Rum Historian by Marco Pierini
A TALE OF RUM 12. PANNING FOR GOLD
We have finally reached the end of this series of articles which I chose to call “A Tale of Rum” to underline its narrative character. In the first article, in the January issue, I wrote that after years of research, and having witnessed the birth and growth of a full-fledged World of Rum in the same years, I decided that the time had now come to briefly summarize all that we know up to this point. So, in the successive articles you did not find new research, new sources and new discoveries, nor true scholarly history. I simply tried to tell the story of rum, from its obscure beginning to its lasting success. I hope I managed to do that.
Having got to the end, now I would like to tell you something about the “backstage”, the behind-the scene work of your rum historian, with the problems I have faced and the choices I have made. With two simple, but necessary caveats. Firstly, I use the general word rum for all kinds of spirit made from the fermentation and then distillation of the products of sugar cane. Secondly, my focus is not its “invention”, but its commercial, large scale, production and consumption. Some of the things you’ll read in this article I have already published, both in GOT RUM? and elsewhere, but often repetita juvant (“repeating does good”), as my wise Roman ancestors used to say.
“To use the language of Marc Bloch, the sources in metropolitan archives tend to be ‘intentional’ or ‘narrative’ sources, written to influence someone’s understanding of events. The sources on the island, by contrast, are more often what Bloch called ‘witnesses in spite of themselves,’ sources constructed not to shape understanding but for some other purpose…” (R.R. Menard)
The reliability of sources is of paramount importance in historical scholarship, but it is often neglected in the World of Rum. Often in a book or article, the author makes a statement (or quotes a document, a date, etc.) without explaining clearly what the source of the information is; sometimes he does not quote any sources at all, at other times he quotes not clearly identified documents. Then, someone else in their turn quotes him as a source and upholds the information (or quotation, date, etc.). Soon the statement, and the story based on it, bounces off from a book into another book, then into an article, then from the article to websites, finally from websites to festivals, and then the other way round. For the sheer fact of its diffusion, it acquires undeserved prestige and authority. Actually, if the sources are not reliable, the statement (or quotation, date, etc…) cannot be accepted and the story based on it is like a building without foundations. By contrast, the first problem of the historian, even more so of the rum historian, is to find reliable sources.
Simplifying a bit, the fundamental sources at our disposal are of two kinds: texts written during the historical period which is the object of our research, or material evidence (works of art, archaeological finds etc…). Let’s leave aside the latter, scanty and little known, and let’s focus instead on the written sources, more easily available and better known.
Great part of my research is dedicated to the origins of rum, an endlessly fascinating theme for me. And, in order to get to the bottom of it, I had to study the origins of alcoholic distillation in general, perhaps an even more fascinating subject, and still little known. My readers will have realised that all my studies centre on the history of rum and of alcoholic distillation IN THE WEST, while I have never dealt with what happened in the East. Yet, I am well aware of the fact that also the East played an important role in this history, and that there would be so much to find out, particularly in India and in China. The problem is, I am not competent enough to undertake such a quest. I’ll try to make myself clear.
As we see in many old films, the gold miners in the Old West sifted through a great deal of water, pebbles, and sand in the hopes that, every now and then, a small, precious nugget would appear, nugget which was often recognizable only to the well-trained miners’ eye. Well, researching the origins of rum and of alcoholic distillation is a similar process. It requires examining many texts that speak about something else, because for those who wrote and read those texts then, rum was not important. For example, many 1600s’ accounts of voyages to America detail the history of the Colonies, the hard life of the settlers, the plant and animal life, the economic resources, etc. (with significant space devoted to the precious sugar), while they give just a few absent-minded nods to that new, unpleasant, but strong spirit made from sugarcane. You often have to read, or at least surf hundreds of pages in order to unearth, if you are lucky, the precious nuggets, that is, those few lines that can shed light on the production and consumption of rum.
For this search to be useful, two things are necessary, which are often neglected by enthusiasts and popularisers in the World of Rum.
First, it is necessary to know the historical context in which those texts were written. For example, only if you know something about the history of France and of its rivalry with England is it possible to comprehend the reasons for the decline of French rum production at the end of 1600. I know the History of the Mediterranean and Atlantic World fairly well, but I know almost nothing about China and India. Of course, there are many valuable works of general History of China and India that can be read and are probably enough to understand the historical context, but here we stumble upon the other, insurmountable problem: the knowledge of the language.
Second, in order to do serious research on these themes it is necessary to read the texts in the original language. Firstly, because many ancient texts are only available in this way, and secondly because if a text is translated, we can’t trust the interpretation of a translator who isn’t interested in what we are on the lookout for. Translators are usually very good at their job, but they lack specific knowledge and interest in the technicalities of distillation. Here is just one example. Some years ago in the course of my research on the Origin of Rum I personally found the “smoking gun”, that is the sure evidence that in Brazil rum was commonly produced at least in the first decades of the 1600s, before the Caribbean. I reached the conclusion after reading the “Historia Naturalis Brasiliae” (Natural History of Brazil) published in Latin in 1648. In this book, we find that from sugarcane juice they made a vinum adustum (burnt wine) and I understood that it was a spirit made from sugar cane, meaning rum (see the August 2015 issue). And this is of paramount importance, because it is one of the oldest reliable sources which provide incontrovertible evidence of the existence of the new beverage. How did I get there? My Latin, unfortunately, is poor, but luckily sufficient to realize that a few pages of the large book were important; not good enough, though, to fully understand their meaning. Therefore, I asked a friend with an excellent knowledge of Latin to translate those pages for me. She did so quite well, but she was dissatisfied and full of doubts, because she did not really comprehend what she was translating. She has no knowledge of distillation, so she understood the single words, but they didn’t mesh as a whole, they didn’t turn into the description of something coherent. She did not realize that what she was translating was the description of a process of fermentation and distillation of sugarcane juice resulting in the production of a strong alcoholic beverage, our rum.
And this applies to any translator. What we now call rum (and alcohol) has had many names, often difficult to understand: eau-de-vie de canne, tafia, gerebita, rom, aguardiente de caña, chinguirito, etc. We cannot demand that the translator of a text which, I’ll say that again, deals with something else, be able to discern the small, precious nugget among the sand, the pebbles and water. My native tongue is Italian, I can read Spanish and English proficiently, and also French and Portuguese even though with greater difficulty. Finally, I know enough Latin to understand whether a text is relevant to my research and, as in this case, ask for assistance with the translation. But I don’t know any Asian languages, and this is sufficient to prevent me from doing any serious research on the origins of rum in the East.
Another example. There is quite a different story circulating in the World of Rum about the origins of rum. It usually begins in 1532, when the Portuguese started to cultivate sugar cane in Brazil. Some say that the distillation of sugar cane products began almost immediately, others few decades later. Some add that the Portuguese learned distillation from the Arabs, others stress that in contemporary documents the word “cagaza” or something like that, can be found. Therefore, the origins of rum would appear to be almost a hundred years earlier than I indicated. But in order to predate the origins of rum back to round 1550, we need reliable sources proving the early distillation of sugar cane products. No one, as far as I know, quotes archaeological sources and the references to contemporary written texts are vague. Moreover, documents written in the Portuguese language of the XVI Century are not easy to understand, because, like English, Portuguese has changed greatly over these 500 years and the meaning of the words is not always clear to us. Actually, we find the word cachazo or similar in many documents of the XVI century, but during most of the colonial period, the word cachaça was commonly used for the foam of the cauldrons where sugar cane juice boiled, and not for the spirit.
And yet … Historic research, like any scientific research, is a work in progress, always prepared to take into consideration new facts and theories. Some years ago, I began my collaboration with this magazine with a series of articles titled “The Origins of Rum: A Quest” (See the first articles of that series in the August 2013 issue) and I revisited the subject in “On the Quest Again” (See the June 2015 issue). At that time I dismissed this theory without any doubts, and I published this opinion also in my first book “American Rum” published in 2017. The reasons for this opinion were what I have said above, but also my incorrect knowledge of the context. I was sure then – like all the authors I knew - that the commercial production of Spirits was not common in Europe before the second half of 1500s, and so it was deeply unlikely that in Brazil they produced a new kind of Spirit, Rum, earlier, even though I already knew that the foam was often used as raw material to make rum. But now, after my research on the origins of alcoholic distillation, which I wrote about in the series “The Origins of Alcoholic Distillation in the West: a New Quest” (see GOT RUM ? from February to October, 2018) and in my second book “French Rum” 2020, the paradigm has changed. Now we know for sure that the commercial production and consumption of Spirits in Europe dated back to more than a century before, at least the beginning of the 1400s. Therefore, now the theory of an early rum making in Brazil round 1550 is not unlikely any more.
In the 1500s, they already had the technical expertise, the instruments and the raw material to be able to produce rum. But there is no evidence as yet. Maybe in the future someone will discover new, trustworthy, sources about this early rum production. To be clear, I think this is probable: I guess that Brazilian archives hold many documents of the 1500s which have not yet been studied as they deserve. Probably, by poring on ships’ manifests, wills, plantation inventories and accounting books, we could find new, interesting information about the origin of Rum. But until then we have to reiterate that, as far as we know, the earliest commercial production of Rum took place in Brazil only at the beginnings of the 1600s.
Well, I think that’s enough. See you next month with new voyages into the History of Rum.
Marco Pierini
