Punch (7 page)

Ultimately, we have to judge this question as one does all historical ones: by the preponderance of the evidence. And that suggests that Punch was invented by an Englishman. But what sort of Englishman? I used to be content with the idea that, as one nineteenth-century commentator wrote, “punch . . . was invented by the convivial factors at Surat,” and if not there, then at one of the East India Company’s many outposts. After all, it first appears in their records, and they certainly drank a lot of it. But the more I delved into the records of England’s early commercial enterprises out east, the more uneasy that conclusion made me. It turns out that I’m not the first to have my doubts. There are only two phyla of ink-stained wretch who can read through the eye-popping accounts of the early English experience in Asia and remain focused on that single word, “punch”: mixographers and lexicographers. The Reverend Charles Bridges Mount belonged to the latter, being one of the subeditors of the
Oxford English Dictionary
. In a brief but cogent 1907 article in the indispensable
Notes & Queries
, after challenging Fryer’s etymology (the published
OED
went with it anyway), Mount posited that the first man to make Punch was most likely neither a factor nor a soldier, but a sailor. The main basis of his argument rests on the popularity of the drink among English tars and the rapidity with which those of other nationalities adopted both the formula and its name. “Sailors of different nationalities,” he observes, “when not fighting each other, are apt to be good comrades. . . . Moreover, they are very ready . . . to pick up from each other words which subsequently become current in the language of those who have taken the words.” Reasonable enough. But there’s another, stronger basis for assigning a nautical origin to Punch. And it’s not just that sailors like to drink; as we shall see, the land-bound employees of the company yielded to no man in their mastery of the bottle. Rather, it has to do with supplies, with victuals.

Traditionally, English ships had been victualed with beer for all and supplemental wine for the “gentlemen,” the officers and important passengers. On the longer voyages that they were beginning to undertake in the Elizabethan years, this proved to be less than perfectly satisfactory. For one thing, beer and wine took up a great deal of space, what with each seaman’s official daily ration of two to four forty-ounce quarts of beer and the so-called gentlemen good for easily half that in wine. Even on short rations, the unfortunate Captain Fenton’s flagship, with a crew of one-hundred-odd seamen, managed to go through 2,300 gallons of beer and 300 of cider in under two months, with the gentlemen sticking away an average of three bottles’ worth of wine a day each on top of that. When the East India Company’s first trading mission set sail in 1601, its four ships and 480 men were provided with thirty thousand gallons of beer, a like amount of cider and fifteen thousand gallons of wine—some 420 tons’ worth in total. Considering that the capacity of the ships totaled 1,160 tons, the burden this copious supply of fermented beverages laid on Elizabethan navigators is all too clear.

But bulk wasn’t the only problem, or even the worst one. In 1588, as England braced herself for the imminent onslaught of the Spanish Armada, a fatal epidemic swept through the fleet. Charles Howard, Lord Admiral of England, attributed it to the beer, which had gone sour; quoth Howard, “I know not which way to deal with the mariners to make them rest contented with sour beer, for nothing doth displease them more.”

One can hardly blame them, what with beer being the main source of their daily caloric intake. Beer going off was no unusual occurrence. Before pasteurization, it was hard enough keeping it from souring when it was stored in a cool, dry cellar. Slosh it around for a while in the fetid bilge of a ship, and every day it kept wholesome was borrowed time, even in temperate home waters.
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In the tropics, well, as one Dutch sailor recorded in 1595, “the extreame heat of the ayre spoyled all our victuailes: Our flesh and fishe stunke, our Bisket molded, our Beere sowred, our water stunke, and our Butter became as thinne as Oyle, whereby diverse of our men fell sicke, and many of them dyed.”

Nor did wines necessarily fare much better; evaluating some captured aboard a couple of stragglers from the armada, the English reported that those from one ship were “wines but indifferent, and many of them eager [i.e., sour]” and those from another good “only to make aquavitae of.” But that, of course, was the answer right there. Shakespeare knew it: in
The Comedy of Errors
, written sometime in the early 1590s, he lists the special supplies purchased for a sea voyage as “oil . . . balsamum, and aqua-vitae” (act IV, scene 1). As is often the case with Shakespeare, the technical knowledge is state of the art, if anachronistic: the play is set in antiquity, but balsam of Tolu, or Peruvian balsam—a remedy for seasickness—was first described in 1574, and the usefulness of aqua vitae as a ship’s store reflected experience even more recent than that. In fact, Shakespeare was one of the first to mention the practice; judging from victualing records and inventories of captured ships, neither the Spanish ships that made up the armada nor the English ones that defeated it were supplied with spirits.
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The choleric and bibulous Captain Fenton, though, had shipped a fair amount with him, on top of all that beer and wine, ostensibly for medicinal use.
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While his lading list doesn’t survive, his journal does. Halfway through the trip, he started keeping a monthly tally of his provisions. His jottings show an interesting pattern: in the first month for which he left figures, Fenton’s men go through three rundlets of aqua vitae. That could indicate something like a daily fortifying dram for each man. But then nothing for five months, during which the remaining four rundlets are kept untapped. Once they run out of beer (some of which had gone bad before they even cleared the Canary Islands) and wine, though, then there goes the aqua vitae, too. That suggests that Fenton decided to hold on to it as a sort of iron ration, a reserve that could be relied on not to spoil until the more perishable drinks were gone (leave beer, wine and water in barrels for six months at sea and they spoil; leave spirits, and they only get better). If this was a decision made on the spot, then whatever his faults, and they were many, Edward Fenton can be said to be the father of the naval rum ration.

In any case, by 1600, long-haul English voyagers were carrying a lot of spirits; the East India Company’s first fleet stocked the equivalent of seven bottles per man, on top of the usual beer, wine and cider. Nor did the company’s men have any trouble adapting to the indigenous spirits of Asia; indeed, they would run considerable risk to get them, as did the boatswain of Thomas Best’s ship, who, when it anchored at Surat in 1612, swam ashore on the Sabbath with a couple of his comrades and spent the day “drinkinge drunk with houres [i.e., whores],” an episode for which he was ducked from the yardarm and demoted back to common seaman. By 1613, as John Jourdain (the company’s chief factor in Indonesia) recorded, its ships were gladly provisioning themselves with Jakarta arrack.

But how did they drink their spirits? One point of evidence: according to the coded secret journal kept by Richard Maddox, Fenton’s minister (it was that kind of voyage), the puritanical ship’s surgeon pretended to pray and fast but kept a secret stash of cheese and bacon and drank “plenty of coole bear & aquavitte.” Shots and chasers? Pop-in? One would like a little more detail. However he was taking it, the aqua vitae seems more recreational than medicinal. That was definitely the case with Robert Pike, a sailor on Sir Francis Drake’s 1572 raid on Panama, who gave away an ambush after “having drunk too much aqua vitae.” The problem wasn’t so much that he drank the spirits, as Drake specifies in his account of the incident, but that he drank them “without water.” So. If watered spirits were a common drink on English ships, that’s 40 percent of the way to a bowl of Punch. We still need the sugar, spice and citrus, though.

One of history’s sad ironies concerns scurvy, a fatal wasting disease caused by a lack of vitamin C, which every other animal save our fellow primates and the guinea pig synthesizes on its own. In the age of sail, it was a great killer: months and months afloat without fresh provisions meant that ships would often lose half their crews to it or more, and through the centuries, its toll must have been into the hundreds of thousands. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the Royal Navy finally put an end to the problem with increased attention to fresh provisions and lime-juice rations. Yet the Elizabethans had known that citrus fruit was a sure cure. As Maddox recorded in his journal, after they made landfall in Guinea and took on a supply of “lymmons” (in this case, probably limes; “lemon” was used for both until the eighteenth century),

Some captains went to great lengths to ensure the citrus supply—the excellent James Lancaster, leader of the East India Company’s first fleet, not only provisioning his ship with bottled lemon juice and stopping often for more “limons and oranges,” as one of his sailors recounted, “which were precious for our diseased men, to rid their bodies of the scurvy,” but even going so far as to retrace part of his route when he had run out.

We don’t know whether this citrus juice was drunk straight or mixed with anything to make it more palatable. In 1617, though, John Woodall, the East India Company’s surgeon general and a man of great intelligence and experience, prescribed against the scurvy “the use of the juice of lemons . . . to be taken each morning, two or three spoonfuls . . . and if you add one spoonful of aqua vitae thereto, to a cold stomach it is the better.” It’s also possible that, in practice, the juice was sweetened; according to victualing records, early East India men carried plenty of sugar and made sure to procure more when they could. And though I’ve been able to find no direct mention of the practice, it’s telling that William Hawkins, who sailed east in 1593, prescribed that sailors be given, in the absence of citrus juice, two drops of oil of vitriol—that is, sulfuric acid; a little frightening, to be sure—“mingled in a draught of water, with a little sugar.” Even the spices can be accounted for: Lancaster, for one, shipped fifty pounds of assorted cloves, cinnamon and nutmegs for use during the voyage.

Again, possibility is not actuality. But in the absence of direct eyewitness testimony, it’s all we have: the nautical origin of Punch is a case that has to be argued on circumstantial evidence. As we’ve seen, there’s enough of that to establish means (all the ingredients at hand), motive (failure of traditional sources of strong drink) and opportunity (months on board ship). So much for the basics. There are also circumstances that work to exclude the other most likely suspects, the company’s factors. For one, they didn’t have to resort to mixology to get something palatable: Shiraz wine, from Persia, was widely available in the East, as was palm wine. Then there’s the “biscuit roty” garnish de La Boullaye-Le Gouz recorded; landlubbers were unlikely to float toasted sea biscuit in their drink unless they had learned to make it from someone for whom that would be a natural building block. (Sailors, it should be noted, were famous for finding novel and unlikely ways to combine the limited ingredients available to them, their odd concoctions serving to fight the salt-pork-and-sea-biscuit monotony of the nautical diet.) Making it even less likely that Punch jumped from land to shore is the sailor’s well-documented antipathy to anyone aboard ship who didn’t pull his weight, a category that would have most definitely included the company men for whom they heaved and hauled and sweated and froze and, shockingly often, died to carry in leisure from England to the East.
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Finally, there were a lot more sailors out east than there were factors: even as late as 1650, it’s doubtful that the company had more than a hundred men in all of India—fewer than the crew of one decent-sized ship.

It would be unsporting of me to go this far into Punch’s origins without hazarding a guess of my own. Therefore, for the who, I nominate a ship’s junior officer—senior officers generally having enough money to bring their own extensive stocks of wine, and ordinary seamen being more likely to adopt an officer’s drink than the reverse—and an Englishman, probably, although a Dutchman is by no means out of the question (Punch would not be the first Dutch innovation that the English took over wholesale). The when is trickier. It could be as early as Fenton’s voyage of 1582 and as late as 1620 or so (here I am assuming Della Valle’s “Larkin” is Punch by another name), but I’ll go with 1610, give or take a few years; the earlier we place it, the stranger it becomes that we don’t hear of it until 1632. Where—well, at sea, of course, anyplace east of the Cape of Good Hope, where English ships called to stock up on water and citrus fruits at a time in their voyages when all beer was likely to be gone.

In any case, for the next two centuries, Punch would be the sailor’s joy, as much a part of the stereotypical image of the English seaman as rough talk, stubborn courage and a proclivity to cavorting with whores. Indeed, Admiral Vernon, in the famous 1740 order directing that his sailors’ daily rum ration—by 1731 the Royal Navy had, sensibly, abandoned beer for foreign postings, substituting a perhaps not so sensible half-pint of rum, brandy or arrack—be “daily mixed with a quart of water” (thus creating “grog”), came close to making it official by also adding that “they that are good husbandmen may . . . purchase sugar and limes” to make the result “more palatable to them.” After a 1794 experiment, the navy took husbandmanship out of the equation and had lemon juice and sugar added to the grog before it was served out, thus preventing scurvy and, finally, making official the expedient that those intrepid, quarrelsome East India men of the early days came up with so that they would not have to drink water.