Rum

A Global History
Richard Foss

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 Rum
A Global History

Richard Foss

 
 Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
 Great Sutton Street
London  , 
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 

Copyright © Richard Foss 

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
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Printed and bound in China by C&C Offset Printing Co., Ltd

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Foss, Richard
Rum : a global history. – (Edible)
. Rum – History.
. Cooking (Rum)
. Title . Series
.-

     

 Contents

Liquid History: An Introduction 

1 What Is and Isn’t Rum? 
2 The Elusive Origins of Rum: From the Caribbean
to the usa 
3 Rum Manufacture by Other European Powers 
4 Rum All Over the World: Australia, India, Asia,
South America and Beyond 
5 Rum Falls from Grace and Rises Again:
Temperance, Cocktails, Wars and Religion 
6 Rum Today and Tomorrow 
Recipes 
Select Bibliography 
Websites and Associations 
Rum Museums 
Acknowledgements 
Photo Acknowledgements 
Index 
 Liquid History:
An Introduction

The first time I enjoyed the flavour of rum was not the first
time I actually drank it – far from it, in fact. I had imbibed
rum as a teenager, of the quality that someone would bring
to a party frequented by underage drinkers, and I could not
imagine how anyone could enjoy drinking the stuff straight.
That particular rum and I both had plenty of rough edges,
and we did not immediately take to each other. I drank rum,
then and later, as a component of sweet tropical drinks with
umbrellas in them, and occasionally as an addition to coffee
on cold evenings. My conversion to actively appreciating
good rum came as an accident as I sought to win the heart of
a fair lady.
The woman was a few years older than me and far more
sophisticated, and I was more than a bit nervous on our first
date. We arrived early for a dinner reservation and were invited
to wait in the bar, and she confidently ordered, ‘Myers’s and
rocks, please.’ Having no idea what that was, I added, ‘Sounds
great! Make that two.’ A coffee-coloured liquid with ice cubes
arrived in short order, and I cautiously took a sip. It was
obviously a distilled spirit of some kind, but like nothing I
had tried before: smooth and gentle and tasting delicately of
spice and caramel. When my date left for a few moments on

 Myers’s rum
used a simple
but memorable
graphic style for
many ads, as in
this example
from .

some mysterious feminine errand, I asked the bartender for a

look at the bottle so I could find out what this marvellous
elixir was.
Rum? That was rum?
My romantic intentions with the lady fizzled out shortly
thereafter, but my appreciation for her beverage of choice
grew with each new experience. I savoured light and dark,
sweet and spicy, mellow and sharp. Gradually I learned some
of the lore of rum, the extraordinary history and cultural con-
nections that go far beyond the superficial connection with
tiki drinks, Caribbean pirates and bad sea shanties.
The most famous of these, the one with the ‘Yo, ho, ho,
and a bottle of rum’ chorus, isn’t traditional at all – it was

written by Robert Louis Stevenson for his book Treasure Island
in . This is in keeping with much pirate and rum lore, both
of which are full of romantic misinformation. The truth about
both rum and piracy is actually more interesting. Rum has
been a beverage, a currency and an element of ritual, a symbol
of debauchery among Temperance crusaders and of healthy
moderation in the British Navy. It is made as far south as
New Zealand and as far north as Newfoundland, and was a
major export of colonial New England. Rum has jump-started
economies and fuelled the slave trade, sparked mutinies against
captains who withheld it and governors who tried to regulate
it, and been an indispensable element of religious worship. It
has been celebrated by authors, used in toasts by statesmen,
and also been a comfort and reward to the labourers who cut
the cane that went to make more rum. In recent years aged
versions have acquired, and deserved, the same mystique as fine
Scotch whisky, and a new generation of distillers are creating
surprising variants on traditional recipes.
In short, it is a beverage that is every bit as worthy of
study as wine, but that hasn’t generally attracted the same
level of consideration. This brief book alone will not make
up for that deficit, but will give at least an overview of rum’s
origins, worldwide history and cultural impact, and perhaps
a glimpse at its future. There are other books about the early
history of rum in the Caribbean that go into greater detail,
but none that address rum as a worldwide phenomenon. I
will also explore some aspects of the anthropology of rum,
the songs and poems that celebrated it or attacked it as evil.
Rum has provoked strong feelings from the very beginning,
and it would be easy to fill a book twice this size with its lore
and literature.


 1
What Is and Isn’t Rum?

First it’s worth a look at the question of what rum is, which is
not as easy to answer as it might seem. The simplest defini-
tion is that rum is a beverage distilled from sugar cane, either
in the form of the raw juice or from molasses refined from
sugar by boiling. That seems to be an easy line to draw, but in
practice things get murky.
Pure sugar-cane juice can be fermented into a type of rum
usually called rhum agricole or cachaça, and about  per cent of
the world’s rum is made this way. Almost all of this is produced
either in Brazil or in former French colonies, though boutique
distillers elsewhere are expanding the style. There is no generally
accepted generic term for rums based on sugar-cane juice – dis-
tillers in the French Caribbean argue that only their products
should be called rhum agricole, and Brazilian law says that cachaça
can only be produced in that country. (It might seem that
cachaça is just another word for rum from Brazil, but there are
also Brazilian rums that are marketed just as rum. Cachaça is
distilled to a lower proof than most other rums, and batches are
started with a different technique, but these reasons alone are
not enough to consider it something other than a form of rum.)
Throughout this book I will use the term ‘cane rum’
as a generic for rums made from sugar-cane juice rather

This  engraving of a sugar plant by Sir William Hooker is an example
of beautiful scientific art from before the age of photography.
than molasses. Such rums are usually more expensive than
molasses-based rums, both because the starting product is
more valuable and because of the relatively low efficiency of
this type of operation. Cane rum can only be made when the
sugar plants are ripe and producing fresh juice, so they are
idle for part of the year. Molasses-based rums can be made
all year round from stored product.
Distillers who use molasses as a raw material are unlikely
to adopt the French term for their rums, which is rhum indus-
triel. The distinction seems explicitly designed to make cane
rum appear more healthy. (While the French were generally
behind in rum technology, their marketing skills were acute.)
Molasses is the sludge that is left over from boiled cane juice
after the crystalline sugar has been extracted; that which isn’t
made into rum is usually bottled for culinary uses or added
to animal feed. There is a very wide range of flavours in raw
molasses, based on the variety of cane, soil and climate. For
instance, Brazilian molasses is particularly sweet and light,

Sugar cane juice being cooked into molasses in Racine, West Virginia, in
.


while Fijian molasses made by the same process is acrid and
approximately twice as dark. In addition, there are several
distinctions among the grades of syrup left over from sugar
processing. In Britain and former British colonies, the first
distilling is called light molasses, the second dark treacle or dark
molasses, while the third is called blackstrap molasses. Rum
of varying quality can be made from all of these, though liquor
made from the lower grades of syrup is usually redistilled to
remove pungent flavours.
Any kind of sugar processing will produce molasses as a
waste product, but only some kinds are desirable for making
rum. Sugar-beet processing creates molasses that can be
made into alcohol, but alkaline salts that are concentrated in
the process make the resulting rum unpalatable. Maple syrup
can be made into rum, but the high price of the raw ingredi-
ent compared to cane molasses makes it economically
impractical. (Maple trees are only about  per cent as produc-
tive as sugar cane, and produce sap only for a short season,
while sugar cane is productive for most of the year in tropi-
cal climates.) Sorghum refining produces molasses that can
be used to make rum, and some boutique distillers have
experimented with rums based wholly or in part on sorghum,
but their marketing efforts have been hampered by the fact
that  and  law require anything that is labelled as rum to
be made from sugar-cane products. A few companies in
Africa and China make sorghum rum for local consumption,
but for cultural reasons most of the rum that is made this way
is labelled ‘whiskey’. (In Asia the word ‘whiskey’ is used for
any distilled alcohol, and beverages like Thai Mekhong
whiskey are made from  per cent molasses and  per cent
rice.) There are also Chinese and Indian ‘whiskies’ that are
actually rums made in whole or in part from molasses, some
of which are very good. Low-quality molasses-based spirits

from China are often flavoured with ginseng and medicinal
herbs and called chiew. These are popular in overseas Chinese
communities as an aperitif and medicine, but since the rum
is just a spirit base for the herb flavourings, chiew will not be
dealt with in this book.
The situation is even more confusing with beverages
called aguardiente, which are made in countries from Mexico to
Argentina and in scattered former Spanish colonies. Some
aguardientes are actually rums by another name, some are made
from rum flavoured with anise and herbs, while others are
distilled from grape spirits and raisin extract in the style of
grappa. Aguardiente comes from the term agua ardiente – literally,
firewater – and the term was used throughout the Spanish
Empire to refer to any very strong spirit. Some cane-derived
aguardientes from Colombia and Mexico are sophisticated
and smooth, while others would be recognized as raw white
lightning by any bootlegger.
(Oddly, though modern distillers have been exploring
new frontiers in other regards, almost all distil from cane juice
or molasses without mixing the two. I have only found only
one company that regularly distils from a blend of cane and
molasses: Ron Los Valientes is made near Veracruz, Mexico.)
Just to confuse things further, there have been other bever-
ages that were called rum, but that were not made from sugar or
molasses. In the nineteenth century, European distillers in
countries that had no sugar-producing colonies created a bev-
erage they called ‘inlander rum’. This was actually a mix of grain
alcohols flavoured and coloured to taste like dark rum. Over
the years major companies such as Stroh of Austria that used
to make inlander rum this way have changed the formula to use
imported molasses. Thanks to this change, which was made
partly to comply with  regulations on what can be called rum,
all inlander rums now sold legally are the real thing.

 Laws concerning truth in labelling and other social
changes have put an end to the most flagrant counterfeits of
rum, which were sold during the Soviet period when trade with
the outside world was limited. Cuban rum was a major trade
item in the Eastern Bloc, but ordinary Soviet citizens could
only afford domestic inlander-style imitations. Since they
had never tasted the real thing, they had no idea that this
‘rum’ was bogus. Cuban officers who trained at Soviet naval
bases on the Black Sea knew differently, and were horrified
when they tried the local swill. Having tried a shot of the stuff
while at the Kuban Hotel in Varna, Bulgaria, when I visited
the country over two decades ago, I can report that it had a
strange metallic taste that was not fully masked by the addition
of low-grade fruit juice. One of the many benefits to civiliza-
tion of the collapse of the Soviet Union is the extinction of
these liquors.
Among beverages that actually are rum as it is conven-
tionally defined, there is no single standard for grading and
grouping, though many have been proposed. Rums are gen-
erally characterized as light, gold or dark, though they come
in shades ranging from completely clear to inky black. A
darker colour is usually, though not always, a sign that the
rum has been aged. Most light rums are clear and unaged, but
there are exceptions: some aged rums are filtered so that they
become clear again. There are also cheap dark rums that are
unaged, but have had caramel flavour and colour added to
simulate the ageing process.
As with Scotch whisky, most rum distillers favour used
barrels that were previously used for wines or bourbon in
order to infuse their product with more complex flavours
during the ageing process. Ageing times vary: some countries
require that rum be cellared a minimum of eight months to
be called aged, others require two years, and most have no

 Barrels of ageing
rum stacked to
the ceiling at a
distillery in St
Croix,  Virgin
Islands, .

legal requirement at all. Even three or four years is far shorter

than the minimum ageing times for brandies and Scotch
whiskies, but this does not mean that aged rums are less com-
plex. The warm temperatures in the regions where sugar cane
thrives mean that alcohols mature in the barrel much more
quickly than in cool climates. This is a benefit to distillers who
age their rum, though they also lose more to evaporation in
the process.
The flavour of rum can be influenced by many factors –
the characteristics of the strain of sugar cane, the age at
which it is harvested, the purity of the molasses, how many
times the molasses is distilled and to what proof, and how the
resulting alcohol is aged. This allows vast latitude for an
accomplished producer to create different effects, and for at

least  years distillers and cellarmasters have experimented
and honed their skills.

As Much as You Need to Know About

Distilling to Keep Reading
Distilling, the process of concentrating essences from a fer-
mented mixture called wort, is usually credited to Arab and
Persian alchemists of the Middle Ages. This assumption was
overturned when a complete terracotta still was identified in
a museum in Taxila, Pakistan, and estimated to be , years
old. It is a simple thing, a dome-lidded clay pot with a detach-
able spout that empties into a covered bowl, but anyone who
has visited a modern distillery can recognize the essential ele-
ments of what later Arab chemists called an alembic still.

Stills were a symbol of alchemy – one is prominent in the right foreground

of this  print by Hinrich von Bauditz.


That ancient forerunner may have been used for extracting
plant oils for perfume or for alcohol, but as of this writing no
tests have been run on the inside of the pot to figure out
what was used as a raw material.
Whether the knowledge of the distilling process travelled
from India, possibly when Alexander’s troops went there, or
Greek scientists figured it out themselves, scientists in classi-
cal Athens knew about it. Aristotle mentioned it briefly, but
there is no evidence that it was used commercially. The
Romans did nothing to advance the technology, though many
assume they did because of a widely quoted aphorism attrib-
uted to the poet Ovid, ‘There is more refreshment and
stimulation in a nap, even the briefest, than in all the alcohol
ever distilled.’ Ovid had much to say about the benefits of
napping, but this particular statement probably originated
with nineteenth-century wit Edward Lucas.
Shortly after the year  , Avicenna and other
alchemists improved the still, using the results as a base for
medicines and perfumes. Around  some unknown genius
in Europe hit on the idea of lengthening the tube between the
boiler and collector in order to cool the vapours. This coil of
tubing, called the condenser, vastly improved the efficiency of
the alembic still, and created the silhouette of the equipment
we know today. The first distilled alcoholic beverages on
record were referred as aqua ardens, literally ‘burning water’. It’s
a reasonable name for raw alcohol, one that would be
repeated in many languages over the centuries.
Brandy was recorded in the early s, whisky and
vodka by , and the process of distilling was so common
by the Elizabethan era that every manor house had its ‘still
room’ where the women of the house made a beverage they
called aqua vitae: water of life. While alchemists still strove to
use their primitive stills to create a literal elixir of immortality,

common people used the same equipment to make medicines
and recreational beverages. These were still raw spirits, since
the techniques of ageing and mellowing were in their infancy,
but they were an exciting development and technicians across
the continent worked to refine the craft.

Even Fewer Words about the History of Sugar

People have known for at least , years that sugar cane, a
perennial grass of the genus Saccharum, yielded a juice that
could be fermented. There is a common misconception that
rum got its name from this botanical classification. This can’t
be true, because Linnaeus did not assign the genus Saccharum
to sugar cane until , long after rum was first named.
Various wild species of Saccharum flourished throughout
Southeast Asia, from the Indo-Burmese border region all the
way to central China and far into the Pacific islands. The earli-
est known cultivation seems to have been in New Guinea ,
years ago, but it was in India that we have the first written
record of the plant’s cultivation and fermentation.
A manuscript called the Manasollana, or ‘Book of the
Happy State of Mind’, dates from the Vedic period in India
around   and includes a recipe for sugar-cane beer.
More tantalizingly, another manuscript from this period
mentions two alcoholic drinks made with sugar, called soma
and sura. Sura, made from sugar cane and rice, was given to
warriors to enhance their courage. Soma was reserved for the
aristocracy and credited with promoting positive qualities,
but unfortunately we don’t know what was in it. (Manu-
scripts from this period frequently contain words whose
exact meaning is unknown, so recreating any recipe from
this period is problematic.) Whatever was in soma, it was one

This picture shows an acolyte of Krishna drinking alcohol, which the
ancient Hindus used as a medicine and sacrament.

of several alcohol-based elixirs that could be found in the

medical cabinet of ancient India.
Alexander the Great’s troops marvelled at ‘honey made
without bees’, the first description of sugar-cane syrup by an
outsider, when they came through the neighbourhood in 
. If any of them took cuttings back to Greece to plant
there, they were disappointed; the cane grows poorly in a
Mediterranean climate, so sugar was destined to be an exotic
and expensive imported item. As early as  , a book on
trade through the Red Sea mentioned ‘honey from reeds

which is called sakchar’, the first documented trade in sugar
to Europe.
Muslim traders in the Middle Ages made huge profits in
the sugar trade and introduced the plant to Egypt and Sicily,
which were close to the huge European market. The price
dropped, but profits didn’t, since the volume of trade increased

‘Saccharum officindiarum’, etching, from Hooker’s Botanical Miscellany

(–).


dramatically. Eventually Europeans considered the vast
amount of money they were paying to Muslim traders with
whom they were at least nominally at war and looked for a
place where they could grow sugar cane themselves.
The Portuguese were first with sugar plantations in their
African colonies and the Azores, which at first were worked
by petty criminals and Jews in a penal environment. That
labour force was insufficient and difficult to control, so black
Africans were bought from Arab traders and the link between
sugar and slavery was born.

Sugar cane illustra-

tion in a Latin edi-
tion of Sebastian
Münster’s
Cosmographia (Basel,
c. ).


This Dutch engraving of the slave trade to Brazil by Johannes de Ram of
c.  shows a white trader who has just paid his native assistant. Note
the chains attached to the stone and the African captives behind them.

Though the profits from these ventures were huge, treach-

erous currents and unpredictable Sahara winds off the African
coast made the journey extremely dangerous. The potential for
gain having been well established, the powers of Europe looked
to the New World to produce this very old crop.


 2
The Elusive Origins of Rum:
From the Caribbean to the usa

Just when and where sugar cane first flourished in the Amer-
icas is a matter of debate, but there were certainly canefields
and sugar mills on the island of Hispaniola by , at Porto
Seguro in Brazil by , and in Jamaica, Cuba and Puerto
Rico by .
The Portuguese had a technological edge thanks to their
experiences in Africa, and applied that knowledge in their
vast Brazilian dominion. Portuguese planters in the Brazilian
area of São Vicente were reporting huge returns on invest-
ment on their plantations by the s, and could have done
even better but for chronic labour shortages; the natives
would not willingly work the fields and disappeared into the
hinterlands, where they easily eluded pursuers. The Por-
tuguese started importing slaves from their colonies in Africa,
people who had no hope of blending in with the locals if they
escaped, and thus African slavery came to the New World.
The rival empires of Spain, Britain and France all turned to
the same source for labour, buying slaves from Arab traders.
Sugar plantations took on the look of opulent prisons, with a
casa grande or manor house where the masters enjoyed whatever
imported luxuries were available, and the senzalas or slave quar-
ters where their workers lived in squalor. Somewhere in one of

these remote outposts, someone who knew the everyday
household technique of distilling applied it to either the sugar-
cane juice or the sludge left over from sugar processing, and a
crude version of the drink we now call rum was born.
Exactly where and when this first happened has been a
subject of much debate, and the answer will never be known
for sure. Record-keeping on the wild fringes of great empires
is often haphazard and confined to essentials, and local ad-
ministrators were unlikely to regard the fact that someone had
brewed a new form of popskull liquor as hot news. Indeed,
mentioning to your superiors that people under your com-
mand had developed a brand new form of vice could be a
career-shortening event. It has been claimed that Dutch Jews
in Martinique distilled some sort of liquor from sugar as early
as , but the records are too scanty to allow us to draw any
conclusions. The first firm documentation is a  report
from Governor Tomé de Souza of Bahia in the Portuguese

Cutting sugar cane was excruciating and dangerous in tropical heat.

William Clark, ‘Slaves cutting the Sugar Cane, ’, from Ten Views in the
Island of Antigua, .


The first unequivocal mention of alcohol distilled from sugar in the New
World was in this book, published in  by German naturalist George
Marcgrave.
colony of Brazil, which mentions that the slaves on sugar
plantations were more passive and willing to work if allowed
to drink ‘cachaco’. That term is similar to one for alcohol used
for pickling rather than drinking, indicating a primitive and
rough spirit. The masters in the casa grande would certainly
have scorned it, preferring wine and brandy imported from
Europe. It would also have been their only legal choice, since
while the governors of the colony might have ignored the
local use of a product made from waste materials if it kept the
slaves tractable, the Caribbean and South American colonies
were supposed to provide raw materials to the mother country
and import all finished products and luxuries. Trade between
colonies – or, even worse, between colonies and foreigners
– was strictly prohibited. The fortunes of many among the
Spanish and Portuguese aristocracy were based on commerce
in brandy and wines, and they wanted no competition from
other sources, even from within their own colonies. If alcohol
made from sugar had been seen as any threat to those very
profitable monopolies, its manufacture would have been sup-
pressed – as the Portuguese government tried to do as early
as . In  – before the first mention of any beverage
distilled from sugar anywhere else – the Portuguese govern-
ment ordered that only slaves were allowed to drink cachaça,
though it was permitted to sell it to residents of Pernambuco,
which was then under Dutch rule. The Portuguese govern-
ment regarded rum as a health hazard and a nuisance, but
evidently didn’t mind exporting a social problem to their
commercial rivals.
There are no conclusive records of rum distilling in the
Spanish or French Caribbean in this era, but it is hard to
believe that it didn’t happen. Distillation was an everyday skill
in both cultures and there were hundreds of sugar plantations
around the islands and South American mainland; it strains

credibility that nobody but the Portuguese ever thought to try
running some molasses or cane juice through a still to see
what happened. The French cleric Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre
brought a still to Martinique in  and experimented with it
during his eight-year stay on the island, but rum was appar-
ently not a common beverage there for some years afterward.
The Dutch were experienced distillers and produced sugar on
the Caribbean islands they owned, which makes it even more
surprising that they never developed much of a rum trade.
The first mention of rum from the Caribbean is both
famous and derogatory: the report from a visitor to the
British colony of Barbados in  that mentioned that ‘The
chief fuddling they make in the island is Rumbullion, alias Kill-
Divil, and this is made of sugar canes distilled, a hot, hellish,
and terrible liquor.’ This is the first recorded use of any vari-
ant of the term ‘rum’, and is cited by many historians as the

This map of Barbados from  shows the principal sugar plantations
and also (at the top) a mounted man shooting at runaway slaves.


date of the invention of liquor distilled from sugar. The mis-
conception lives on, and the connection with Barbados was
sufficiently strong in English-speaking regions that rum was
called Barbadoes-Liquor throughout the eighteenth century.
The origin of the name ‘rumbullion’ is hotly disputed,
with some partisans alleging that the word ‘rum’ was rustic
British slang for ‘excellent’. Others point to an alleged link
between the words ‘rum’ and ‘scrum’, meaning fight, or ‘rum -
bustious’, meaning exuberant, noisy and undisciplined. Given
that every first-hand report of rum from this era emphasizes
how raw and awful it was, the ‘excellent’ explanation seems
far fetched. There is a well-documented propensity for rum
drinkers of the period to fight, and this etymology seems
more likely.
(Many early references to rum in free populations remark
how people who drink it are inclined to violence, while slaves
were more tractable when they drank it. Surely there is no
inherent quality in rum that makes it have these diametrically
opposed effects in different populations. It seems more likely
that those who have no hope of freedom drink themselves
into an apathetic stupor and are less likely to run riot than free
people in newly settled communities with little supervision.)
The adjective ‘kill-devil’ was at least as popular a name
as rum for many years, and in fact became the vernacular
term for it in Dutch (keelduivel ) and French (gueldive). No report
or description of rum would refer to it as a beverage fit for
gentlemen for almost a hundred years.

The British Commercialize Rum

Unlike the French, Portuguese and Spanish, the British had
no indigenous wine and brandy trade to protect, and the

colonial administration allowed the making of rum and its
export to other British colonies. Entrepreneurs started trad-
ing in rum as soon as they figured out how to make it,
though it seems that smuggling became a problem almost
immediately. An order from the Governor and Council of
Jamaica from the Calendar of State Papers Colonial in 
ordained ‘that the former orders concerning rum, sugar,
and hammocks be still in force, viz., one half to be forfeited
to the King, and one half to the informer.’ What any in-
former would do with half a hammock is a question that is
left unanswered. It is unfortunate that the date and text of
that previous order is unknown, since it was the first attempt
by the British to regulate a smuggling trade that quickly
became notorious.
All early references to rum describe it as a public nui-
sance and social evil. In  Governor Robert Hooper of
Barbados ordered soldiers to close ‘sundry small houses for
selling rum’, one of a long list of actions designed to increase
order in the community. In  a Barbados merchant named
John Style sent an extended rant to the colonial overlords in
Whitehall, alleging that

The number of tippling houses is now doubly increased,

so that there is not now resident upon this place ten men
to every house that selleth strong liquors. There are more
than  licensed houses, besides sugar and rum works
that sell without license; and what can that bring but ruin,
for many sell their plantations, and either go out for pri-
vateers, or drinking themselves into debt, sell their bodies
or are sold for prison fees.

There is no evidence that any action was taken, or that

Styles even received a reply. He was not alone in his complaints

of rampant alcoholism, and the next year Governor West of
Barbados, in a requisition for supplies, said he hoped that

their Honours are thinking of sending a supply [of ser-

vants] from England, for some will be out of their time
next year, and one English servant is worth two Barbadi-
ans, for they are so much addicted to rum that they will
do little but while the bottle is at their nose.

The fortune of Governor West’s colony was based on

molasses and the rum trade, but there was a price to be paid
in efficiency.
Though it is doubtful that Barbados deserves the often-
claimed title of ‘birthplace of rum’, it was certainly the first
place that rum was commercialized and turned to a more
refined drink. As in many other trading ventures, the entre-
preneurial British took inefficient and languishing markets
and turned them into profitable concerns. The planters of
Brazil made a primitive and foul version of rum for  years
without improving it or merchandizing it; the same class of
people in Barbados refined the spirit and turned it into a
money machine within a decade of its first appearance on
their shores.

Rum in New England

British rum was not widely traded outside the Caribbean at
this time, but molasses, the raw material, soon found a ready
market in New England. The earliest mention of rum in New
England is from , when the General Court of Massachu-
setts declared the overproduction of alcohol, ‘whether
knowne by the name of rumme, strong water, wine, brandy,

etc., etc.’, a menace to society. Since this law addresses an
existing trade and the process of legislation was slow, rum must
have been sold there for some time. By  that same body
took action against innkeepers who sold weak beer fortified
with rum.
Rum was certainly made in Staten Island, New York, by
, in Boston by  and in Philadelphia by . Doc-
tors of the period considered the liquor to be medicinal,
believing that the air and water of America’s ‘hot climate’
were unwholesome. Rum had its medicinal purpose on cold,
damp days too – it was drunk just before leaving the house
as an ‘antifogmatick’ to ward off the chill. Rum was drunk to
prevent the evil effects of this environment, and while it may
have done little to alleviate other malaises, it certainly did
much to stimulate the economy. Unlike the sparsely forested
Caribbean islands, where fuel was expensive, New England
had vast forests to supply the fires of the distilleries. Its work-
force also included many Scots and Irish, who had learned
the trade in their mother countries. The cool northern cli-
mate made spending days among the fires of a distillery more
tolerable than the hellish occupation it was in the Caribbean,
and well-charted currents made transportation routine and
inexpensive.
Molasses quickly became part of colonial culture. It had
many uses in cooking and baking by honest housewives,
including ‘Indian Pudding’, made from corn, molasses and
butter. In  the pioneer doctor and botanist John Josselyn
remarked that he was served molasses-beer made with sas-
safras root, water and bran in Maine; this is one of the first
references to a fermented but undistilled sugar-cane product
in North America. Josselyn made a distinction between this
sugar beer and rum, and recommended the latter boiled
together with onions as a treatment for gout and kidney

stones. Those who tried this remedy would be denied the
anaesthetic qualities of the rum, since Josselyn prescribed
boiling the rum and onions into a plaster and applying it to
the patient’s hip.
As the production of rum took hold, it became a central
ingredient of the hot toddies that warmed and comforted peo-
ple through freezing winters. Some of these were elaborate in
preparation; a man known as Landlord May of Canton, Massa-
chusetts, became famous for a concoction that began with
sugar, eggs and cream left to stand for two days. This was
added to a mug of beer that was heated with a hot poker, with
a gill of rum tossed into the creamy mixture just before serving
to finish it off. (This may sound odd but it is actually delicious,
like an alcoholic marshmallow. You can find the recipe for
this and other rum drinks at the back of this book.) The same
drink with an egg beaten into it just before serving was called
‘bellows-top’, and had a consistency almost like custard.
There were other combinations of rum with ‘hard’ (or
alcoholic) cider, the most popular beverage of New England,
and with molasses and spruce beer to create a beverage with
the delightful named callibogus. Another popular drink of the
period was rum shrub, a cordial made with sugar, vinegar and
orange or lime juice. (This usage of the word ‘shrub’ probably
comes from the Arabic sharab, to drink, not from the word for
a small bush.) The vinegar gives shrubs a tart flavour and makes
them exceptionally refreshing, a sophisticated cocktail from
colonial days.
Those who cared more about effect than aesthetics drank
rum straight, which was usually regarded as a sign of desper-
ation or depravity. Puritans naturally disliked this recreational
beverage, and in  Increase Mather preached one of his
typically aggrieved sermons against it. ‘It is an unhappy thing
that in later years a kind of drink called Rum has been common

The author stirs a jug of Landlord May’s Flip with a hot poker to
caramelize the sugars and boil the mixture of beer, rum, egg, cream
and sugar.

among us. They that are poor, and wicked too, can for a penny
or two-pence make themselves drunk.’
Rum was cheap because the raw materials were inexpen-
sive and highly productive; a gallon of imported molasses
and some water would make a gallon of rum. In  molasses

could be bought for one shilling a gallon, and the rum made
from it sold for six shillings per gallon – an enviable profit
for very little work. As the trade grew in volume the price fell,
and rum was made on an industrial scale and exported widely.
New England seamen and merchants conducted this trade
while living under laws that restricted the drinking of alcoholic
beverages in highly intrusive ways. As Josselyn complained,

at the houses of entertainment called ordinaries into which a

stranger went, he was presently followed by one appointed
to that office who would thrust himself into his company
uninvited, and if he called for more drink than the officer
thought, in his judgment, he could soberly bear away, he
would presently countermand it, and appoint the propor-
tion beyond which he could not get one drop.

Anyone who managed to get enough alcohol to get

drunk faced fines and humiliation, including a day in the
stocks and having to wear a red D around his neck for a
month afterward. These restrictions were even greater for
Native Americans, and beginning in  anyone selling rum
to them could be fined. These restrictions seemed harsh to
the easygoing New Yorkers, who opined that ‘to prohibit all
strong liquor to them seems very hard and very turkish,
rumm doth as little hurt as the ffrenchmans Brandie, and in
the whole is much more wholesome.’ They were alone in
their charitable concern for the Native Americans’ right to
drink; most others of the period expressed fear of a rebellion
of ‘inflamed devilish bloody savages’. The tribes themselves
were divided on the issue, some chiefs recognizing the social
problems of drunkenness among their people. In , when
an invasion by the French was expected, the chief of the
Onondaga tribe asked Governor Fletcher to ‘discharge the

selling of rum to any of our nations. Let them have powder
and lead instead of rum.’ Other chiefs took a different view;
in , Seneca chief Wabbicomicot demanded rum from the
soldiers at Fort Niagara, warning that he could not guarantee
peace with his people if they remained sober. Benjamin
Franklin recorded a native orator who proclaimed:

The Great Spirit, who made all things, made every thing
for some use, and whatever use he design’d any thing for,
that use it should always be put to. Now, when he made
rum, he said ‘Let this be for the Indians to get drunk
with,’ and it must be so.

Franklin added his own gloomy note afterwards:

And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extir-

pate these savages in order to make room for cultivators
of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be
the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the
tribes who formerly inhabited the sea-coast.

The rum that so destroyed the culture of the Native

Americans was made locally in New England, where new
technologies for industrial distilling made high volumes pos-
sible. As usually happens, high volume led to low prices; as
Burke put it later,

The quantity of spirits which they distill in Boston from

the molasses they import is as surprising as the cheapness
at which they sell it, which is under two shillings a gallon;
but they are more famous for the quantity and cheapness
than for the excellency of their rum.


This picture of  shows the idealized British industry – impeccably
dressed overseers supervising hard-working slaves. On the left are the
stills; on the right are windmills for grinding cane.

Superior rums came from the Caribbean, particularly

Barbados, where improved distilling technology was aided by
the tropical heat. Spirits mellow much more quickly in warm
weather, so even if New Englanders had followed the same
procedures, their rum would not have matched those
imported from the West Indies. A tiered pricing system
quickly developed, with West Indian rum priced at twice the
cost of New England rum. Inferior products still sold in vast
quantities for mixing into compound beverages, consump-
tion by the lower classes, and for trading for slaves.
By  the Southern colonies were buying New Eng-
land rum in quantity, and it quickly became a form of
currency. All colonies were chronically short of money and
often had to resort to barter, since Britain had prohibited the
export of silver coins. This led to the widespread use of
Spanish, French and Dutch coins, as well as the Austrian

Thaler from which American currency gets its name, but there
were still not enough in circulation.
Rum filled the vacuum: it could easily be measured and
divided, and then either drunk by the recipient or traded
again for something else. Wages were paid in rum as early as
October , when the New York council specified that the
carpenters building a pinnace for the customs service were to
be given rum as part of their wages. (That small, fast vessel
would be used to chase rum-smugglers, so one hopes that the
liquor the carpenters were paid with was obtained legally.)
This practice became so commonplace that the great econo-
mist Adam Smith later mentioned it in The Wealth of Nations:

In the province of New York, common labourers earn

three shillings and sixpence currency, equal to two shillings
sterling, a day; ship carpenters, ten shillings and sixpence
currency, with a pint of rum worth sixpence sterling, equal
in all to six shillings and sixpence sterling.

In time larger transactions and contracts specified rum

for payment, a practice that quickly spread beyond New Eng-
land. The first piece of land to change hands in Kernersville,
North Carolina, which is over  miles inland, was priced at
four gallons of rum.

Rum Smuggling and the Triangle Trade

The habit of paying in rum was a headache for administra-
tors and tax collectors. In November  Collector of
Customs Edward Randolph reported that residents of Vir-
ginia and North Carolina were smuggling the majority of the
tobacco they produced, and on the rare occasions when they

were caught, they paid the duty in rum. Randolph’s reports
were notoriously biased against the colonists, and his opin-
ion of their beverages may be discerned from the final
paragraph of a letter he wrote home:

I am indisposed, not finding agreeable diet or drink. I

have not been accustomed to rum. Signed, Ed. Randolph.
Please to excuse the writing, the matter is too true.

Whatever his opinion of the colonists and their bever-

ages, there’s no denying that rum-smuggling had become a
global business by the end of the seventeenth century. In July
 Governor Coote of New York wrote:

’Tis the most beneficial trade, that to Madagascar with

the pirates, that ever was heard of, and I believe there’s
more got that way than by turning pirates and robbing. I
am told this Shelley sold rum, which cost but s. per gal-
lon at N. York, for s. and £ per gallon at Madagascar.

To the consternation of the upright locals, respectable

citizens were sometimes caught engaged in this illicit trade,
which was lubricated by gifts of rum to customs inspectors
who were less than diligent about their work after sampling
it. Even prominent citizens were caught smuggling: Peter
Faneuil of Boston (after whom Faneuil Hall is named) had
one of his ships seized in  for illegally trading with the
French. He was practising other ruses in the liquor trade too:
a letter to his French agent surfaced, advising him to ‘See
what good French brandy is worth, and if it be possible to
cloak it and ship it for rum.’
Just what percentage of rum was smuggled can never be
known, but there were many entrepreneurs operating along

a vast and lightly patrolled coast, and the officials in charge
of suppressing the trade were notoriously bribable. All the
official statistics of the economic effect of the rum trade are
undoubtedly underestimations. Rum and the molasses used
to make it were the most heavily traded commodities in the
Caribbean by , and the main source of profit for Britain’s
colonial enterprise in the Americas.
Rum also fuelled what came to be known as the Triangle
Trade, in which molasses was exported to New England to
be made into rum; rum to Africa to trade for slaves; and
slaves to the Caribbean and South America to produce sugar
for molasses. (The same ships did not travel to all three
points of the triangle, since slave ships were not ideal for
other cargo, but that is the way the money flowed.)
Rum was not responsible for the African slave trade,
which the Arabs had conducted since at least the thirteenth
century, but that trade expanded exponentially when it was
discovered that sugar cane was a crop that could be easily har-
vested from huge plantations by forced labour. As the voyages
became routine, the volume of trade increased and became
more specialized. The islands of the British Caribbean ex -
ported sugar and molasses and imported everything else,
becoming dependent on faraway places for staple foods. Grain,
cattle and vegetable cultivation withered in the Caribbean,
because sugar cane cultivation brought in more money.
Even such occupations as fishing in the rich Caribbean
waters were forsaken in pursuit of increased rum produc-
tion. A brief entry from the journal of Emmanuel Downing
reads, ‘Leader has cast the iron pans to be used in the process.
Frequent commerce with the West Indies carried out, un -
merchantable fish to be exchanged for molasses.’ Since
molasses was a waste product of sugar refining, what we
see documented here is the dregs of the fishing trade being

Caribbean
pirates hauling
barrels of rum
to trade for
slaves, from The
Pirate’s Own Book
().

exchanged for the dregs of the sugar trade, to the benefit of

both parties. The results of this trade route are still plain in
cuisines all over the Caribbean, where cod is popular even
though that coldwater fish would die in the warm ocean.
Caribbean islanders who are the descendants of slaves still
celebrate with codfish fritters; and though the raw material
for these is no longer traded for human beings, it is still paid
for with profits from rum.
That enterprise received a huge boost in  when the
British captured Jamaica from the Spanish. The soil and cli-
mate of that island were excellent for growing sugar cane, it
was over twenty times larger than Barbados, and unlike Bar-
bados it had both fuel and water in abundance. Planters and
slaves poured in, distilleries were established and Jamaican
rum quickly became esteemed as the standard of quality. The

 This Jamaican
stamp from
 reveals
the reason the
British considered
Jamaica such a
prize – it shows
Queen Elizabeth
framed by sugar
cane stalks.

population of Jamaica quadrupled within two decades as

new plantations were founded, and eventually slaves out-
numbered free people by twenty to one. The city of Port
Royal became famously wicked and wealthy, and until an
earthquake destroyed it in  it was a crossroads for the
whole Caribbean.
Slavery also flourished in the islands of the French
Caribbean, where some attempts were made to establish hu -
mane standards of treatment. The Code Noir of  prohibited
planters giving their slaves tafia (French slang for low-quality
rum) instead of food. This law was regularly violated, and there
are many reports of slaves who had Sundays off, but spent the
Lord’s day bartering rum in order to support their families.
Until Great Britain outlawed the slave trade in , it
was a multinational affair, though in theory the planters were
supposed to buy slaves transported by their own country-
men. Though the slave trade was dominated by British ships
even after slavery became illegal, American, Dutch and French
ships also engaged in it. An accurate assessment of the trade
is impossible because so much of it was illicit; after a certain

point we can only make guesses and extrapolations based on
the records of prosecution of those who were caught.
There were profits from the Triangle Trade for everyone
but the slaves who were bought and sold. The fortunes to be
made from the sale of rum became proverbial. Richard Cum-
berland’s play The West-Indian of  featured a title character
who was said to control ‘enough sugar and rum to turn the
Thames into a rum-punch’. Samuel Morewood, writing in
, estimated that the rum made from a Jamaican planta-
tion in this era covered all of the expenses of the operation,
so that all the sugar produced was pure profit. Genteel fam-
ilies of the era preferred to ignore the slavery at the root of
their wealth; in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (), the
wealthy Sir Thomas Bertram departs for a year to deal with
problems on his plantation in Antigua. While he is absent,
Austen’s heroine Fanny Price asks one of the family about the
conditions of slaves on his plantations. The response is a

Though this engraving of a distillery dates from , the techniques were
the same as an earlier era. Here slaves fill hogsheads with rum while a
cooper makes barrels and a white manager looks on.


 Wilberforce’s
movement called
attention to slavery
using sugar bowls
like this one, which
bears the inscrip-
tion ‘East India
Sugar not made by
Slaves’.

dead silence; such topics were obviously not appropriate to

polite society. Fanny and the rest of the company quickly
return to more important topics, such as the arrangements
for their next party.
Mansfield Park was popular at the very time that the
British public began to regard the slave trade as both a
corrupting influence and immoral by nature. The charis-
matic politician William Wilberforce expounded eloquently
on the evils of slavery; on the lighter side, satiric poet
William Cowper penned a famous verse in  called ‘Pity
for Poor Africans’:

I own I am shock’d at the purchase of slaves,

And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;
What I hear of their hardships, their tortures, and groans,
Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.


 I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?

Whether converted by Wilberforce’s eloquence, Cow-

per’s satire or the gentle persuasion of prominent Quakers,
many Englishmen took to ostentatiously refusing to use
Caribbean sugar, preferring sugar from India made by free
people. Trafficking in slaves from Africa was abolished in
, and slavery was abolished throughout the British
Empire in . The social upheaval in the Caribbean was
considerable, with African former slaves disinclined to work
on the plantations, or in some places actually barred from
working there as free men, and plantation owners turned to
importing labourers from India. Though these workers toiled
in conditions that a modern worker would find intolerable,
they were much better than those experienced by slaves, and
the free labour force turned out to be more productive. The
eventual result was that despite worldwide competition, the
British Caribbean continued to produce both the highest vol-
ume of rum and the best-quality rum. They could not have
foreseen it, but they were increasing their output just as
changes in taste, civil war in America and other factors were
about to lead to a reduction in demand.


 3
Rum Manufacture by Other
European Powers

Though Jane Austen’s characters and thousands of enterpris-

ing Britons made vast fortunes from rum, entrepreneurs
from other countries were forbidden to follow their example.
The Spanish prohibited the manufacture of rum in their vast
holdings, citing the protection of public health and morals,
and the ban was only lifted in . The administrators of
their colonial enterprise were obsessed with the gold and
silver of Mexico and Peru, so little attention was given to the
sugar trade and none to rum.
The Portuguese oscillated between grudging toleration
and suppression. Illicit trade was apparently widespread
between Brazil and the Portuguese colony of Angola, and in
the year  the authorities in Lisbon ordered the destruc-
tion of all stills in Brazil together with all ships caught
trafficking in illegal alcohol. The official reason given was that
productivity of the gold mines in the colony was unaccept-
ably low because the workers were drunk on cachaça. The
prohibition sparked what came to be known as the Cachaça
Rebellion of , a revolt that resulted in the city of Rio
de Janeiro being governed by rebels for five months. This
was the first rebellion against a colonial power in South
American history, and the Portuguese government eventually

relented and allowed rum to be produced, though it was not
permitted to export it.
After the Cachaça Rebellion rum was legalized for a while,
but almost all trade was to Africa in exchange for slaves. Since
Brazil produced huge quantities of gold and diamonds and the
sugar trade there was profitable by itself, the commercial
potential of rum was ignored. In  the government of John
 outlawed the making of cachaça again, and though small-
scale manufacture continued, export ceased for almost 
years. Cachaça was legalized and taxed heavily after the Lisbon
Earthquake of , when the government in Portugal was in
desperate need of funds to rebuild.

The people who

actually harvested
sugar cane prob -
ably did not look
as glamorous as
the person depicted
on this bottle of
Negro Old Rum
from Martinique.


 The French occupied some of the best islands in the
Caribbean for growing cane, and at first they had better dis-
tilling technology and more mastery of the technique.
However, a combination of prejudice and government
restriction assured that export was limited and the products
inferior. Rum was recorded in Martinique as early as ,
called eau-de-vie, gueldive or tafia. It was made by and for slaves.
Distiller and cleric Jean Labat employed only women at the
distillery he called the vinegarie, believing that, unlike men, they
could be trusted not to get drunk. Local merchants and
administrators saw the vast potential for profit from the rum
trade, and Dutch and Jewish artisans made some quality rum,
but the government in Paris was unmoved and outlawed its
manufacture in . Labat pointed out in detail just how
much potential profit was being forfeited, but in vain.
There were substantial smuggling operations in the
French Caribbean colonies, but the export industry did not
mature until rum was fully legalized in the s. By then
other changes were taking place that ensured that the French
never caught up with their British rivals.
There was one place where the French laws against the rum
trade were ignored from the beginning, though it was not the
best place for growing the raw materials. Sugar cane flourishes
in the islands of the Caribbean, but was a marginal crop on the
North American mainland; the sudden freezes that can hit even
Florida and Texas devastated the strains that were then culti-
vated. The Company of the Indies, the French colonial
administrators of the colony, planted cane in Louisiana as early
as  but suffered crop failures as often as one year in three.
What sugar they made was shipped back to France, but as time
went by an increasing amount of the cane juice was made into
tafia. The first history of Louisiana, written by Governor Du
Pratt, makes several references to tafia, usually as a beverage for

slaves. There were intermittent attempts to regulate the trade,
such as the  law prohibiting the sale of tafia to slaves and
soldiers, the two groups with whom it was most popular. Tafia
eventually caught on among all classes in New Orleans, and in
 Governor Jean Jacques d’Abadie noted sadly that ‘The
immoderate use of tafia has stupefied the whole population.’
Only a year later, France ceded Louisiana to Spain, but
the Spanish governors had only a tenuous hold on the colony
and made no serious attempt to suppress the rum business.
The trade received a boost in about  when Joseph Solis
arrived from Cuba with cane cuttings that turned out to be
both cold-tolerant and highly productive. Solis was also a tal-
ented horticulturist, and figured out ways to improve
previously marginal operations. Around  Solis did some-
thing highly unusual: he opened a crushing mill that,
according to historian Charles Gayarre, ‘made molasses and
tafia (a distilled drink) from the cane juice, but no sugar’. This

John Hinton’s  print of sugar-making in the West Indies shows all the
stages of production.


is the first instance I have been able to find of any operation
that focused on making rum and regarded crystalline sugar
as a by-product.
Joseph Solis made plenty of money from his distillery,
selling most of his output at the tavern his father Manuel ran
in New Orleans. The Spanish rulers of a mostly French popu-
lation ignored his establishment and others like them, except
in , when Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró demanded
that taverns be closed during divine services on Sunday. Even
this modest restriction was ignored, and rum-drinking con-
tinued to flourish in New Orleans. We have few independent
reports of the quality of this rum, but it was good enough that
in  , casks of  gallons each were shipped up the
Mississippi to the Ohio river valley. The market for Spanish and
French rum was there, but the will and skill to commercialize
the trade was not.
This failure to legalize and encourage trade had long-last-
ing effects. The technology of rum manufacturing improved
by leaps and bounds in places ruled by the British, thanks to
improved stills and experience of ageing techniques, but other
colonies turned out the same liquor that was so vilified when
it was first invented. It sold cheaply and illegally, when it sold
at all, and taxes were not collected by colonial administrations.
They were consequently poorer then their British competi-
tors, and destined to fall even further behind as the rum trade
increased. It was a deliberate abandonment of an obviously
lucrative business, and a blunder of vast proportions.

Rum and the American Revolution

French and Spanish plantation owners were eager to cash in
on the popularity of rum, and they did so in the only way they

This may be the
happiest looking
member of a
notoriously dour
sect. Label of
Pilgrim Rum,
published in
Fortune magazine
in .

could: by selling the raw material to anyone who would buy it.
The French government prohibited the export of rum from
their colonies in  in order to protect their market for
brandy. This effectively made rum not worth the effort to
make and molasses worthless unless someone was interested
in buying it on the black market. Many people were, and they
were American distillers.
Molasses flowed northward to the New England colonies,
frustrating the feeble attempts of tax collectors to police a
vast coastline. The British tried to suppress this trade with
more vigorous enforcement, but eventually decided that if
they couldn’t catch the smugglers, they would tax the buy-
ers. The Molasses Act of  put a tax of sixpence per gallon

on molasses imported from non-British colonies, which if
collected would have more than doubled the price of French
Caribbean molasses. This tax was explicitly designed to enrich
the British Caribbean planters at the expense of the New
Englanders, whose prosperity was seen as provoking a move-
ment for separation from the Empire. When Martin Bladen,
a member of the British Board of Trade, was asked about
the likely economic effects on the New Englanders, he
replied that

The duties proposed would not prove an absolute prohibi-

tion, but [Bladen] meant them as something that should
come very near it, for in the way the northern colonies are,
they raise the French Islands at the expense of ours, and
raise themselves also too high, even to an independency.

Predictably, the New Englanders continued smuggling,

bribing inspectors and intimidating tax collectors, and the tax
raised little revenue and much ill will. It eventually created
exactly the circumstances it sought to avoid: the obvious
corruption of colonial officials and widespread avoidance of
the tax encouraged colonial thoughts of independence. In
 one of the architects of the revolution ran for election in
the Virginia House of Burgesses. At one event his campaign
manager served up  gallons of rum,  gallons of rum
punch,  gallons of wine,  gallons of beer and two gallons
of cider. (Note that gallon measures in this era are approxi-
mate as standards varied depending on regions; measures
were only standardized in  in the British Empire,  in
the .) It may be suspected that not all of the rum at this
event was made from legal products. The politician in ques-
tion, one George Washington by name, won handily and
went on to even greater things.

 A prohibitively high tax having proved unsuccessful at
suppressing illegal molasses, the Board of Trade decided to
withdraw it and levy a tax that would allow some profit to
the Americans. The Sugar Act of  reduced the tax to three
pence per gallon of molasses, but required that most pro-
cessed items could only be exported to Britain, where they
fetched much lower prices. The effect was to make the inferior
New England rum even less competitive with that of the
Caribbean, where Britain’s colonies were more dependent and
tractable. The rampant discontent caused by the Sugar Act
led to sporadic violence and the first organized boycotts of
British luxury goods. The revolutionary movement did not
ignite until the Stamp Act was passed the following year, but
the fuse had been lit by the tax on rum.
Once the revolution actually began, the Americans were
cut off from their usual suppliers in Jamaica and Barbados
and dependent on French and Spanish molasses. One esti-
mate states that the average adult male in the colonies drank
between four and five gallons of rum per year, so local dis-
tillers were in a panic to produce enough to fill demand. The
quality of New England rum, always low, became even
worse, and whiskey became cheaper and more popular. In
time whiskey-drinking came to be seen as patriotic, since it
was made from local materials and hence all profit stayed
in America. Rum was not a part of the military rations
approved by Congress in , but many officers paid for
rum for their men as a way of slowing the rate of desertions.
The availability of so much alcohol among poorly trained
and undisciplined troops caused problems with fighting.
Lieutenant James McMichael wryly recorded instances of a
disease he called barrel fever, ‘which differs in its effects
from any other fever – its concomitants are black eyes and
bloody noses’.

 Rum was directly involved with one of the most famous
incidents of the war: Washington’s crossing of the Delaware
to surprise and capture Hessian troops at Christmas of .
The return crossing was considerably delayed because despite
Washington’s orders to destroy the Hessians’ rum, his men
drank it and got so inebriated that many fell out of their
boats. The Father of his Country had read Paine’s lines
‘These are the times that try men’s souls’ to his soldiers in
camp a few days earlier; this must have been a time that tried
the general’s own patience. Washington certainly understood
the morale-building effect of rum – he supplied a ration to
all his troops in March  to reward them for surviving the
dreadful winter in Valley Forge. The British made fun of the
American troops’ alleged fondness for alcohol, as in this lyric
from ‘Yankee Doodle’s Expedition to Rhode Island’:

So Yankee Doodle did forget, the sound of British

drum, sir.
How oft it made him quake and sweat, in spite of
Yankee rum, sir.

The soldiers on both sides of the conflict expected rations

of alcohol, and morale suffered when they didn’t get it, so
running low on liquor was a matter of anxiety among quarter-
masters. When the British general William Tryon raided the
Continental Army storehouse at Danbury, Connecticut, in April
, he ordered his soldiers to burn  barrels of rum.
Tryon’s soldiers were every bit as undisciplined as Washington’s.
They drank as much as they could before setting the rest afire,
and burned the entire town afterwards.
Following the end of the revolutionary war in , trade
between the new country and the British Caribbean was cut
off for more than a decade, and distillers relied on molasses

from Spanish and French islands. Americans continued dis-
tilling, their domestic market strengthened because no legal
rum came in from British colonies, and the rum available
from French and Spanish colonies was often inferior to their
own. As President, George Washington served Madeira wine,
whiskey and rum at official functions, and his wife Martha’s
rum punch recipe can be found later in this book. When the
Washingtons retired to Mount Vernon he operated a distill-
ery, and though he made whiskey, he kept up a lively
correspondence about techniques with another gentleman
farmer who made rum. The period from  until ,
when slave revolts in Haiti disrupted commerce with the
French Caribbean, represented the peak of legal commerce
between America and the French Caribbean. After that suc-
cessful revolt other islands competed to fill the void; the
Spanish legalized slavery in Cuba only one year after Haiti

This scene of dancing in an American tavern shows a peaceful, jolly side

of a maligned institution. Note the kegs marked ‘Rum’ behind the bar and
the picture of George Washington on the wall.


declared independence in order to provide a steady source of
labour for their own sugar plantations.
The French molasses trade was further disrupted when
the Napoleonic Wars caused chaos throughout the Caribbean,
and British expeditions captured many French islands. The
entry of the  into the War of  caused prices to rise so
that New England rum distilleries became even less compet-
itive. The industry began a long decline, hastened by the
rising popularity of American whiskey. Though rum distill-
ing was no longer a major occupation in New England, many
companies lasted until the Prohibition era. The last rummery
in Massachusetts, Felton & Son of Boston, closed its doors
in , ending a tradition that had lasted for over  years.
Craft distillers have opened in Boston in recent years, some
with names very similar to bygone brands, but they have no
actual connection to the old companies.
One other outpost of rum distilling remained active in
North America, in a region utterly unsuited to sugar-cane culti-
vation. Fishermen in Newfoundland had been trading codfish
for molasses since the early s, and the Newfoundlanders
made strong, harsh, heavily flavoured rum that has come to
be known as Screech. Though made by the same processes
that are used to make other rums, it was so awful that
rumours spread that it had been adulterated with cleaning
products. It got its name during the Second World War, when
an unwary American naval officer tossed back a tumbler of
it and made a noise that could only be called a screech.
Screech is still sold in Newfoundland, but these days most of
it is made in Jamaica under contract.


 Rum and Piracy
Wherever you find fortunes made honestly, you will find
other people attempting to get just as rich without the bother
of actually working. Since rum functioned as a de facto cur-
rency, traded by ships sailing long distances through poorly
charted waters, it was natural that pirates and privateers
became interested in hijacking their cargoes. Ships loaded
with rum might be less likely to put up a strong resistance,
because in a hot Caribbean climate, with many barrels of
evaporating alcohol in an enclosed space, any spark in the
hold could lead to an explosion.
Rum was the everyday drink of the rough crews of sailing
ships, routinely distributed before battles and other tribula-
tions. A page from the pirate Blackbeard’s diary from ,
found aboard his sloop Adventure, sums it up better than any-
thing else:

Such a day; rum all out. Our company somewhat sober;

a damned confusion amongst us! Rogues a plotting. Talk
of separation. So I looked sharp for a prize [and] took
one with a great deal of liquor aboard. So kept the com-
pany hot, damned hot, then all things went well again.

Blackbeard was said to drink flaming rum just to intimi-

date people. If he did, he was probably the most sober man
present, since the majority of the alcohol would have burned
off. (That a man with a luxuriant moustache and beard would
develop the habit of drinking flaming beverages is only one
of several reasons to question his sanity.) He also reportedly
mixed his rum with gunpowder, a combination that some-
times happened accidentally when the same barrels were used
for both commodities.

 The few records we have of life among pirate crews often
show a similar dependence on rum, as well as a cynical sense
of humour. When the pirate captain Thomas Anstis con-
ducted a hasty trial of a captured rival, he appointed an
‘Attorney General’ from his crew. The prosecutor, having
made a poor and rambling speech, concluded with:

My Lord, I should have spoke much finer than I do now,

but as your Lordship knows our rum is all out, and how
should a man speak good law that has not drunk a dram?
However, I hope your lordship will order the fellow to
be hang’d.

Despite the prosecutor’s admitted deficiency in oratory,

the defendant was found guilty with the anticipated results,

In  pirate Edward Low gave a captured captain a choice: drink punch
with him as an equal, or be shot. Woodcut from The Pirates Own Book
().


and presumably the entire company later found a way to
quench their thirst. The story of Anstis and his kangaroo
court was printed in sensationalist newspapers and may have
been exaggerated for effect, but there are plenty of docu-
ments that back up the link between rum and brigandage.
Given the perils that faced even a well-run ship in an era
of rudimentary charts and primitive navigation instruments,
it seems remarkable that a boatload of belligerent drunks
was dangerous to anybody but themselves. There are records
of ships being wrecked or run aground by drunken steers-
men or crews, such as the incident in  when the
buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan lost his flagship because cele-
brating sailors accidentally lit the powder magazine on fire.
The ancient reputation of rum as a drink for fighting
men was burnished by lurid accounts in the popular press, as
well as court documents. According to the confessions of the
crew of the brig William, who in  were hanged for piracy
along with their captain, Charles Delano, before every attack
the skipper shared out large amounts of rum to put the crew
in a fighting mood.
Many other pirates suffered the same fate as the crew of
William: by  the colonial powers in the Caribbean were
cooperating to suppress buccaneers, and the dawn of sophis-
ticated naval gunnery and steam propulsion gave governments
an overwhelming advantage over their adversaries.

Jolly Tars and Navy Rum

When it came to imbibing, hard-drinking pirate crews were
sometimes evenly matched with their law-abiding counter-
parts, since sailors on merchant vessels were notorious for
tapping any rum in the cargo while officers weren’t looking.

Captains ignored small thefts, reasoning that a reputation for
harsh discipline raised the likelihood of experienced crew
jumping ship in the next port. British and French merchant
captains were broadly regarded as tolerant of drinking, Amer-
icans more strict. This may have been for business reasons,
since by  insurance companies in the  offered cheaper
rates to captains who ran a dry ship. Since the insurance
adjusters were far away on land while the ships were at sea,
some shipowners paid the cheap rates while the crews sur-
reptitiously drank their accustomed tot.
However low the acceptable standards of sobriety, some
crewmen couldn’t meet them, and were thrown off in strange
ports because they were habitual drunks. The vocabulary of
sailors reflects this. A ‘rum-gagger’ was the name for a con
man who told stories of his sufferings at sea to obtain money
for drinks. Another nautical term related to rum is in more
common use: ‘rummage’ was the name for intrusive searches
by customs officials looking for smuggled barrels.
In time the taste for rum spread beyond merchant ships
and those who preyed upon them to the British Navy. The
Admiralty originally favoured rations of brandy for their
crews, but after the capture of Jamaica from the Spanish in
, rum was substituted. The logic was obvious: brandy
had to be purchased in Europe from the Spanish or French,
unreliable allies at the best of times, while rum was produced
by British subjects in their own colonies. Buying from those
colonists stopped the flow of money to rivals, assured a
steady supply regardless of politics, and saved money
besides. In  the ration was standardized at half a pint
( ml) per day of rum exceeding  per cent alcohol, and
later this was mixed with water or weak beer to create
the beverage known as grog. The reason for the name is
disputed, but it is usually cited as a reference to Admiral

A natty and clean-shaven pirate is unusually helpful in this Fortune magazine
ad from .

Edward Vernon, whose nickname was Old Grog. Vernon

ordered that rum be diluted to half strength to combat
drunkenness, and later ordered the addition of lemon or
lime juice to mask the foul taste of water that had been
stored in barrels for months. The sailors disliked the new
drink at first, fearing that quartermasters would stint on their
rum rations, but after a short period it became obvious that
Vernon’s sailors were far healthier than those who continued

drinking straight rum. This was actually because the vitamin
 in the juice reduced the risk of scurvy, but at the time this
wasn’t known, and the rest of the Navy adopted Vernon’s
drink as he made it. In time this was diluted further, and by
the late nineteenth century grog was made with one part
rum to four parts water and juice. The Sailor’s Word-Book
notes the existence of something even weaker called ‘Six-
water Grog’, a further diluted version that was given as a
punishment for drunkenness or neglect of duty.
An elaborate ritual for mixing and serving grog arose, with
separate pipe tunes played for the handing of the keys to the
rum locker to the bosun, for his arrival on deck with a guard of
soldiers and a cask of rum, and for the moment when mixing
was complete and the line of sailors could form. The rum was
mixed with water in a half-barrel with a lid, called a ‘scuttled

Doling out the rum ration in the British navy was a daily ceremony, and
on special occasions the ration was doubled. This illustration from The
Graphic shows sailors celebrating Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in .


butt’ in the parlance of the day. Since plenty of gossip was
exchanged while in the line to pick up the rum ration, the word
‘scuttlebutt’ evolved to describe idle conversation.
The most famous incident involving rum in the British
Navy involved the death of Admiral Nelson, who was shot
by a French sniper in the final moments of the Battle of
Trafalgar. Rather than being buried at sea, his body was put in
a cask of rum so it could be preserved for interment in Eng-
land. On the way back, so many sailors tapped the cask that
it was nearly empty except for the pickled admiral. The nick-
name ‘Nelson’s Blood’ was adopted for Navy rum almost
immediately, and is still widely used among sailors.
Grog continued to be drunk in the British Navy until
, by which time it had shed its disreputable character. A
pivotal moment was when Queen Victoria reviewed the
British fleet in March : after drinking grog from the same
tub as her common sailors, she earned their undying admira-
tion by declaring that she liked it. The evidence of popular
song suggests she was in the minority; of the sea shanties that
have been conclusively dated to the age of sail, more express
a longing for whiskey and beer than rum. One, ‘Whiskey
Johnny’, takes a less discriminating attitude:

The mate likes whiskey and the skipper likes rum,

Whiskey! Johnny!
The crew likes both, but we ain’t got none,
Whiskey for me Johnny!

The one that shows the most enthusiasm actually cele-

brates tapping a cargo:

I wish I was Old Stormy’s son,

I’d build me a ship of a thousand ton,

 I’d fill yer up with Jamaica rum,
And all the shellbacks they’d have some,

Another shanty that mentions rum, ‘Sally Brown’, has a

West Indian beat and celebrates a local lady:

Sally Brown’s a bright mulatto,

Way, hey, roll and go!
She drinks rum and she chews tobacco,
Going to spend my money on Sally Brown.

The final line suggests that Sally Brown’s affection was

negotiable, adding to the sense that she was anything but
ladylike. For a sailor to be dreaming of a mixed-race prosti-
tute who drinks rum and chews tobacco instead of a fair
flower of English femininity was more than a little shocking
for the era.
The romance of rum and the sea would be celebrated
later, and romanticized during the Prohibition era in Amer-
ica, but it was economy and practicality that made it the
beverage of choice in Britain’s Atlantic and Caribbean trade
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
As with merchant shipping, the Americans were warier
of alcohol afloat. The  Navy served grog made with rum
or whiskey from the earliest days of its existence until  Sep-
tember . On  August of that year, the last day of the
liquor ration, an officer named Caspar Schenk of the 
Portsmouth composed a ditty called ‘Farewell to Grog’. It was
sung to the tune of ‘Landlord, Fill The Flowing Bowl’, a
merry song about rum punch, and ran in part,

Come, messmates, pass the bottle ‘round

Our time is short, remember,

 For our grog must stop,
And our spirits drop,
On the first day of September.

For tonight we’ll merry, merry be,

For tonight we’ll merry, merry be,
For tonight we’ll merry, merry be,
Tomorrow we’ll be sober.

Jack’s happy days will soon be gone,

To return again, oh never!
For they’ve raised his pay five cents a day,
But stopped his grog forever.

The  Navy never did reinstate the grog tub, and did
their best to block Caribbean rum runners during the  Civil
War. Those shipments infuriated Confederate officials; most
captains were British and interested only in profit, and they
kept bringing in rum, silk and luxuries instead of desperately
needed munitions. The British Caribbean had been in an
economic downturn with the war raging to the north, so
successful blockade runners could buy rum cheap and make
huge profits. The end of the war brought little relief to the
Caribbean planters and distillers, because though the coun-
try was at peace, the economy of the South was shattered and
imports were a fraction of their previous volume.


 4
Rum All over the World:
Australia, India, Asia, South
America and Beyond

Once you know that rum can be made from molasses, it

really isn’t very difficult to do it. Making good rum is
another matter, one that involves redistilling and ageing, but
it is fairly easy to make a strong, cheap alcoholic beverage.
Wherever sugar was milled, rum distilling followed, and the
profits to be made and portability of molasses meant that
rum was made even in places where the hardiest cane could
not thrive.

Rum and Rebellion in Nineteenth-century

Australia
Sugar cane arrived in Australia with the first colonization
fleet in , and rum and whisky were made there as soon
as the first stills arrived in , but for a long time most
rum was either imported or made with imported molasses.
As was the case in British colonies in the Americas, there
was a shortage of coinage and rum quickly became a de
facto currency.

 While Australia had few instances of seagoing piracy,
the colony quickly developed a massive organized crime
problem. The New South Wales Corps, the regiment of sol-
diers in charge of keeping order among convicts who were
shipped to Australia, were as rough a crew as the prisoners
they supervised. Australia was an unpopular posting, and the
British Army had sent their worst troops to that continent,
including some who were paroled from military prisons on
condition that they go there. The New South Wales Corps
quickly became known as the Rum Corps, and set a record for
using their military connections to enrich themselves. The
mark-up on the rum and whisky that they controlled was as
much as , per cent, and illicit fortunes were made.
Attempts by one governor to discipline an officer caught trad-
ing in illicit rum were complicated by the fact that all but one
of his fellow officers were doing the same thing, so a jury of
his peers could not be found. So much farmland was devoted
to growing wheat for whisky and sugar for rum that there was
a shortage of food even during a year of good harvests.
The previous governors having been ineffective at con-
trolling the unruly troops, in  the British government
appointed someone who had an obvious genius at personnel
management: Captain William Bligh. Bligh’s first command
had been the Bounty, which famously failed to reach its
destination, and he was no more successful in his next –
the crew of the Providence also mutinied. While on the
way to Australia, Bligh and another captain, Joseph Short,
quarrelled over the leadership of the fleet to the point
where Short fired shots across the bow of Bligh’s ship.
Bligh responded by ordering his men to board Short’s ship
and arrest him. They did, and in that happy and convivial
atmosphere Bligh arrived in Australia to discipline the
Rum Corps.

The beginning of the Rum Rebellion of  – this damaged watercolour
from the period shows Govenor Bligh found hiding under his bed. The
artist is said to be one of the mutineers.

Bligh proceeded to do sensible things in as abrasive a

manner as possible. His actions included prohibiting officers
from engaging in the illegal rum trade, and within a year a
corps of officers deposed Bligh in an uprising called the Rum
Rebellion. Bligh was overthrown and the head of the Rum
Corps took his place, ceding it almost immediately to a newly
arrived administrator named Joseph Foveaux. The Rum
Corps officers may have thought Foveaux would be a pliable
stooge, but the newcomer turned out to be the first effective,
competent and politically savvy civilian administrator. The
deposed Governor Bligh was held in genteel captivity
throughout the year , when he was granted a ship on
the condition that he sail back to England. He immediately
broke this promise and went to Tasmania instead to try to
raise a force to take back his position. His instincts were as
good as ever: the governor there refused to help and confined
Bligh to his ship in the harbour for two years. The colonial
overlords in London eventually came up with an interesting

solution. Bligh went back to Sydney and symbolically gov-
erned for one day and then shipped out for London, shortly
followed by the entire Rum Corps. New troops were rotated
in, and the links between rum, the military and wholesale cor-
ruption was severed. Bligh was promoted to Rear Admiral
but not given any ships to command, and finished his naval
days without further incident. His career is immortalized in
three brands of rum: Bounty brand rums are made in both
Fiji and St Lucia, and Captain Bligh rum hails from St Vin-
cent. Given the problems Bligh had with the Bounty and with
rum in Australia, I have a feeling that he would not regard any
of these as a compliment.
The first legal commercial rum production in Australia
began in , but was on a small scale until the s, when
vast tracts of sugar cane were planted in Queensland. The
government did its best to regulate rum strictly and tax it
heavily, inspiring one enterprising lawbreaker to an ingenious

Photo of the  Walrus, the floating distillery designed to evade Australian

customs inspectors, c. .


solution: a floating cane crusher and distillery called the 
Walrus. A local character named James Stewart, alias ‘Bosun
Bill’, took this paddlewheel steamer around the rivers of
Queensland, easily evading inspectors while making an
unknown and untaxed amount of rum. After a few years he
quit the business and sold the boat’s still to local entrepreneurs
who started the Beenleigh Rum Distillery, which is still in
operation. For many years they sold rum emblazoned with the
smiling face of a man in a sailor’s cap, known as Bosun Bill.

Rum in India and Asia

Eventually rum distilling returned to the place where making
sugar from alcohol began. Charting the early history of rum
in India is difficult, because so many beverages were care-
lessly referred to by the same name, arrack. This is now the
name for distilled palm sugar, but as early as  François
Bernier recorded what he called an ‘eau de vie de sucre’ made
from unrefined sugar. This can hardly be anything other than
rum, but we know nothing about it. It is often the case in
societies where only aristocrats are literate that details of the
merchant class are left to outsiders, who are often ill
informed.
We do know that rum was widely made in colonial India,
with the first industrial-level distillery opened by Carew & Co.
in  at Kanpur (Cawnpore) to supply the army. Before
sugar was grown in Australia, that colony’s needs were met
by rum shipped from Calcutta, and the Navy depended on a
ready supply for British outposts in Africa and Asia. Produc-
tion grew steadily, though for decades local producers faced
discriminatory tariffs that favoured sugar and rum from the
West Indies. The high tariff did mean that much rum was

The Beenleigh
Distillery ran
this ad in
Australian news-
papers in .

smuggled to neighbouring countries despite laws that prohib-

ited the practice.
There were distinct differences between the rum made
for the consumption of British troops and what was con-
sumed locally. Rum distilled from sugar to international
standards was usually called ‘Indian made foreign liquor’, or
fl. ‘Country rum’ and ‘arrack’ were slang for locally pro-
duced alcoholic beverages made from anything that would
ferment, often containing palm sugar, molasses and various
flower essences.
The British believed that drinking rum warded off
cholera, and in the s Temperance-inclined soldiers could
actually be punished for failing to drink their ration, but there
were other tensions caused by religious beliefs. Muslim ser-
vants and orderlies in India sometimes objected to handling

rum for the officers’ mess, and many Hindus resented the
British for introducing corrupting spirits into Indian society.
When one prostitute was found plying her trade while actu-
ally living in a discarded rum barrel, it confirmed the worst
nightmares of those who thought rum had a pernicious
influence on society.
Rum was made on a smaller scale in Burma and other
British Asian colonies, and some distilling was conducted in
east and south Africa. Rum was made in Mauritius too, but
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was of famously
bad quality: in a parliamentary inquiry the Secretary for
Foreign Affairs referred to it as ‘inferior and poisonous’.
Rum came to Hawaii in the early nineteenth century,
during the time that the British claimed the islands, and King
Kamehameha  liked it so much that he ordered that it be

Three rums
from Asia: Starr
Rum from
Mauritius,
Mekhong
‘Whisky’ from
Thailand and
Old Monk
from India.


Many companies
tried to cash in
on South Pacific
allure. Though this
bottle is labelled
as Grand Rhum
Hawaii, it was
bottled in France
using rum from
French colonies.

made locally. The Hawaiians had traditionally made a kind

of beer from the sweet roots of the ti plant, and when
distilling equipment arrived on the islands they started experi -
menting both with making rum and with distilling their
native liquor. The Hawaiians used old whaling pots that had
an unusual shape, like Siamese twin cauldrons. They were
made that way so they would fit inside ships’ holds. The
Hawaiians nicknamed those pots okolehao, or ‘iron buttocks’,
and this came to be the generic name for liquors made from
combinations of ti leaf, molasses and pineapple juice. The
Hawaiians also made heavy, dark rum in those pots, which
sold well to whaling crews and later became the signature
flavour in Hawaiian cocktails.

 Some island rulers didn’t like rum as much as Kame-
hameha; after a look at the unruly effects of drunken sailors
in Madagascar, the government of the time tried to ban its
importation, despite pressure from the British. Prime Minis-
ter Rainilaiarivony memorably complained that the same
boats that came loaded with missionaries and Bibles above
decks were loaded with rum below, and while he was glad to
welcome the foreigners he would not let in a single bottle of
rum if he could help it. However, his protests were to no avail,
and within a few years sugar was planted and rum distilled on
his own island.
The only country in South Asia never conquered by the
British or French was Thailand, where rum arrived with
European traders in the sixteenth century. By  Thais had
developed distilled liquors called lao khao, literally ‘white
spirit’, containing various mixtures of fermented sugar cane
juice, molasses, rice and herbs. Quality control and standard-
ization of their wares were literally alien concepts among
Thai distillers, and no quality rum was made there until the
twentieth century.

Rum in the Spanish and Portuguese Colonies

during the Nineteenth Century
Meanwhile, back where rum began, the Brazilians continued
making cachaça, but the improvement in quality was patchy
and gradual. During the Napoleonic Wars when Portuguese
monarchs ruled from exile in Rio de Janeiro, manufacture
was prohibited, but it became legal again in . In  Dr
Robert Walsh called it ‘an inferior sort of rum so cheap and
accessible that foreigners, particularly sailors, get greatly
addicted to it’. He noted that ‘A distiller has lately tried to

improve it, and by a further process converted it into good
rum.’ Walsh was the first foreigner on record to say anything
kind about cachaça, and Morewood noted a decade later that
servants drank it with salt as a tonic, and it seemed to do
them good. It was still a raw beverage, crudely made; while
everyone else was using copper stills and ageing in wood, the
Brazilians were using clay pots for both.
The most famous foreigner to write about Brazil in the
nineteenth century, Sir Richard Francis Burton, had plenty of
experience with cachaça, and hated it. In his book The High-
lands of Brazil () he described it as ‘distilled from refuse
molasses and drippings of clayed sugar’, and said it tasted of
‘copper and smoke, not Glenlivet’. He described two kinds:
common, which was made from Cayenne cane, and creoulinha
or branquiunha, made from Maideran cane. Of both, he said:

Strangers are not readily accustomed to the odour, but a

man who takes to it may reckon on delirium tremens and
an early grave. Its legitimate use is for bathing after inso-
lation, or for washing away the discomfort of insect bites.

Burton also used it to get his mastiff puppy drunk so it would

stop snoring at night.
Burton was kinder about restilo, redistilled cachaça or
caninha, jocularly called ‘Brazilian wine’, which he said did
not have an unpleasant odour. (He referred to restilo as a
molasses spirit only a sentence after referring to it as being
made from cane juice; whether he was confused or Brazil-
ians were actually distilling both is difficult to determine.)
Burton used restilo to preserve the snakes he captured in his
expedition, though he noted that the alcohol affected the
colour of the specimens. Mention was made of a triple-dis-
tilled version called lavado, or washed, which was said to be

A traditional copper alembic still in use at Cachaça Leblon in Brazil.
so pure that if it were tossed in the air, much of it would
evaporate before it came down.
Burton also recorded two related slang terms: cachaçada,
literally meaning ‘what happens when you drink cachaça’ – in
other words, a drunken fight – and pinga, a slang term for rum
that literally means ‘the drip’. This image, of alcohol dripping
from a crude still of the type everyone else had long ago aban-
doned, is probably the best indication of how far the
Brazilians had to go to catch up with the rest of the world.
Among the Spanish colonies Cuba had the ideal weather
and soil for sugar, but restrictive laws and the stifling Span-
ish bureaucracy kept it an economic backwater. Cuban rum
was famously murky and stinking until an enterprising wine
merchant named Facundo Bacardi became interested in mak-
ing it better. After considerable experimentation with charcoal
filtering and oak barrel ageing, he managed to make a pure,
clear spirit that was unlike any Cuban rum produced before,
and he released it to the public in . Having been a mer-
chant, Bacardi understood the power of branding, and he
claimed to have drawn from Taino lore to develop the bat
symbol that is the best-known trademark in the industry. In a
well-run entrepreneurial society, Bacardi would have prospered
in peace, but the Spanish Empire’s last major Caribbean colony
was on the brink of collapse. Slave revolts (the institution was
not abolished until ), trade embargoes and other up -
heavals kept the business precarious for three decades, and
Facundo’s first rum-producing company went bankrupt. His
son and successor Emilio was repeatedly jailed under suspicion
of supporting the rebels, and the company survived only due
to his dedication. It was not until the close of the Spanish–
American war in  that Bacardi was able to settle down to
making rum unhindered by politics, and when it did it made
up for lost time.

 ‘Rum’ that Wasn’t Rum
The nineteenth century saw the invention of two items that
weren’t actually rum as we know it – ‘inlander rum’, as exem-
plified by Stroh’s of Austria, and bay rum. Inlander rum was
a response to the popularity of rum drinks in countries that
had no tropical colonies, and hence no sugar. It was invented
in about  by a pharmacist in the Austrian city of Krems,
who used a mix of grain alcohol, caramel made from beet

Distilleries were often built like fortresses due to concerns about revolts
by the workers. This picture of Rummerie St James in the Netherlands
Antilles is an example.


Bottle of Bay Rum
hair dressing from
the s. No matter
how thirsty you are,
do not drink this.

sugar and herbs to mimic the taste of rum. In  Sebastian

Stroh started brewing his version of this concoction in Kla-
genfurt, and he quickly became the dominant producer.
Inlander rum became an integral part of hot toddies made
with rum and tea, and was also used in a flaming cocktail
called Feuerzangenbowle. This cocktail has an elaborate presen-
tation: a sugar cube is soaked with inlander rum and set on
fire so that the molten sugar drips into hot mulled wine. Mak-
ing Feuerzangenbowle – literally, fire-tongs bowl – is still a
tradition among German college fraternities, but since 
the rum in it has been made with molasses. Stroh’s and other
companies still flavour their rum so it tastes like their origi-
nal recipe, a rare case of a product that mimics a counterfeit
of itself.

 Nobody is going to counterfeit the taste of bay rum,
because it is not designed for drinking. Bay rum comes from
the island of St John in the Caribbean, but it is an aftershave
and deodorant made from rosemary and the leaves of the bay
laurel tree soaked in rum. It smells nice but tastes horrible,
and it was once regarded a hilarious practical joke at colleges
to serve a neophyte drinker bay rum and watch them gag. It
deserves a mention here only so that nobody who reads this
book will fall for that trick.

Rum, Wars and Exploration

Once the British adopted the practice of rum rations for the
Navy, the other services were quick to follow. Though the
blockade of France during the Napoleonic Wars never entirely
shut off the flow of wine and brandy from the Continent,
dependence on smuggled supplies for military rations was
obviously a bad idea. Rum caught on quickly, and became so
much a part of British military life that one chronicler literally
suggested that it had magical powers. Sita Ram, an officer who
began his career in the Bengal Army of East India in ,
wrote in his autobiography that

I am sure there is some elixir of life in ration rum; I have

seen wounded men, all but dead, come to life after having
some rum given to them. Be this as it may, I am convinced
there is something very extraordinary about it. I know
European soldiers worship liquor, give their lives for it, and
often lose their lives trying to get it.

Each enlisted man was entitled to a third of a pint (c. 

ml) of rum per day, and that dependable supply of liquor was

necessary for morale. As the Duke of Wellington put it, ‘Peo-
ple talk of their enlisting from their fine military feeling – all
stuff – no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having
got bastard children – some for minor offences – many more
for drink.’ Soldiers also received a ration of tobacco, which
like rum was regarded as a health food. A contemporary
account of the Peninsular War by a serving officer includes
this poem, in which a regimental doctor gives his patient a
prescription that modern physicians are unlikely to endorse:

‘Come’, says the doctor ‘here is rum and segars –

This is the way we carry on our wars.
Here, smoke, my boy, I know ’twill do you good;
And try this country wine, ’twill cool your blood.’

If this was an exaggeration, it wasn’t much of one. After

campaigning in Ceylon in , Captain Robert Percival of
the Royal Irish Regiment wrote:

In this  etching by Johann Ramberg, an officer has tossed his sword
beside an empty rum cask and is flirting with local women, while his
troops carouse in the background. Only the stray dogs seem interested in
fighting.


 Drinking plenty of Arrack and smoking tobacco coun-
teract the bad effects of the atmosphere and the water,
while the natives on the other hand live so abstemiously,
few or none of them eating flesh or drinking anything
but water, that once they are seized with the exhausting
distempers they want strength to resist them and they
usually fall victims.

Percival and his men drank imported West Indian rum

when they could, but sometimes had to buy inferior rum that
was made locally by Dutch entrepreneurs.
It was not unusual for officers to supply rum from local
manufacturers when rations were low, and this was often
bought from their own wages. Requests for reimbursement

The idea that

rum is a healthy
beverage lasted
a long time.
This German-
language poster
for Coruba
Rum of Jamaica
boasts that it
helps you to
warm up, s.


arrived in London along with complaints about how bad and
expensive local rum usually was. Sometimes this rum was
even poisonous, as in the case of the entire garrison on the
island of Marie-Galante that was laid low by rum made in a
crude still with soldered lead pipes. One positive effect of the
mass consumption of alcohol by British soldiers was that
government quartermasters made the first tentative steps
toward regulating its quality and strength.
Another ramification of the Napoleonic Wars had long-
range consequences for tropical sugar production. Since the
French were cut off from their Caribbean sources for sugar
they sought substitutes, and in  Benjamin Delessert
devised the first commercially practical method of extract-
ing sugar from sugar beet. The availability of sugar from a
crop that could be grown in Europe, and hence had low
transport costs to major markets, meant that Caribbean
sugar had competition for the first time. By  the world-
wide price of sugar slumped due to overproduction and the
competition from beet sugar. Beet sugar was useless for
making rum due to sulphuric by-products that imparted a
strong flavour to the liquor when distilled, and cane sugar
producers soon realized that rum would be an increasingly
important source of income.
Among the most successful at improving the quality of
their rum were planters in what is now the nation of Guyana.
Demerara rum was regarded as poor at the outbreak of the
Napoleonic Wars, but a consortium of distillers hired experts
to improve it. Their precise contributions are not well docu-
mented and may just have involved enforcing cleanliness in
the production facilities, but it is certain that the quality
improved greatly. Interest in the colony and its produce was
heightened by a book published in  titled A Voyage To The
Demerary. The author, Henry Bolingbroke, rhapsodized about

the idyllic nature of the area, the quality of its sugar and its
boundless commercial opportunities. Bolingbroke insisted
that slaves in Guyana were better treated and happier with
their lot than sailors in the British Navy. The accuracy of his
impression that these slaves were cheerful and contented may
be judged against the fact that they revolted en masse just
over a decade later, but his assessment of the sugar and rum
were accurate.

Demerara rum was advertised as an effective remedy for cold and chills.
The packaging shows the casual racism that celebrated African slaves
working in British South American colonies.


 In  Morewood noted that

the superior quality of the rum manufactured in the

colony of Demerary has, it is thought, injured the
demand for the rum of the islands. Its distillation . . . has
been carried to a high state of perfection by the persever-
ance and skill of several scientific men, who have
succeeded in causing the rum of Essequibo and Demer-
rary to be as much in request in the American market as
that of Jamaica is in England.

The American Civil War disrupted that trade, but even

after the conflict was over, rum sales to the  declined. The
Temperance movement was gaining adherents, and cities
and towns were experimenting with banning or severely
restricting the sale of alcohol.


 5
Rum Falls from Grace and
Rises Again: Temperance,
Cocktails, Wars and Religion

The original Temperance movement began in Britain around

, and advocated not the abolition of alcohol, but temperate
– or moderate – imbibing. As time went on the movement in
America became more radical, and began agitating for a ban on
the sale of all alcohol. In June  the movement notched up
its first success and its first public relations disaster in quick suc-
cession when the state of Maine outlawed the sale of alcohol
except for medical and industrial purposes. The law was spear-
headed by Mayor Neal S. Dow of Portland, who styled himself
the ‘Napoleon of Temperance’. Within four years ten other
states and numerous cities and counties had gone dry, and Dow
looked poised for a place in national politics. His career stalled
when a search warrant was issued for a shipment of liquor that
he personally had arranged. Though there was little doubt that
this alcohol actually was for medicinal purposes as he had
claimed, an angry mob denounced him as a hypocrite and
started throwing rocks at his property. This marked the begin-
ning of what came to be called the Portland Rum Riot, which
ended when the militia fired on a crowd, killing one man and
wounding seven others. The conflict damaged the Temperance

movement in Maine, and the law was repealed in . Dow
went on to become a Union general, the founder of the
National Temperance Society and Publishing House, and the
Prohibitionist Party’s candidate for President.
By the end of Dow’s career he was widely regarded as a
cranky buffoon, but the movement he championed was a
force in culture as well as politics. New towns such as Greeley,
Colorado, and Temperance, Ohio, were founded with char-
ters that banned alcohol in perpetuity, and Republican-leaning
newspapers printed lyrics to Temperance songs in their pages.
Many of these rail against rum, possibly because there are
more potential rhymes for it than whiskey, which was actually
more popular at the time. A typical example, ‘Father’s a
Drunkard and Mother is Dead’, printed in the Baltimore Sun
about , includes these deathless lines:

We were all happy, till father drank rum,

Then all our sorrow and trouble begun,
Mother grew paler and wept every day,
Baby and I were too hungry to play.
Slowly they faded, on one summer night,
I found their sweet faces both silent and white.
With the big tears slowly dropping, I said,
Father’s a drunkard and mother is dead.

There are several recordings of this song from the Edi-

son Cylinder days, and the tune is surprisingly sprightly. The
same can not be said of ‘Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never
Touch Mine’, a song so popular that it spawned at least two
sets of lyrics: one a surprisingly well-written tale of a temper-
ate maid rejecting a drunken suitor, and the other a call to
arms for anti-alcohol actions. The latter captures the flavour
of the militant Temperance footsoldiers very well:

 Let war be your watchword, from shore unto shore,
Till Rum and his legions shall ruin no more,
And write on your banners, in letters that shine,
The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.

‘Demon rum’ was the shorthand for all manner of liquor,

and those who abused alcohol became known as ‘rummies’.
Temperance hit the headlines in  when a Massachu-
setts minister named George Cheever published a poem called
‘Deacon Giles’ Distillery’, an account of a man who was a
minister at weekends, but made his living distilling rum. In the
story demons ran the distillery after the workers went home
and manufactured all the evils of the world. Everyone in
Salem recognized it as a caricature of John Stone, a Unitarian
minister who did in fact own a distillery. Mobs supporting
Stone attacked the publisher, and Cheever was jailed for libel.
Cheever became a national Temperance leader and his poem
was widely circulated with inventive and lurid images.

Temperance forces were quick to link rum with Satan, as in this image of
devils operating a distillery from .


 Rum was also used in the generic sense in a famous slo-
gan that doomed the  presidential candidacy of James G.
Blaine. A minister who was speaking at a campaign event for
Blaine thundered that opposition candidate Grover Cleve-
land’s Southern and Catholic support made his Democrats
the party of ‘Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion’. Blaine, who
was present, ignored the remark and thought it was unimpor-
tant, but the national audience that read about it in the
newspapers found it too intolerant. Public opinion turned
against him, and he was the only non-incumbent Republican
to lose a Presidential election between  and . It was
a setback for a movement that was to have its moment of
triumph and failure after the dawn of a new century.

The Early Twentieth Century: Rum Runners

and Tiki Bars
The sale of alcoholic beverages was banned in the early years
of the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, Hungary, Ice-
land, Norway, Finland, several Canadian provinces and the
Australian Capital Territory of Canberra. Most of these laws
had already been recognized as failures and repealed when
the  embarked on the utopian social experiment of Prohi-
bition in . It had been a long time coming; the legislation
to enact it had been proposed in , and private citizens
had had plenty of time to stock up on booze. Organized
crime had had plenty of time to prepare, too, and they were
far more ready than the police for what was to come.
Since the word ‘rum’ was already shorthand for all forms
of liquor, the press quickly coined a new vocabulary of com-
pound words. Entrepreneurs who smuggled contraband in
small boats were called rum runners even if their cargo was

Driving while drunk was recognized as a social problem as early as ,
when Puck artrist Frank Nankivell put Demon Rum at the wheel of a
speeding car.
whiskey and gin, and the large vessels that floated just out-
side the three-mile limit were called rum sows. Fleets of
smuggling ships were referred to as the rum fleet or rum row,
and the ships that preyed on them and stole their cargo were
quite logically called rum pirates. In  Supreme Court
Chief Justice William Howard Taft invented another phrase
that didn’t catch on when he referred to a ship as ‘hovering
with rumful purpose’.
A large percentage of the public sympathized with these
men and romanticized the smuggler’s life, and that of other
lawbreakers who set up alcohol distribution networks. It was
recognized even then that Prohibition was the greatest gift
to organized crime in American history, and ardent Prohibi-
tionists were widely depicted in popular culture as busybodies
and prigs. One such portrayal in popular culture showed
Prohibitionists in terms as apocalyptic as the ones they used
for alcoholics. The  play Spellbound, according to a review
in Life magazine,

expounds the curse of cursing drink. It holds up the horri-

ble example of a mother so intent upon defeating Demon
Rum that she flushes her two little sons with anti-whiskey
solutions. The result: one becomes a mute, the other a par-
alytic. Later in life, a thunderstorm suddenly starts up during
the third act to provide atmosphere while the mute is
engaged in raping a girl. This reprehensible sight so enrages
the paralytic that he suddenly renews his synaptic connec-
tions, skips out of bed, does successful battle for the Right.

The review noted that ‘The play’s existence testifies to at least

one of the evils of Prohibition.’
Prohibitionists were often decried as hypocrites, and the
public was delighted whenever a prominent one was caught

red-handed. In  Congressman M. Alfred Michaelson was
allowed ‘free entry’ for ponderous baggage which, on inves-
tigation, was found to contain kegged gallons of rum and
bottled quarts of strong liquors. Michaelson’s explanation
that his brother-in-law Walter Gramm had packed his bags
for him was met with some scepticism, but the case was
eventually dropped and Gramm paid a fine of $,.
Officials were even ridiculed when they were caught eat-
ing things made with rum rather than drinking it. General
Lincoln Andrews, returning from a conference with the
British on smuggling prevention, was spotted in the dining
salon of the liner La France eating crêpes with rum sauce.
When challenged, he replied that ‘everything eaten with a
fork or a spoon was quite all right’. Andrews called his meet-
ing with the British ‘% successful’. If anyone asked him
about the irony that the British Navy ships were supposed to
stop rum smuggling while serving daily rum rations to their
own sailors, his reply has been lost.
Business on cruise ships like the La France that continued
to serve liquor boomed, as did tourism to the Caribbean
islands that welcomed drinkers. The losers, of course, were
those American possessions that complied with the law. The
tally of cruise ship calls at St Thomas dropped from  per
month to , and the value of the island’s exports, which were
limited almost exclusively to rum, fell from $,, in
, to $, in .
Those vacation destinations that didn’t enforce Prohibi-
tion reaped the benefits, and increased tourism and rum sales
were all the more important because of the crash in com-
modity prices: sugar that cost over  cents a pound in 
fetched  cents a pound in . All rum-producing islands
in the Caribbean made their pitch for American tourists,
none so successfully as Cuba. Writers like Ernest Hemingway

popularized exotic drinks like the Daiquiri, Mojito and Cuba
libre, and the Bacardi Company ran ads that proclaimed,
‘Come to Cuba and bathe in Bacardi rum!’ Movie stars
trekked from Hollywood and New York to Havana, and the
Floridita and other nightclubs became famous for style and
decadence. Other islands benefited as well: Haiti was going
through a rare period of peace and good governance and
reaped considerable benefits, and Bermuda capitalized on the
inflow of liquor from both Europe and the Caribbean to
become the world capital of liquor smuggling.
While governments of Caribbean countries and officials
of European navies routinely agreed to assist the  Navy
and Customs Service in combating smuggling, it is hard to
believe that they were trying very hard. Countries that profited
from the smuggling trade obviously had no great interest in
putting a stop to it, and found America’s spasm of righteous-
ness more than a little ridiculous. Americans eventually agreed,

Sloppy Joe’s in Havana was the most famous bar in the western hemi-
sphere during Prohibition. A later establishment of the same name in Key
West copied its style and drinks. The picture is of the Havana location in
the early s.


and the legislation to repeal the act passed in  and went
into effect in .
Prohibition had a massive effect on America’s native
liquor industry, wiping out all but a few of the remaining New
England distilleries. It also signalled a major change in Amer-
ican tastes. As Life magazine put it in December ,

The pre-War liquor business was the whiskey business.

In  the  drank ,, gal. of rye and Bour-
bon, ,, gallons of gin, ,, gallons of
Scotch, a trickle of Irish. Rum, wine, brandy, liqueurs cut
no figure . . . That in  the  will drink at least
,, gallons of something seems certain.

Though the article suggested that whiskey would likely

regain its former prominence, it noted that ‘Bacardi rum is
more widely known in the  today than ever it was before
Prohibition.’
Since the few American distilleries that remained in busi-
ness would take some time to restart operations and age their
product, foreign liquor had the American market to itself for
some time afterward. Even before the repeal was officially in
effect, Sloppy Joe’s in Key West became famous for the
Mojito cocktails that regular customer Ernest Hemingway
enjoyed so much, and in Los Angeles a bartender named
Ernest Gantt opened a bar called Don the Beachcomber and
introduced a rum drink called the Zombie. Gantt invented
not only the drink that is one of the most powerful tipples in
a bartender’s arsenal, but the concept of the Polynesian-
themed tiki bar, and he eventually changed his name to Donn
Beach to capitalize on the name of his famous bar. Gantt’s
customers included Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hughes and
other Hollywood celebrities, who were happy to try his other

Don the
Beachcomber,
the man who
made tropical
drinks famous,
in his natural
element.

creations, such as Tahitian punch and his version of Navy

grog. Gantt was a canny businessman who understood the
psychology of his customers. Behind the bar he had a tap
for a garden hose mounted on the roof, and he would turn it
on when the bar was full, so customers would think it was
raining and would stay until the shower was over.
Gantt’s success inspired San Francisco native Vic Berg-
eron to start his own restaurant, Trader Vic’s, with his own
rum drink, the Mai Tai (named after the Tahitian word for
‘good’). Both establishments spawned dozens of imitators

 The tropical allure
of rum and remote
islands – label
from a bottle of
Man Friday rum,
.

and became chains, and the tiki bar phenomenon spread

across America. People in the American heartland who had
never even seen the Pacific ate bad Chinese food while sip-
ping rum drinks out of fake coconuts and dreaming of
tropical breezes. It was a marketing work of genius, and
established an image for rum that still endures.

World War, World Rum and Today

While America was repealing Prohibition, a bizarre incident in
London put rum in the European headlines. For over a cen-
tury a set of docks and warehouses on the Thames had been
known as Rum Quay, and over three million litres of liquor

were stored there in , wooden barrels. On  April  a
small fire at a neighbouring lumberyard spread to the ware-
house, and the entire stock ignited. The burning rum spread
over half the width of the river and burned for four days, and
firemen trying to fight the blaze were made tipsy by the fumes.
The amount lost was almost equal to the entire annual produc-
tion of Barbados at that time and, along with the surging
demand from America, caused a spike in rum prices.
Nicaragua, which produces some excellent rums, prob-
ably had some extra product available to put on the market in
the autumn of that year. In a break with tradition, President
Carlos Jarquín ordered that none of the parties were to pro-
vide voters with free rum at polling places. It is hard to tell
whether turnout that year was so low because of this or be-
cause the election had obviously been rigged by the military,
but rum was given away at the next election.
The Second World War interrupted the rum trade again,
and in many places distilleries were assigned to make indus-
trial alcohol of the type used to fuel torpedoes. (It was
poisonous, but soldiers and sailors figured out ways to purify
it and drank it anyway.) In the Philippines, which had begun
producing rum on a grand scale in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, this alcohol was regarded as a munition, and as the
Japanese advanced toward Manila the government pleaded
with distillers to dump their entire stock of rum. Most did,
and the Japanese imprisoned the owners of the distilleries as
a consequence.
Places where people were accustomed to imported
alcohol but couldn’t get it started making their own, as in
Uganda, where local sugar and palm spirit was distilled into
waragi, the local pronunciation of ‘war gin’. In Thailand in
, with most export markets closed, an expatriate brewer
named James Honzatko took advantage of the low price of

The first Asian brands of rum sold in American market had little success.
Rocroy was only briefly available in the , and it is a fair bet that when
this ad appeared in  most people had never heard of Réunion Island,
where it was made.
sugar by brewing a concoction he called Mekong whiskey.
Actually a rum made of  per cent molasses and  per cent
rice and herbs, it became the national spirit of Thailand and
was distributed all over Southeast Asia after the war.
Meanwhile, traditional rum producers in the Caribbean
and South America were devastated by closed markets in
Continental Europe, vastly increased shipping rates, and loss
of cargoes to -boat warfare. There were of course local sales
to American soldiers who had bases in the islands, which
caused social friction because of the wealth of the s com-
pared to the locals. This was commemorated in a song made
famous by the Andrews Sisters, who were given the lyrics the
night before the session and hadn’t yet realized they were
singing about prostitution:

From Chicachicaree to Mona’s Isle

Native girls all dance and smile
Help soldier celebrate his leave
Make every day like New Year’s Eve
Drinkin’ rum and Coca-Cola
Go down Point Koomahnah
Both mother and daughter
Workin’ for the Yankee dollar.

The song had been written by a pair of Trinidadian musi-

cians and plagiarized by Morey Amsterdam, who obscured the
meaning slightly – the original included lyrics about a newly-
wed wife who ran away with an American soldier. Most people
paid no more attention to the lyrics than the Andrews Sisters
had, hearing only the chorus and dreaming of rum drinks and
accommodating native women in a tropical paradise.
After the war’s end many former colonies achieved inde-
pendence and began marketing their rum outside traditional

Most ads for rum show black and brown people making rum and white
people drinking it. This ad from a Havana newspaper in the s was
aimed at a local audience; the text reads, ‘The beauty of Cuban women
is unique in the world – the same is true of Matusalem.’

channels. Some became market leaders. Though most Ameri-

cans have never heard of Old Monk rum from India, as of this
writing it is the third best-selling rum in the world. Meanwhile,

companies like Bacardi of Cuba expanded their operations and
became true multinationals, making rum in several different
countries. The head of the company in the s, Pepin Bosch,
had been expanding capacity outside Cuba for years, and their
facility in Mexico was the largest distillery in the world. When
Castro took over Cuba and nationalized the company, Bacardi
was hardly affected, especially since they had recently shipped
huge orders from Cuba to buyers all over the Caribbean, who
hadn’t yet paid for it. The deliveries were planned by Bosch,
who spirited his spirits away from the Communist regime and
left the island with his family just in time. Bacardi shifted their
headquarters to Puerto Rico and continued selling rum with-
out a single missed delivery. Bacardi continues to assert its
heritage and annoy the Cuban government by producing rum
under the name Havana Club, which is also trademarked by a
government-owned Cuban distillery. While legal battles rage
over the name, the Cuban version of Havana Club is sold
almost everywhere except the .
Rum took a back seat to vodka, gin and other spirits in the
s and ’s, but has made a resurgence in popularity since
then. New players entered the international market, and in
 – only  years after it was invented, give or take a few
decades – the Brazilians finally marketed cachaça outside their
own country. Rums and aguardientes from other parts of South
America became prominent later in the decade, and Zacapa
rum from Guatemala became the first Central American
spirit to top international competitions.
A decade into the twenty-first century, rum is being made
all over the world by both traditional and inventive methods,
and brands that were unheard of only a decade ago are selling
for premium prices. Speciality rum bars cater to an increas-
ingly knowledgeable crowd, and rums are savoured with the
attention usually given to fine brandy and Scotch whisky. It

Bacardi was the famous name in Cuban rum, but another company had
the best ads. This caricature of Fidel Castro as a peg-legged pirate was an
ad for the Matusalem Rum Company, which moved to the Dominican
Republic after the Communist takeover of Cuba.

has been an amazing change in status for a drink made from

what was once regarded as industrial waste, fit only for slaves
who could hope for no better antidote to their cares. A little
later I’ll address the future of rum, but first it’s worth look-
ing at some of the ways in which rum has become entwined
in culture and religion.

Voodoo and Other Rituals of Rum

Rum has been a part of so many cultures for so long that ritu-
als and traditions have grown up around it. Voodoo is the most
famous, but rum is also a ritual beverage in Cuban Santería
and Brazilian Quimbanda cults. All are based on African reli-
gions as modified in the New World, but the spirits are seen as
benevolent in some traditions, bloodthirsty in others.

 Voodoo is based on rituals from Benin and is practised
in Louisiana and Haiti, though the rituals in each place are
markedly different. Both share the concept that there are
powerful spirits called loas that can be invoked by the prom-
ise of sensory experiences in this world. The supplicant
enters a trance state and invites the spirits to enter their body,
and while there to enjoy earthly pleasures. These include
food, drinking, tobacco and sexual intercourse, and each
spirit has their favourite combination – for instance, the love
goddess Erzulie appreciates offerings of fried pork, rum and
cigarettes. Baron Samedi, the loa who is the guardian of the
underworld, prefers cigars with his rum, and Haitian believ-
ers are certain that any offering other than Barbancourt
premium rum will not merit his attention.
Voodoo rituals can involve drunken sex, and the wor-
shipper often claims not to remember the actions of their
body while it was possessed by the spirits. At the end of the
trance state they are given a message from the spirits, usually

Bottles of rum are lined up as gifts to the spirits at this voodoo rite in
Benin.


a prophecy or promise to intercede in the worshipper’s favour.
The loas are capricious and greedy, and often cloak their
promises in ambiguous language worthy of a Greek oracle.
Voodoo worshippers keep altars in their homes, and start
most ceremonies by pouring rum on the altar to get the loas’
attention. Both Haitian and Louisiana voodoo rituals involve
intricate drumming, but the Haitian ceremonies are more
structured and closer to the African roots, the Louisiana
more freeform.
Santería is a Cuban offshoot of Nigerian Yoruba trad-
ition that was shaped by the necessity of the worshippers to
hide their beliefs from the Spanish Inquisition. The loas are
associated with Catholic saints who are venerated with
extreme fervour using rituals seen nowhere else in the Chris-
tian world. The religion was long considered a mere cover for
pagan traditions, but after the Spanish fell from power, San-
tería worshippers did not revert to their African beliefs – they
continued baptizing their children and offering the saints gifts
of rum, cigars and sugar. Priests called Santeros also offer
animal sacrifices, first chanting and drumming so that any evil
influences that plague a supplicant are drawn into a dove or
chicken, then killing the bird so that the evil is dispersed. San-
teros insist that their practices are different from black magic
or witchcraft, and that they will only be a force for good.
Quimbanda makes no such claims. Followers of this
Brazilian cult worship Exu, the god of chaos and trickery, or
Ogu, god or war and metal. The rituals are explicitly designed
to obtain power and revenge, and typically involve lighting
seven candles and seven cigarettes, opening seven bottles of
cachaça, and sacrificing an animal. Quimbanda is explicitly
black magic, and has a more gentle and spiritual counterpart
called Umbanda that has some resemblance to Santería.
According to some authorities, cachaça is more important in

Quimbanda since it draws and compels the wilder and more
malevolent spirits. There are many variants of Afro-Brazilian
spirit worship, but in all of them cachaça is regarded as having
unique power to call up spirits.
Strangely, rum has similar potency in a religious tradition
with no African roots, that of the highland natives of Chia-
pas, Mexico. The Tzotzil Maya people in this area have a long
tradition of giving offerings to the water spirits, and at some
time – nobody knows exactly when – it was decided that the
most effective gifts were bottles of rum and Coca-Cola.
Some Tzotzil practice a hybrid religion like Santería in which
Christian and native ideas are entwined, and Catholic priests
in the area are used to offerings of rum to the saints.
Rum has also evolved one secular ritual, equivalent to the
salt and lime tasting of tequila. This involves aged dark rum,
limes, brown sugar and instant coffee. One is expected to dip
one side of the lime into the sugar, the other side into the cof-
fee, then suck on the lime, then taste the rum. The Pampero
company of Venezuela decided to advertise this ritual in Italy
with the slogan ‘Il rum piu bevuto nei peggiori bar di Caracas’
(‘The rum most drunk in the worst bar in Caracas’). Strangely,
it was a hit, and both Pampero rum and its tasting ritual are
now popular in Europe.


 6
Rum Today and Tomorrow

A book could be written just about the different types of stills

used to produce rum and how various ageing techniques
affect the final product: in fact, at least one has been. The
engineering is interesting but not essential to know in order
to appreciate rum. That said, it is worth considering how the
raw materials, distilling equipment and ageing techniques
have always shaped the final product.
Cane rums have a distinctive vegetable flavour to them,
which can be an advantage or a liability depending on how
highly refined the alcohol is and how it is aged. In crudely
refined and unaged cane rums that character is unpleasant,
but it is an advantage when this rum is aged in wood – the
vegetable flavour mellows into a rich undertone.
Molasses rums begin with a sweeter, more concentrated
sugar product that often has smoky or burnt flavours from the
refining process. Depending on how highly the molasses is
refined and how completely it is distilled, the resulting liquor
can range from heavy and oily to thin and sharp-tasting.
Rum is made in two different types of stills: the alembic
or pot stills that were used by medieval alchemists and the
column still. Column stills were invented in  and are far
more efficient, but remove more flavours from the resulting

A field worker delivers sugar cane to the mill by bicycle in Mauritius.
alcohol. Pot still rums tend to have a sharper, smokier
flavour, equivalent to the peaty Highland Scotch whiskies,
while column-still rums are smoother, like Lowland whiskies.
Most rum is distilled multiple times and filtered to remove
impurities before being either sold unaged or barrel-aged to
add smoothness and character. There is no consensus on
how long rums should be aged for, and some are in the wood
as little as one year, some for over twenty. As might be
expected, the longer rums are aged the more their flavours
become mellow and akin to aged whiskies. The different
molasses and cane flavours are lost over time and the flavours
converge; very old rum tastes much more like other rums of
the same age than like its younger counterpart.
The type of wood used in ageing also makes a difference,
and political changes have occasionally forced shifts in mate-
rials. Bourbon distilleries in America use their charred oak
barrels once and then sell them, and Caribbean rum produc-
ers found that reusing these produced particularly mellow
rum. When Prohibition came into effect the supply was cut
off, and rum producers had to shift to used wine barrels from
Europe, which cost more and didn’t produce as desirable a
product. The supply didn’t resume immediately at the end of
Prohibition in the , because the legal whiskey industry was
at a standstill, and it was years before more American barrels
were back on the market.
Spiced and fruited rums have a long heritage dating back
to the days when most rum was so bad that it was almost
undrinkable without some alteration. Spiced rums were also
concocted by pharmacists as tonics, and in time they gained
a following for beverages that tasted more of tropical herbs
than molasses, cane and wood. In the last decade, premium
spiced rums such as The Kraken have shown that it is possi-
ble to create a multi-dimensional drink in which the flavour

of quality rum shows through. The genre seems to be headed
for greater respectability, but rum purists will probably never
really warm to it.
The same is true of fruit-infused rums, which are almost
invariably bland and sugary confections. Most fruited rums
are rightly classed as alcopops, and best left to the unsophis-
ticated and underage drinkers that are their intended market.
They are a boon to bartenders who value speed rather than
quality. Real fruit juice and decent rum is a justly celebrated
combination, and the small amount of time it takes to mix
your own is worth it.

How Experts Enjoy Rum

It is hard to find any meaningful data about how people drink
their rum worldwide, but it’s safe to say that at least  per cent
is blended with some kind of fruit juice or other flavouring.
These drinks are usually served over ice, which further masks
the subtle differences in taste and scent of the spirit.
Straight rum has not historically been served with any
thought about how to enhance its flavour. It still isn’t: if you
order rum neat at most bars it will be served at an inappropri-
ate temperature using the wrong glassware. Shot and cordial
glasses do nothing to focus the aromas toward your nose so
that you catch subtleties, and the best you can do in a typical
place is to ask for it to be served in a wineglass.
I have read an expert’s opinion that rum is best tasted at
temperatures between  and ˚ (–˚), and best drunk
from a balloon snifter or a sherry glass called a copita. To which
I say: well, maybe. The wide range of flavour in modern rums
extends from the almost vodka-like clarity and crispness of
Treaty Oak Rum (Texas) to the rich, full sweetness of Old

Monk (India), butterscotch and caramel of Zacapa (Guate-
mala), and peppery exuberance of Sang Som (Thailand). Such
different drinks may well warrant different glassware and temp -
eratures. That said, snifters can concentrate the evaporating
alcohol to the point where other scents are overwhelmed, so

David Morrison, Senior Blender for Appleton Rums of Jamaica, displays

his wares at a rum tasting dinner in Los Angeles.


only the oldest and most full-flavoured rums ought to be
drunk this way.
If you enjoy the vanilla and caramel scents of aged rums,
you may prefer them a few degrees warmer than is usually
considered optimal, and your glassware of choice is likely to
be a snifter. As with Scotch whisky, a few drops of water –
no more – can be surprisingly effective at opening up the
flavours. Those who like white rums neat tend to like them
cool but not cold, and often use a white wine glass or brandy-
tasting glass.
The most interesting comment I got from interviewing
several bartenders who specialize in rum was from John Col-
thorp of Caña in Los Angeles. He noted that you can accent
different characteristics of rums using different glassware, but
at the cost of learning less about it.

Professionals taste using an  tasting glass at room tem-

perature, and if you really want to get a sense of the
character of the rum, you’ll taste them all in the same
type of glass without correcting for the style. I drink it at
room temperature, and don’t understand why people
drink it chilled – it reduces evaporation and dulls the
nose, and why would you want that? As for water, it does
help you notice fruitier aspects, and some people like it.
As the rum changes proof, you open up different flavors.

As with everything else in food and beverages, the

important thing is what you like, so if you discover you like
your rum out of a coffee mug or straight from a hip flask, it’s
your business. Try it the expert’s way some time, just to see if
you’re missing something, but enjoy it in whatever way makes
you happiest.


 Rum Cocktails
Anyone who tries to recreate early rum drinks is faced with
an unusual problem: the worst rum you can buy now is bet-
ter than the best rum in the world then. Other ingredients
have changed too: culinary historians argue over whether the
lemons called for in early recipes should be replaced by limes,
and how to approximate the flavours of long-lost cultivars of
Seville oranges and wild coconuts. Even those few recipes
that include proportions can be problematic: what does ‘the
juice of five lemons’ mean when the lemons we have to work
with now have been bred for hundreds of years to yield lots
of sweet juice? The best we can do is make educated guesses
and experiment with enthusiasm, which is what the people
who created these recipes did in the first place.
Early rum was so raw and unpalatable that even slaves
seeking mere oblivion were creative about adding something
to kill the taste and mute the harsh sharpness of the alcohol.
Cachaça was mixed with cane and fruit juice in Brazil, and
Morewood recorded that slaves on the plantations were given
a beverage called ‘weak diversion’ made from rum, water and
molasses. We don’t know the exact proportions, and even if
we did, it is unlikely to be a diverting experience.
The trinity of rum, citrus and sugar makes its appearance
very early; Bacardi traces the drink’s roots back to one of Sir
Francis Drake’s captains in . That dating may be fanciful,
but it certainly wasn’t long after that before something very
much like a Mojito was being sipped cautiously around the
Caribbean. Lemons and limes were brought by Columbus on
his second voyage in , so when sugar and rum made their
appearance, all the ingredients were available.
Rum punch, named not for fistfighting but after the Hindi
word panch, or ‘five things’, was traditionally made with rum,

citrus and at least three spices, often including cinnamon,
nutmeg and ginger or cloves. It is in Jamaica that we find the
first references to this beverage, which introduced distilled
molasses to polite society. Punches made from brandy or
whisky with fruit juice and sugar had been recorded as early as
the s, but rum punches quickly became popular wherever
the raw materials were available.
Rum punch was standardized in  in a set of regu-
lations that the English issued in Bombay, which specified:
‘if any man comes into a victualling house to drink punch,
he may demand one quart good Goa arak, half a pound of
sugar, and half a pint of good lime water, and make his
own punch.’ This beverage, called Bombay Government
Punch, lacks the expensive spices that add aroma and com-
plexity, but could be made cheaply, and like grog was a
healthier beverage than straight rum. (It packs a wallop; if
you decide to make one using this recipe, it is best to add
water or tea.)
Morewood records a similar drink on St Kitts called a
‘swizzle’ in , which he referred to as

rum with about six times the quantity of water, rendered

palatable by the infusion of some aromatic ingredients.
This beverage is often expensive, because water has fre-
quently to be brought in from the neighboring islands,
and sometimes rum and wine is given in exchange.

The fact that the water was more expensive than the rum
in this era is mind-boggling to a modern person eyeing the
prices for good rum at liquor stores. The splinter of wood that
was used to spear fruit in this drink, the swizzle stick, was
more than just decoration, since it was made from an aromatic
wood that added a slight root beer flavour.

 There was a craze for rum punch in England begin-
ning in the s, and punch houses opened all over the
country. The most elegant establishments charged exorbi-
tant prices: in  a bowl of the best punch could sell for
eight shillings a quart, at a time when a week’s room and
board in London was only seven shillings. The popularity
of punch continued through the Regency era, and exotic
versions flavoured with expensive spices were served at
royal events. It was popular on the other side of the
Atlantic too, and the recipe for the rum punch that Martha
Washington served to guests is included in the section at
the end of this book.
Punch declined in popularity in Britain, but new versions
flourished in the Caribbean. The Myers’s Rum company claims
that the first Planter’s Punch was served at the opening of
their distillery in , but the first known reference in print
to Planter’s Punch was this poetic recipe in the  August 
edition of the New York Times:

This recipe I give to thee,

Dear brother in the heat.
Take two of sour (lime let it be)
To one and a half of sweet,
Of Old Jamaica pour three strong,
And add four parts of weak.
Then mix and drink. I do no wrong –
I know whereof I speak.

Myers’s version of Planter’s Punch includes orange juice and

a dash of grenadine, and is a much more sophisticated drink.
Punches have remained popular for good reason: they’re
enormously refreshing, and the juice and spices can conceal
the imperfections of even mediocre liquor.

 The period of French and Spanish colonialism on the
mainland led to the creation of a rum drink that is no longer
associated with rum. In Stanley Arthur Clisby’s book, Famous
New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ’Em (), he provides a
recipe for a rum mint julep, calling it the original mint julep
that arrived in Louisiana in  when white aristocrats who
were expelled from Santo Domingo settled in New Orleans.
The earliest known mention of a mint julep, from , only
calls it a ‘spiritous liquor with mint in it’, so it is quite likely
that whiskey was not used in the first versions.
Other rum drinks were being created in South America
at about the same time, but unfortunately with much less
documentation. Brazil and Mexico both lay claim to very dif-
ferent drinks called rompope. The Mexican version is a sweet
vanilla-infused eggnog, which was reportedly invented in a
convent in Puebla in the late s. In Brazil this is rum with

Rum punch was the tipple of choice for upper-class Englishmen in the
s. It was not always drunk in moderation, as shown in A Midnight
Modern Conversation, William Hogarth’s wonderful depiction of a drunken
rum punch party, .


cinnamon, sugar and bitter lemon, with a sister drink called
dimantina that is the same with milk added.
While we have at least a vague timeline for these drinks,
it is impossible to accurately date one of the most interesting
rum beverages. The Quarente Quatre or ‘’ is peculiar to
Madagascar, and involves cutting  slits into an orange,
filling each slit with a coffee bean, and putting the orange into
a jar containing a litre of white rum for  days. This obvi-
ously isn’t something you’d whip up on short notice, but it is
an amazing drink. If you don’t like coffee you can make it
with cloves for a spicy, citrusy cordial.
Cooling drinks were deservedly popular in India and in
the New World’s steamy summers, but just as important were
the eggnogs and hot toddies that warmed up winter evenings.
The hot drink known as flip, described in an earlier chapter,
also appears in a poem from  that mentions bounce,
cherries soaked in rum:

The days are short, the weather’s cold

By tavern fires tales are told
Some ask for dram when first come in
Others with flip and bounce begin.

A hot rum drink that is enduringly popular is Austrian

jagertee, which at its simplest is just rum poured into tea. A
drink by that name, which means ‘hunter’s tea’ in German,
was invented in the nineteenth century, but it isn’t known
whether it contained the herbs that give the modern bottled
version its distinctive flavour. It doesn’t help that the drink
was known under various other names such as hut tea, ranger’s
tea and poacher’s tea, supposedly depending on the percent-
age of alcohol. A recipe for ‘Oberjagertee’, or chief-hunter
tea, has twice the amount of alcohol, and ‘Schürzenjagertee’,

hunting-something-in-a-skirt tea, contains three times the
amount. One suspects that anyone who drinks this is really
hunting for oblivion, and would soon find it.
Eggnog has been a traditional drink for centuries, and
there are many elaborate recipes from colonial America on-
wards. One of the most enjoyable that I have tried is relatively
modern; it is called Moose Milk and is a favourite drink of the
Canadian Air Force at their New Year’s celebrations. As a
glance at the recipe at the back of the book shows, milking a
moose is not required to make the drink.
I could easily go on with twentieth-century rum drinks
from the tiki era like the Zombie, Mai Tai and the lethal Mis-
sionary’s Downfall, but don’t see a point in doing so in this
book. Bartending historian Jeff ‘Beachbum’ Berry has writ-
ten a definitive and entertaining work on the subject, and I
can do no better than to point you toward that book on the
Suggested Reading list.

The History of Cooking with Rum

Like many alcoholic drinks, rum changes its character remark-
ably when cooked, but it also can be used uncooked to enhance
other flavours. It is popular as a filling for chocolates, and can
be used to soak fruitcakes and rum babas. It can be used to
produce a wonderfully delicate and aromatic cake, and it has
served as the base for barbecue, Jamaican jerk and other
savoury sauces.
There are many recipes from colonial America that use
rum, most often in sweet dishes such as apple tansy tarts,
baked apples with rum raisins and rum berry sauces. An
excellent modern interpretation of one of these is the straw-
berry rum sauce served over a Dutch Baby pancake – see the

It has been claimed that the rum cake evolved from a steamed pudding
popular in the th century. This cake was made using the recipe from
Mr Cecil’s Restaurant.

recipe section for details of these and other items from this
chapter.
Another old combination that is difficult to date is rum
butter, which was certainly drunk as hot buttered rum as early

as the colonial era, but wasn’t documented in cooking until
much later. The oldest specific citation I’ve found is from
, and it didn’t make the Oxford English Dictionary until
, but it’s hard to believe it really was invented that
recently. New Orleans cookbooks from the s refer to
rum butter sauces as old family recipes, and rum butter glazes
for bread puddings are an old tradition in the city. There are
numerous earlier references to ‘hard sauce’, made with but-
ter and various liquors, but most seem to regard whiskey,
brandy and rum as interchangeable.
The first attributed recipe I have found that uses rum is
a surprising one – a rum omelette that is associated with
Thomas Jefferson. If you’re used to savoury omelettes filled
with ham or cheese, this egg pancake topped with rum-
apricot sauce will be a revelation. America’s third president had
a well-deserved reputation as a culinary adventurer but was
not a hands-on cook; his French chef may have experimented
with rum as a substitute for brandy. It was not specified
whether this omelette was intended to be a main dish, snack
or dessert, but it makes a simple but elegant brunch item.
The item that brought rum to the attention of cooks in
Europe was the rum baba, which was first made in Paris in
the nineteenth century. King Stanislas of Poland had brought
the yeast cakes called babkas to France during his exile in the
s, and the French hit on the idea of soaking them in
brandy. Around  a patisserie in Paris decided to use rum
instead, and a star was born. The ring cake mould that is usu-
ally used for rum babas was invented in , and in that
form the rum baba spread across Europe, with a variant
becoming a speciality of Naples. Other rum-soaked cakes fol-
lowed, and they became a Christmas tradition as far away as
Kerala in South India. (Some people have attributed the rum
baba to the great French gourmet Brillat-Savarin. A variant

on the rum baba was named for him, not by him – he died
five years before the first rum baba was recorded, and there
is no mention of it in his great book The Physiology of Taste.)
Rum balls are another Christmas tradition in which the
rum is not baked, so the cake is mildly alcoholic. They seem
to have originated around  in Germany, where they are
called Rumkugel, but there are many regional variations; in one
Hungarian version called kókuszgolyó the rum and chocolate
mix is rolled around a whole cherry, then the rum ball is
rolled around coconut flakes.
Sweet rum desserts are not only popular in Europe; there
are many fine ones from the New World, such as ‘claypot
canela’ sauce from Colombia. This mix of rum, cinnamon,
sugar and star anise is usually made with panela, boiled raw
sugar-cane juice, but you can use brown sugar and get an
almost identical effect. The caramel-flavoured sauce with a
mild rum tang can be used to frost a cake or fill a cream puff,
and is the most distinctively Colombian dessert.
Finally, we come to one of the signature items of New
Orleans cuisine: Bananas Foster. This was invented in ,
either by Owen Edward Brennan or Paul Blange, both of
whom were chefs at Brennan’s Restaurant in the French
Quarter. It was named for Richard Foster, the head of the
New Orleans Crime Commission, a gourmet who dined at
the restaurant regularly. The dessert of bananas flamed with
rum, cinnamon and banana liqueur was an immediate hit, and
Brennan’s now uses , lb (, kg) of bananas a year
making the confection.
Though sweet rum sauces dominate cookbooks, rum
has also been used as a base for savoury sauces. Some
Jamaican jerk sauces use rum as an ingredient, chilli made
with rum has placed well in cookoffs in Texas, and honey-
rum sauces have been used to baste chicken and fish in the

Philippines and elsewhere. In the tiki s, rum-based bar-
becue sauces proliferated, usually in the form of a sweet,
sticky coating for spare ribs and other grilled meats. Rum-
ginger sauces also date from this era, and though these were
often claimed to be traditional Polynesian or Caribbean
dishes, they were probably created in California. Rum-based
grilling sauces really hit their stride in the s, and there
are many rum, ginger and citrus sauces to choose from at
any high-end grocery.
There are many other recipes that involve cooking with
rum, and a book could easily be written on the topic, but as
far as I know no such work exists. It would be an interesting
volume that would show the subtle side of a powerful liquor.

The Future of Rum

Rum is finally being treated as seriously as brandy, fine whisky
and other liquors, and distillers have responded by coming up
with an unprecedented range of flavours and styles. Some of
these sound bizarre, such as the aged sorghum-based rum
made in Madison, Wisconsin, by Yahara Bay distillers. In blind
tastings I conducted among rum lovers, everyone com-
mented on the unusual combination of musky and herbal
flavours, but not one suggested that it was anything but rum.
The average quality of rum has certainly risen worldwide,
and even countries that once produced famously bad rum
are now bottling high-end liquor and selling it at premium
prices. The British Admiralty derided rum from Mauritius
in the nineteenth century; it is now sold as Starr African Rum
and celebrated for its hints of citrus and cardamom. Trad-
itional producers like Appleton’s of Jamaica are selling rum
that has been aged for as long as  years and promoting it at

expensive events in which rum is paired with foods in the
manner of fine wines. These dinners have been less than suc-
cessful, since rum is too alcoholic to really work with food
pairings the way subtler wines and beers do, but the mere fact
that the concept is being tried is a sign of serious intent.
Of course there are rivers of bad rum being made as well,
since government price supports make overproduction of
sugar a certainty. There have also been whiffs of scandal from
some quarters about misrepresentation of the age of rums, and
of artificial concoctions added to young rums to make them
appear aged. In the same way that many people embrace genet-
ically modified crops and molecular gastronomy, this kind of
tinkering may eventually be seen as not merely acceptable but
desirable. Purists and those who revere tradition will recoil, but
a generation that has grown up drinking spiced and fruited

Occasionally
a bottle of
extremely old
rum is found
in someone’s
cellar and is sold
at extraordinary
prices. These
bottles of
Jamaican rum
from  have
an estimated
value of
€ each.


Decent rum is
made in some very
unlikely places. Old
Jamaica is made in
Ireland from
Caribbean
molasses.

rums is liable to be excited by post-cultural experiments that

taste like nothing else on earth.
The simultaneous booms in premium traditional rums
and fruit- or spice-flavoured versions is likely to continue
with both sides upping the ante. Expect to see older and
more exotic rums sold at spiralling prices at the same time
that hipsters explore using rum in vodka and gin drinks and
in ever more outré combinations. The slaves who toiled in
the cachaça fields with tafia, sailors who hoisted a tipple
before splicing the rigging, and gentlemen with flappers on
their arm who frequented speakeasies wouldn’t recognize
either the refined or the exotically blended beverages, but
they’re all pages in a story that gets longer every day.


 Recipes

Rum Drinks
It is hard to pick recipes from the bartender’s manual of history to
include here, but it seems best to focus on those that are not in
most mixologists’ repertoire or easily available elsewhere.
Following are a few that are easy to make and only use commonly
available ingredients.

Rum Shrub
(s)

This hot-weather drink is making a comeback, and though sever-

al recipes are available from the colonial era, most are for making
amounts suitable for a tavern full of thirsty people. This modern
version can be made with any berries, though raspberries were
called for in the original.

 cup ( ml) water

 cup ( g) sugar
 cups ( g) raspberries or chopped strawberries
 cups ( ml) white wine vinegar (not white vinegar)

Whisk water and sugar together to a boil. Reduce heat and add the
raspberries, stirring for  minutes. Add the vinegar and boil for 

minutes. Pour the liquid and push the berries through a strainer,
cool, bottle, and let sit for at least a day. The shrub mix will keep
in a refrigerator for up to a month. To use, mix shrub -to--to 
with rum and water, or for added flavour and fizz, use ginger beer
or ginger ale instead of water.

Landlord May’s Flip

()

 lb ( g) sugar
 eggs
½ pint ( ml) cream
dark beer or amber ale
cheap light rum

Mix sugar, eggs, and cream and let stand in the refrigerator or a cool
room for two days. To serve, fill a quart mug two-thirds full of beer,
add four heaping spoonfuls of the above mixture, then thrust in a
hot poker until the mixture bubbles vigorously. Add a gill of rum
just before serving, and drink hot. I have used Belgian dark ales and
Mexican amber beers with good results. Warning – when the poker
is thrust into the cold beer mix, it foams up a lot – only fill the pitch-
er about two-thirds of the way or it will overflow.

Martha Washington’s Rum Punch

()

 fl. oz. ( ml) simple syrup (sugar water, see any bar guide)
 fl. oz. ( ml) lemon juice
 fl. oz. ( ml) fresh orange juice
 fl. oz. ( ml) white rum
 fl. oz. ( ml) dark rum
 fl. oz. ( ml) orange Curaçao
 lemons, quartered
 orange, quartered

 ½ tsp grated nutmeg
 cinnamon sticks (broken)
 cloves
 oz. ( ml) boiling water

In a container, mash the orange, lemons, cinnamon sticks, cloves

and nutmeg. Add the syrup and the lemon and orange juices. Pour
the boiling water over the mixture in the container. Let it cool for
a few minutes. When cool, add the white rum, dark rum and
orange Çuracao.
Strain well into a pitcher or punch bowl. Serve over ice in
goblets and decorate each glass with wheels of lemon and orange.

Moose Milk
(Twentieth century)

 large eggs
 cup ( g) plus  tbsp sugar
¼ pints ( litres) vanilla ice cream
 cups ( ml) milk
¾ cup ( ml) dark rum
 cups ( ml) light rum or brandy

Separate the eggs. In a large bowl, beat the egg yolks. Beat in half
the sugar, a little at a time, and beat the mixture until it is light and
lemon-coloured. In another bowl, beat the egg whites until frothy.
Beat in the remaining half of the sugar. Continue beating the mix-
ture until it thickens.
In a larger bowl, combine the two mixtures and stir in the
milk and rum (or brandy). Chill the Moose Milk, covered
overnight. Transfer it to a punch bowl. Cut the ice cream into
small pieces and stir into mixture. Let it stand  minutes before
serving.
Serves ; if desired, you may sprinkle with cinnamon before
serving.


 Cooking with Rum

Dutch Baby with Rum Sauce

This Pennsylvania Dutch-style recipe is an adaptation by Laura

Flowers, aka The Cooking Photographer. Her cooking blog is an
excellent resource.

for the Fresh Strawberry Rum Syrup

½ cup ( ml) water
½ cup ( g) granulated sugar
 cups ( g) strawberries
zest of  lemon
 tbsp white or dark rum (I use Myers’s dark)
small pinch of salt

Clean, hull and purée the strawberries in a food processor. Set aside.
In a medium-sized saucepan over medium high heat boil the
water and sugar until clear. Add the puréed strawberries, lemon
zest, rum and salt. Bring to a boil and then lower the temperature
until the mixture is at a high simmer. Cook for  minutes, stirring
occasionally. The syrup will thicken more as it cools.
(This makes twice as much syrup as would be used by one
Dutch Baby. The leftover syrup will keep for a day or two in the
refrigerator and is delicious over ice cream.)

for the Dutch Baby

 eggs, at room temperature
½ cup ( ml) milk
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup ( g) all purpose flour
 tbsp unsalted butter
 cup ( g) sliced strawberries
powdered (icing) sugar
strawberry rum syrup (recipe above)


Preheat the oven to ° (°).
Beat together the eggs, milk and salt. Then beat the flour into
the mixture until smooth.
In a - to -inch skillet (–-cm frying pan), melt the butter
over medium heat on the stovetop. Pour in the mixture and cook
for exactly one minute. Place the skillet in the oven and immedi-
ately turn the oven down to ° (°). Bake until puffed over
the edges and nicely browned; about  minutes.
Remove from the oven and top with the strawberries, sugar
and strawberry rum syrup. Slide onto a plate, cut in half, and move
half to another plate. Serve immediately.
Serves two very hungry people.

Thomas Jefferson’s Rum Omelette

 eggs, beaten
½ tsp salt
 tbsp sugar
 tbsp rum
 tbsp butter
 tbsp powdered (icing) sugar
 tbsp apricot jam (preserves)

Add salt, sugar and half the rum to the beaten eggs. Beat again
until fluffy. Heat the butter in an omelette pan, pour in the egg
mixture and cook until firm, lifting up from sides. When firm
throughout but still a little moist, fold over and slip onto a warm
platter. Sprinkle with the powdered sugar. Make a sauce of the
remaining rum and preserves. Pour over the omelette and serve
immediately.
(President Jefferson had quite a sweet tooth. If you don’t,
make this without the powdered sugar, or with half the amount
called for in the recipe. Pair this with something savoury like
sausages or bacon at brunch, or surprise your guests and make it
as a dessert.)


 Mr Cecil’s Rum Cake

While writing this book, I tried several rum cakes. This one, from
a family recipe of film director Jonathan Burrows, owner of Mr
Cecil’s restaurants in California, was by far the best.

 cup ( g) finely chopped pecans

 cups ( g) cake flour (low-gluten, finely milled flour)]
 tbsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
 cup ( ounces or  g) unsalted butter, room temperature
 cups ( g) granulated sugar
 large eggs
¾ cup ( fl. oz.) buttermilk
 package french vanilla pudding, or  ounce ( g) custard
powder
½ cup ( ml) light rum
Sauce:
 stick ( g) unsalted butter
 cup ( g) sugar
¼ cup ( ml) water
 fl. oz. ( ml) rum

Preheat oven to ° (°). Sprinkle the chopped pecans on

the bottom of a greased bundt pan. In a medium bowl, stir
together with a wire whisk the flour, baking powder, vanilla pud-
ding mix and salt. Cut up the butter into -inch (.-cm) pieces
and place them in the large bowl of an electric mixer, fitted with a
paddle attachment or beaters. Beat for  minutes on medium-high
speed until the butter is light and creamy in colour. Stop and
scrape the bowl. Cream the butter for an additional  seconds,
then add the sugar, a quarter-cup at a time, beating for one minute
after each addition. Scrape the sides of the bowl occasionally. Add
the eggs one at a time. Reduce the mixer speed. Stir rum into the
buttermilk. Add the dry ingredients alternately with the butter-
milk. Mix until just incorporated. Scrape the sides of the bowl and
mix for  seconds longer.

 Spoon the batter into the prepared pan. Lift up the pan with
the batter, and let it drop onto the counter top to burst any air
bubbles, allowing the batter to settle, then put in the oven. Rotate
the pan after  minutes and check every – minutes after cake
has baked for  hour. The cake is done when a toothpick inserted
into the cake’s centre comes out clean. When the cake is almost
done, bring the sauce to a boil, stir and remove from the heat.
Pour the sauce over the cake and let it cool completely (approxi-
mately  hour), then remove from the pan.


 Select Bibliography

Berry, Jeff, Sippin’ Safari: In Search of the Great Lost Tropical Drink
Recipes and the People Behind Them (San Jose, , )
This history of the rise and fall of Polynesian bar craze is a
humorous and enjoyable read and recommended to anyone
with an interest in the subject. It contains plenty of recipes
for the favourites and some obscure tipples, and is a practical
bartending guide to recreating these drinks.

Curtis, Wayne, . . . And a Bottle of Rum (New York, )

Covers the history of the Caribbean rum trade in great depth,
but later developments in a more cursory manner.

Earle, Alice Morse, Customs and Fashions in Old New England

An excellent survey of society of the s, with chapters
focusing on food and drink. It is available online through The
Gutenberg Project.

Gjelten, Tom, Bacardi and the Long Fight For Cuba (New York, )
The surprisingly interesting history of the Bacardi family.
Gjelten profiles several generations of talented and ruthless
businessmen who made rum and money in a horribly mis-
governed county, and this history reads at times like a politi-
cal thriller.

Morewood, Samuel, A Philosophical and Statistical History of the

Inventions and Customs of Ancient and Modern Nations in the

 Manufacture and Use of Inebriating Liquors (London, ). Samuel
Morewood was an exciseman, but his interest in alcohol ex-
tended far beyond collecting taxes on the liquor that flowed
through the British Empire. His exhaustive history of the arts
of fermenting and distilling ran over  pages and includes
fantastically arcane lore, but is briskly written so a modern
reader may enjoy it. Several editions are available for free online;
I used the one at Archive.org.

Williams, Ian, Rum, a Social and Sociable History (New York, )
Also covers the history of the Caribbean rum trade, with less
on more recent history

Wondrich, David, Punch: Delights and Dangers of the Flowing Bowl

(New York, )
A gifted writer explores the history of punch in a way that is
always insightful and often hilarious. This book includes
many period recipes, including Charles Dickens’s own recipe
for rum punch.


 Websites and Associations

Peter’s Rum Pages

www.rum.cz
The labels from rum bottles often feature beautiful art, and
Peter’s Rum Pages has the definitive online collection of rum
labels through history. It is sorted by country or company, and
often has historical information about rum production. The site is
headquartered in the Czech Republic but is maintained in good
English.

AMountainOfCrushedIce.com
One of the more interesting websites about the history and tech-
nique of bartending, and there are many articles about rum
drinks.

MinistryOfRum.com
An excellent source for rum reviews and a good place to get rum
questions answered.

rumhistory.com
A compendium of rum lore, songs, and cultural references. This
site was created by the author, and has some interesting addition-
al material that I did not have room for in this book. If you’d like
to hear the sea shanties that are quoted here or know more about
the culture of rum, this is the place to go.


 rumandcocacolareader.com
A page all about the true history behind the famous song, which
is far more complex than generally recognized.

rumproject.com
Captain Jimbo’s Rum Project is a site with much to say about
rum, some of it controversial but all of it entertainingly written.


 Rum Museums

There are many small museums of rum production located in

distilleries around the world, though some of these are more glo-
rified gift shops than serious institutions. These inevitably focus
on the brand of rum produced there, but some, including the
Havana Club Museum in Cuba and the St James Museum in
Martinique, are reported to have good general interest exhibits.
Among the museums not affiliated with any particular distillery
are the following:

Dominican Republic
Rum and Sugar Cane Museum,
Isabel La Catolica #,
Santo Domingo.

This museum is located in a sixteenth-century building in the

tourist zone, and has a bar with sampling offered.

Germany
Das Rum-Museum
Located inside the Seafaring Museum,
Schiffbrucke ,  Flensburg.

This is a small museum in the basement of a former rum warehouse.

www.flensburg-online.de/museum/rum-museum.html


 Great Britain
The Rum Story,
Lowther Street, Whitehaven, Cumbria

Located in a set of rum warehouses dating to , this museum

includes exhibits on production, smuggling, a reconstructed boil-
ing room and distillery, and so on.
www.rumstory.co.uk.

Martinique
Musée de la Canne,
Point Vatable, Trois-Islets.

Though the St James distillery museum is larger and more famous,

this little museum is worth a visit if you are on the island.


 Acknowledgements

I am indebted to many people for their assistance with this book,

and can’t name them all because I am already so far over my agreed-
upon word count that my editor will be cutting this manuscript
with a machete. I must thank the following major contributors:
nautical historian Simon Spalding for help with maritime lore,
American colonial history and sea shanties; Voodoo scholar Gerry
Gandolfo; Charles Perry for odd details and general encourage-
ment; Joe and Gail Touch for assistance with Portuguese transla-
tions and rum lore; Chulatip Nitibhon for help resolving Southeast
Asian rum history; Marshall Sheetz of the Colonial Williams-
burg Foundation and Steve Bashore, Manager of the Gristmill and
Distillery at Mount Vernon, for their expertise on measurements;
editor Andy Smith for patience and guidance; Wolf Foss for drink -
ing any concoction I made and honestly critiquing the result, and
my beloved wife Jace Foss for putting up with over a year of rum
drinks and strange kitchen experiments.
To all the rest of you who helped me refine this, tasted arcane
recipes and generally encouraged me, my deepest thanks. Any errors
in this manuscript are my own fault, because I had wonderful and
willing help.


 Photo Acknowledgements

The author and the publishers wish to express their thanks to the
below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to
reproduce it:

Phoebe Beach, used by permission, with thanks to Mutual Pub-

lishing: p. ; Biodiversity Heritage Library: p. ; British Library,
London: pp. , , , , ; © The Trustees of the British
Museum, London: p. ; David Croy’s Advertising Archive: p. ;
www.finestandrarest.com, used by permission: pp. , , ;
photo by Richard Foss: pp. , , , , ; Photo by W. L.
Foss: p. ; FotoLibra: p.  (Martin Hendry); Courtesy of Galleries
L’Affichiste, Montreal: p. ; Grindon Collection, Manchester
Museum Herbarium: pp. , ; Istockphoto: p.  (Jaime Villalta);
Cachaça Leblon: p. ; Library of Congress, Washington, : pp.
, , , , , ;  National Library of Medicine, Bethesda,
Maryland: p. ; Princeton University Library: p. ; Proximo
Spirits, used by permission: pp. , , , ; Rex Features:
p.  (Isifa Image Service sro); Starr African Rum: p. ; State
Library of New South Wales: p. ; State Library of Queensland:
pp. , ; Victoria and Albert Museum, London: p. ; Vintage
Scans Creative Commons: p. ; Werner Forman Archive: p. 
(Formerly Philip Goldman Collection. Location ).


 Index

italic numbers refer to illustrations; bold to recipes

aguardiente  voodoo religion of

alembic still –,  see Quimbanda
American Indians see Native see also cachaça
Americans Burton, Sir Richard Francis
American Revolution – –
arrack –, , 
Austen, Jane –,  cachaça , , –, –, ,
Australia , –, 
floating distillery in  Cachaça Rebellion –
Rum Corps Rebellion in chiew –
– cocktails, origins of , ,
Austria – –, 
see also grog, punch
Bacardi & Co. , , ,  Colombia
Barbados , , ,  rum dessert from 
barrel ageing –, , ,  rum ritual of 
bay rum ,  Colonial America –, 
beet sugar , ,  distilling in –
Blackbeard  rum drinks of , , ‒
Bligh, Captain William –,  Cuba , , –, , , ,
Brazil , 
cocktails from –
sugar cultivation in – Deacon Giles Distillery 
suppression of distilling in Demerara see Guyana
, –,  distilling , 

 economics of –, ,  –
history of – Mauritius , , 
technology of , –, , Maya religion 
, , , , ,  Mekhong whiskey 
Don the Beachcomber molasses –, 
(Ernest Gantt) –,  cooking with 
smuggling of , –
egg nog ,  Moose Milk see egg nog
Morewood, Samuel , ,
Franklin, Benjamin  , 
French Caribbean –, , 
Native Americans –
grog –,  naval rum rations , –,
gueldive (French slang for rum) , , 
,  Nelson, Admiral Horatio
Guyana –,  (‘Nelson’s Blood’) 
New England rum –, , 
Haiti , , – rum drinks of , 
Hawaii – Newfoundland Screech 
hot toddies , , – Nicaragua 

India –, , , ,  Philippines 

Indians see Native Americans piracy , , –, , 
inlander rum , – poetry mentioning rum ,
, 
jagertee – Portuguese colonies see Brazil
Jamaica , , –, , , , Prohibition () –
, –,  religious roots of –, 
Josselyn, Dr John –,  punch , , , –, ,
‒
kill-devil (keelduivel) 
Quimbanda cult , –
Louisiana –, , 
Réunion Island 
Madagascar ,  rhum agricole 
Martinique , ,  rompope –
Massachusetts, distilling in rum

 ageing of –,  smuggling
as currency –, – th century –
colours of  Confederate 
cooking with –,  early Caribbean , –,
earliest –,  –
laws regulating quality  song lyrics, , –, –, 
laws against slaves drinking sorghum, rum from , 
,  Spanish colonies , –, 
magical powers attributed spiced rum –
to , –  Walrus , 
medicinal uses of –, , sugar
–,  earliest cultivation of
military issue of –,  –
nautical slang regarding , New World cultivation of
– –, 
styles of , –,  saccharum plant , , 
Rum Baba  sugar beet , 
Rum Balls  swizzle 
rumbullion –
Rum Cake , , ‒ Temperance movement ()
‘Rum and Coca Cola’ (song)  –
rum punch see punch song lyrics of –
‘Rum, Romanism, and rebel- Thailand , , 
lion’  tiki bars –
rum runners , ,  Trader Vic’s 
see also smuggling
rum sauce –, ‒ Uganda 
rum shrub , ‒
Virgin Islands () 
Santería – voodoo –, 
sea chanteys (shanties) , –
slavery , , , , , , Washington, George , –,
–, , ,  
in the French Caribbean  Weak Diversion (drink) 
rum traded for slaves , West Indian, The (play) 
,  whisky, rums referred to as ,
Smith, Adam  –
