard provisions. Few abstained from drinking Punch, and many abused it. Yet one can hardly blame them. Consider, for a moment, the factor’s life. Thirteen thousand miles and six months at sea from home, pent up in a claustrophobic little compound (few were allowed to live outside of the factory) perched on the rim of an alien land whose people, languages and way of life were utterly foreign to anything in your experience, with little to occupy your time for weeks on end but waiting for ships to come in and trying not to think about the disease and death that were claiming all too many of your comrades. Small wonder if, as the Reverend John Ovington reported after his 1689 tour of the English factories of western India, you lost yourself in “Luxury, Immodesty and a prostitute Dissolution of Manners”—if you gambled, drank yourself insensate on Punch and solaced your existence with native whores.