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Early Pub Photo
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Marco Pierini
Marco Pierini, Rum Historian
A JOURNEY TO BARBADOS 3 – WHY RUM?
As we know, “The Five Ws” are questions whose answers are considered basic in information gathering. They are often mentioned in journalism, research etc. and they constitute a formula for getting the complete story on a subject. According to the principle of the Five W's, a report can only be considered complete if it answers these questions: Who is it about? ; What happened?; Where did it take place?; When did it take place?; Why did it happen?
To the first 4 questions we have already given an answer : the Dutch star ted the commercial production of rum on a large scale, in the North East of Brazil, at the beginning of the XVII century.
But still there is no answer to the fifth question, why?
Precisely, why? Why did they go to great pains to produce the new beverage? To find the answer, we have to take a step back and, in order to simplify such a complex point, we have to narrow our scope and focus on English colonists in the Americas.
In the England they came from, the consumption of wine and beer was widespread and extremely large. The medical culture of the time saw water with suspicion. It was considered a hostile element from which to keep away as much as possible. Even washing oneself was advised against. Especially in the cities, drinking water was often filthy and polluted, so it was really dangerous.
To drink, to quench one’s thirst, it was better to turn to wine. And wine had always been imported in great quantities from France and Spain. More recently, they had started to import brandy too.
The first colonists sailed to the Americas full of dreams and hopes, but what they found was very different from what they had expected. Life conditions were appalling. The environment was alien and hostile. New, terrible diseases scourged the settlements. Hurricanes battered men and their possessions. There was a permanent state of war against the Spanish and the French, and pirates were a constant threat. Poor white people had to work very hard, while the élite, the plantation owners, feared their rebellion. There were few white women.
Finally, all white people lived in fear of a slave rebellion.
In order to soldier on, in order not to go crazy, the colonists wanted to drink: drink hard, get intoxicated, escape from reality for a while. In alcoholic beverages they didn’t look for the pleasure of taste, but for the inebriation that only alcohol can give.
From the very beginning they started to import wine and then brandy. But transport costs were high, so the imported beverages were expensive, only the rich planters could afford them.
Therefore, they also applied themselves to producing alcoholic beverages from the fermentation of local plants, such as cassava, potatoes, agave and others; they even tried to grow grapevine, with mixed success. But local production was low-alcohol and, anyway, insufficient.
When someone had the idea, and the know-how, of distilling the beverage which for a long time had been obtained from the fermentation of the by-products of sugar processing, it was an immediate boom. The new drink could be produced in great quantity, it was cheap and very strong. It had everything the colonists wanted. Sure, it did not taste very good, indeed at the beginning it was really bad, but it guaranteed inebriation cheaply and that was all that mattered. All the documents of the period and the few data we have tell us that the consumption of alcohol, and of rum in particular, was enormous. Many colonists must have lived in a state of permanent inebriation.
Then, when sugar made the planters rich, they imported the best wines and the best brandies, but they were a minority. The vast majority of the plantation workers, the sailors, the soldiers and the slaves certainly could not afford imported beverages. Rum, on the contrary, was affordable, and in great quantity. Rum, therefore, became their drink, their cheap Stairway to Heaven.