Punch (6 page)

Of course, some company men were just plain bad to begin with. “In those early turbulent days,” as Major H. Hobbs wrote in 1944 in his marvelously chatty
John Barleycorn Bahadur: Old Time Taverns in India
, “India swarmed with unrepentant sinners who had discarded their Bibles and their consciences at the Cape of Good Hope.” But not all were so studiedly wicked. Mandelslo leaves us a rather poignant portrait of how William Methwold, president of the Surat factory, would gather with three other factors after prayers each Friday, “which day being that of their departure from England,” to toast with sherry and Punch the health of their wives, half the world away in England. “Some made their advantage of this meeting to get more than they could well carry away,” he adds. It would take a strong man not to.
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But drinking something and inventing it are two different things, and with all that tippling, there was not much reflection on the origins of the factors’ social drink of choice, and no informed account of its introduction has yet come to light. In the absence of eyewitness testimony, plausible assumptions tend to harden into orthodoxy. In the case of Punch, those assumptions began early. In 1658, Edward Phillips, a pioneering English lexicographer, published his
New World of English Words
. Among those new words was “Punch,” which he defined thus: “A kind of
Indian
Drink.” From his point of view, this was a good call. Paging through the convivial literature popular in the day—from Thomas Dekker’s and Robert Greene’s low and squabblesome satires and pasquinades to the various rowdy comedies by Shakespeare and his contemporaries to the 1638
Barnabae Itinerarium
, aka “Drunken Barnaby’s Itinerary” (a wet and smutty tour of England recounted in execrable verse, both Latin and English) and on up the literary scale to the elegant drinking songs of Ben Jonson and the other Mermaid wits and the suave little essay James Howell devoted to the world’s drinks in 1634—he would have found no Punch. Poking around London, he might perhaps have heard of such a concoction at the East India docks. Elsewhere, the only recreational drink he would have found made with spirits would have been the newly popular pop-in (the seventeenth-century tippler’s name for a shot of booze in a mug of beer or glass of wine), and he would have had to descend to low precincts indeed to find that. See, for example, Dekker’s 1609 lowlife excursion,
The Bel-Man of London
, in which the senior member of the “ragged regiment of beggars” calls his crew to order while swigging from “a double Jug of Ale (that had the spirit of Aqua vitae in it, it smelt so strong).” Of course, the fortified wines coming into England from Spain at the time were made on essentially the same principle, but wines were for gentlemen and thus received little satirical attention.

In 1676, John Fryer, a young English physician working for the company in India, gave weight to the Punch-as-Indian-drink theory when he noted in one of his letters home that

Fryer’s letters were published in 1698. Ever since, his offhand remark has had the force of holy writ. In part, it’s because of the erudition displayed. Compared to the hardheaded Edmund Scotts, whom the company usually sent east, Fryer was a gentleman, and as such, he knew Greek (that “
Diapente
” and “
Diatesseron
”) and was quick to use his learning to fit modern phenomena into classical molds. It helped that his etymology was plausible—the Hindi for “five” is indeed
panch
, and Punch did generally have five ingredients, except of course when it didn’t. It also helped that the idea of the drink’s Indian origin appealed to not only academic sense but common sense. Everything in a bowl of Punch but the water either came exclusively from the East or was much cheaper there and easier to come by—but here I am merely repeating what Joseph Addison already observed in No. 22 of his newspaper,
The Free-Holder
, three centuries ago.
⁵

Addison’s observation was particularly true when it came to the booze. The first European travelers to the eastern and southern parts of Asia found them awash in distilled spirits of various new and interesting species, none of them involving lees or draff and none needing to be spiced to mask the flavor. Antonio Pigafetta, one of the few who sailed with Magellan to survive the voyage, encountered two of the most common types on the Philippine island of Palawan in 1521. There the natives drank both distilled palm wine and distilled rice wine, he reported, the latter being the stronger and better. “It is as clear as water, but so strong that it intoxicated many of our men. It is called
arach
.” When it touched at Java in 1596, the first Dutch mission to the Spice Islands found the Chinese community there (“very subtil and industrious people,” as the contemporary English translation of their report puts it) also making “much aqua vitae of rice and Cocus [i.e., coconut sap], which the Iauars [Javans] by night come to buy, and drinke it secretly, for by Mahomets law it is forbidden them.” Indeed, it’s likely that the distilling technology in the great Southeast Asian island groups came originally from China; certainly the stills that they used, and in some places use to this day, are Chinese style.
ⁿ
But the only thing sketchier than the history of distilling in Europe is the history of distilling in Asia; in this respect, great stretches of time and territory are sunk in stygian blackness.

Only relatively recently has the antiquity of India’s distilling tradition become clear. Archaeological excavations in the 1950s and 1960s in the region around the ancient trading center of Taxila, at the headwaters of the Indus in what is today Pakistan, uncovered remains of what were unmistakably distillery-grogshop complexes, each with multiple clay-pot stills. These have been dated to the time of Christ, give or take a century or two. Combine them with the sugarcane that Alexander the Great found growing in the same region and the long-standing domestication of the lime in India, and it’s not impossible that Rum Punch could be two thousand years old. Frustratingly, the millennium and a half between then and the arrival of European explorers in the 1500s remains one of those dark stretches, and I cannot say whether that ancient tradition survived unbroken or had to be reestablished through contact with the Chinese or Arabs. In any case, those explorers found not only a tremendous amount of distilling going on but some unusual people drinking the resulting spirits.

Moghul emperors, for example. Although they strove mightily to spread the faith with sword and lance and glorified it with jaw-dropping architecture (e.g., the Taj Mahal), Babur, the conqueror who swept into India from the north at the beginning of the sixteenth century and founded the dynasty; his son Humayun; his grandson Akbar and his great-grandson Jahangir all shared one great, un-Islamic weakness. Like the Javans, they could not resist a little tipple. Unlike them, however, they made no attempt to hide it. Akbar the Great, drunk on arrack, once famously raced across the rickety pontoon bridge spanning the Yamuna in Agra at a gallop. He was riding Hawai, his favorite elephant, at the time. And Jahangir, who at one point in his life was sticking away twenty capacious cups of arrack a day, scrupled not to drink it in front of William Hawkins, the East India Company’s first emissary to his court, and then banish him from court for having alcohol on his breath.
^o
By the time the elegant Sir Thomas Roe, who replaced Hawkins in 1615, arrived at his court, the shah had ostensibly cut back to six cups a day, although Roe still found him often “very busy with his Cuppes” and possessed by “a drowzines . . . from the fumes of Backus.” And those six cups weren’t even of pure arrack: Jahangir preferred “mingled wyne, halfe of the Grape, halfe Artificiall.” When he offered Roe a cup of it, the aristocratic ambassador took one sip and promptly sneezed, remark-ing later that “it was more strong then [
sic
] ever I tasted.” I shouldn’t wonder; pop-in was not exactly favored by gentlemen. Ever true to his class, Roe informed his mercantile masters in his first report home that he “drancke water this 11 Monthes, and Nothing els,” adding that “Rack” he could not endure.

Jahangir, who clearly could, preferred the coconut-sap variety. Although it was produced all over southern and western India, it was a particular specialty of the Portuguese-held port of Goa. In Bengal they had another type, which Bernier defined as “
eau de vie de sucre noir
”—“aqua vitae of black [i.e., raw] sugar”—a “much stronger Spirit than that of
Goa
,” according to the Reverend John Ovington, who encountered it in Surat in 1689. There were plenty of other kinds, made from things like mangoes, cashew fruits, mahua-tree blossoms and what have you. India also abounded in the other ingredients that went into Punch. Although not a great producer of spices itself, it was close enough to their source in the East Indies that they were widely available, and for far less money than in Europe. Citrus fruits were abundant, as was sugar from both cane and palm. There was of course water, too, although its purity doesn’t bear thinking about; but then again the same could be said of the water in London. It’s safe to say, in other words, that all the ingredients for Punch were present in India. In parts of the subcontinent, people even had a tradition of drinking sherbet, an Islam-friendly tipple made by flavoring water or snow with a syrup of sugar, citrus juice (or other acid) and spices.

But possibility is not the same thing as necessity; the fact that something could have happened does not mean that it had to happen. Even if it did, we’d have another problem, since the exact same conditions existed in Java: plenty of arrack, citrus and sugar, and there the spices were even cheaper. Who’s to say that our inquisitorial Mr. Scott, had he been a little more neighborly and gone to sit for a spell at the Chinese “arrack house” (as he called it) next door, might not only have forestalled that vexatious tunneling but also have taken Richard Addams’s place in the history of drink by discovering that the arrack house was in fact a “Punch house,” where a novel and delightful tipple was on offer? By the middle of the century, that is in fact precisely how Europeans were identifying such places in Indonesia, where they appeared to be operating in profusion, and we don’t know whether the changed terminology reflects changed drinks or simply more precise knowledge of what was on offer in such places.
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But the real problem for the claim that Punch is an Indian creation is the dearth of actual seventeenth-century evidence of the native peoples of the region drinking the stuff. It’s not mentioned in their own writings, or at least no such mention has yet filtered through to the West. If it were in fact a native specialty, one would expect that it would have been known by the likes of Jahangir, but it appears in none of the (very detailed) observations on his drinking habits. As for the Europeans who encountered it, they share a consensus that it was, as de La Boullaye-Le Gouz put it, “
un boisson dont les Anglois usent aux Indes
”—“a drink the English use in India.” Even the erudite Dr. Fryer, in the midst of his lesson in etymology, says only that it’s “the
English
on this coast” who are making “that enervating Liquor called
Paunch.
” If it’s not the English, it’s the Dutch; they, at least, are the ones Bernier found also drinking it. True, a few of these travelers spent the entirety of their time in-country in one of the English factories, but others did not. Only one of the latter even so much as mentions Punch.

That was Johann Jacob Saar, who spent much of the 1640s and 1650s in Sri Lanka as a soldier for the Dutch. Upon his return, he published a wildly popular account of his travels, written with a cowriter from memory, as he had lost his notes on the voyage back. In it, he has a little section on Sri Lankan mixed drinks. There are three: massack, which is warm toddy—palm wine—mixed with palm arrack, eggs and spices; the very Punch-like vinperle—water and arrack boiled together with citrons, sugar, spices and, again, eggs; and palebunze, which is the now-familiar concoction but without the spices. His verdict on that one? “
Wie dem Geschmack so angenehm nicht: Also auch der Gesundheit nicht
”—“As for the taste, it pleases not; for the health, neither.” Regrettably, Saar gives us no context for these most interesting concoctions. Did the locals drink them when by themselves? Were these drinks simply what they had learned to serve to Europeans in Punch houses, like the Bahama Mamas that rum-and-coconut-water-drinking Caribbean bartenders make for tourists? Most importantly, were they local inventions or merely adaptations of drinks that had been floating around the ports of the Bay of Bengal and the eastern shores of the Arabian Sea for the last generation or so?

Without this context, we can’t rest half the argument for a native Indian origin of Punch on his observations—the other half resting, of course, on Fryer’s etymology. That, too, is pretty shaky, seeing as the English were such inveterate manglers of foreign words—“Robidavia,” a Spanish wine, became in their mouths “Rob Davy”—that it would be most remarkable if the Hindustani word for “five” emerged nearly unscathed. Furthermore, “punch” was a perfectly good English word with a number of uses, including, according to Samuel Pepys, as “a word of common use for all that is thick and short”—items that would include the “round and Belly’d” bowl Punch was usually served in (as the journalist John Dunton noted in 1728).
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Nor can we ignore that there was a perfectly good, perfectly English model for this new drink, one that’s attested to in print before the first English traveler set foot in India or viewed the palm-fringed coast of Java. That is, of course, George Gascoigne’s wine mixed with “Sugar, Limons and sundry sortes of Spices.” To make that into Punch, one would have to simply replace the real wine with an “artificiall” one (as Roe would describe it) made up of aqua vitae and water. Easy.