A Tale of Rum 2. Brazil

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Rum In History

                                                   A TALE OF RUM

                                                        2. BRAZIL

In the first article of this new series published in January, we have seen that in the 1400s, before the discovery of America, Europeans were familiar with spirits. Among these spirits was RUM, too? No, I don’t think so. Of course, they were able to make it. They had been making sugar for some centuries, Venice being one of the oldest centers of this industry, so they had at their disposal molasses [for the sake of simplicity, with the word molasses I mean all the by-products of sugar making]. So had nobody ever thought of starting commercial production of a new Spirit? Apparently not, or at least I did not find anything. I know that on the Internet a lot of different information is circulating but without reliable sources.

Perhaps, and I repeat perhaps, the reason for this lack of initiative in fermenting and distilling molasses could be that the countries where the sugar-making industry first developed, Italy and Spain, were also great producers of wine. At that time, most wines were of low, often even very low quality, and anyway, even the best wines deteriorated quickly. Usually, wines were drunk young before they turned sour and with the arrival of the new wines on the market, the previous year’s vintage lost its value. So, distillers had an easily available, abundant, and cheap raw material, wine, that they knew well and that produced appreciated spirits. So why should they risk gambling with their time and money for the sake of molasses? 

Later, in the course of the 1400s, the Portuguese and the Spaniards discovered and settled in the Atlantic Islands, among them Madeira and the Canary Islands, where they set up large sugarcane plantations, but also in this case I have found nothing reliable about RUM. Therefore, it can be stated for now that before the discovery of America, Europeans did not know RUM. 

Christopher Columbus was a seasoned merchant in the sugar trade and in his second voyage (1494) he is also said to have planted sugarcane in Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti) even though its actual cultivation started some years later. Anyway, by 1527 there were 25 mills functioning at full capacity on the island. According to contemporary witnesses, the slaves drank a sort of cane wine, which is a rough beverage made by fermenting molasses, but nobody tells us anything about distillation and Spirits. Meanwhile, Hernán Cortés planted sugarcane on the Mainland, in New Spain (present-day Mexico) where the production of sugar developed quickly. In Hispaniola, the production of sugar collapsed at the end of the 1500s, while in New Spain it continued to grow, even if only for local consumption, but for a century no sugarcane spirit is mentioned.  It’s actually a bit strange: a century is a long period of time. People loved drinking alcohol, and the wine and brandy imported from Spain were both scarce and expensive. In addition, distillation technology was well known; for example, in 1621 a source describes the current consumption of Mezcal, a spirit made by distilling a local, traditional fermented beverage, the Pulque. It’s hard to think that nobody thought of fermenting and then distilling molasses. Yet, as a matter of fact, I have found no evidence, and the very lack of easily available sources tells us that in the 1500s no noteworthy commercial production existed. And maybe this also explains why only in the 1600s the Spanish Crown enacted a law prohibiting the making of sugarcane spirit, to defend the metropolitan wine and brandy trade from its competition. Actually, the first known prohibition of RUM in Spanish America is also the first undoubted evidence of its very existence: in 1631 the Viceroy of New Spain, Marchese de Cerralvo, prohibited the manufacture and consumption of aguardiente de caña (cane spirit), which is RUM. The Viceroy’s decision was justified by the alleged danger of RUM for consumers’ health; anyway, if it had to be forbidden, this means that it was already quite widespread. In New Spain, clandestine RUM making went on despite the prohibition. But it (also called Chinguirito) was produced in limited quantities, its quality being very bad, and intended only for local consumption, without entering the Atlantic market. Maybe further and more in-depth research could discover that a sort of sugarcane spirit was manufactured for the first time in Hispaniola or in New Spain. It is possible, but even in this case, it would be a sterile birth, so to speak, without growth and without a future, a dead end in early RUM history. To sum up, it was not from Spanish America that RUM started its triumphal march into the world.  

Meanwhile, further South the Portuguese discovered Brazil. Vasco da Gama reached India and returned to Portugal in 1498, paving the way for the rich trade with the East by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Today it is not easy for us to fully understand the difficulties of sailing. Portuguese ships headed for India were not able to follow the shorter route, that is to go down the African coasts till the Cape of Good Hope and enter the Indian Ocean, due to contrary currents and winds. Instead, the ships had to sail to the South-West, deep in the Atlantic until they met the prevailing winds and with them, they were able to pass the Cape. In the second voyage to India, in 1500, the fleet commanded by Pedro Alvares Cabral sailed South-West so much till unintentionally reaching the coast of Brazil. A ship was dispatched back to Lisbon to inform the Crown, and the remainder of the fleet proceeded on the Cape route toward India. Some historians have suggested instead that the Portuguese, and maybe also the French, had discovered Brazil a few years earlier, but it doesn’t change much; in any case, in the first decades, the new colony was mostly a port of call for the ships en route to India. Then, at the latest in the 1530s, sugarcane cultivation was introduced with great success: towards the end of the 1500s Brazilian sugar dominated the European market.

Before the encounter/clash with the Portuguese, Brazilian indios produced and drank some kinds of fermented beverages, but not spirits. Now, a lot of sugar means also a lot of molasses. Molasses easily ferment in the warm and humid tropical climate, so a sort of cane wine, abundant and cheap, started to be largely drunk by slaves and poor whites. Then, someone brought to Brazil a still from Europe and began to distill just that cane wine, thus inventing RUM. Who? We don’t know. When? We don’t know exactly, but in the 1620s RUM commercial production was already common. So, RUM was born by the marriage between European distilling technology and Brazilian abundant, cheap molasses.

According to the great French historian Marc Bloch, the sources in European metropolitan archives tend to be “intentional” or “narrative” sources, written to influence someone’s understanding of events. The sources on the colonies, by contrast, are more often “witnesses in spite of themselves”, that is sources focused not to shape understanding but for some simple, practical purposes. So, the first concrete reference to the existence of stills in Brazil comes from a 1611 Sao Paulo Inventory and Will. Then, according to the accounting books of a Brazilian sugar plantation, in the 1620s RUM was regularly distributed to the slaves. Later, in 1636, the governor-general of Brazil, Pedro da Silva, released a provision prohibiting sugarcane aguardente (burning water, that is RUM). This is a very interesting document because, among other things, it shows that RUM was already commonplace, because “many stills” existed, and numerous people benefited from the sale of it.  Then, the Dutch arrived. In 1624 the Dutch West India Company occupied the north-east coastal region of Pernambuco. The Company made great investments, bringing from Holland men, capital, technical skills and equipment. They held it till 1654 when they were finally driven out by the Portuguese. The Dutch had gone to Brazil mainly to take hold of its precious sugar, but with the sugar they discovered RUM too. We have an indisputable source in “Historia Naturalis Brasiliae” (Natural History of Brazil), a book published (in Latin) in 1648 that contains, as far as I know, the first ever description of a sugarcane spirit in the West. It was made by fermenting and distilling the juice of sugarcane and they called it Vinum Adustum (burnt wine). Last, but not least, the Dutch transmitted that precious skill to the English settlers of Barbados, as we shall see in the next article. 

In Brazil, unlike what happened in Spanish America, commercial manufacturing and consumption of the new Spirit developed, spread beyond local borders and actually started the journey that has brought RUM to us, to the present. The Portuguese had a stronger trade vocation than the Spaniards.  Oversimplifying, the Portuguese sailed across the oceans to discover new and lucrative commercial routes, the Spaniards to discover and conquer new lands. Maybe it could be stated that the former saw themselves mainly as Navegadores (sailors), the latter as Conquistadores (conquerors). In any case, Brazilian planters devoted a great deal of attention to the new spirit. Soon it entered the trade records of the plantations, was regularly distributed to the slaves, and sold to the natives and poor whites. Moreover, in the late 1640s, Brazilian slavers began to use the new cane spirit (called Gerebita) to buy slaves at Luanda (in present-day Angola). So, RUM began to replace the wine until then used by the Portuguese slavers, paving the way later for Dutch, British and American slavers. The new spirit was known also by the French that on several occasions tried to settle in Brazil and that, after being repulsed, in the 1620s occupied part of Saint-Christophe, present-day Saint Kitts, where almost immediately started to manufacture it. Therefore, we can state that, as far as we presently know, the voyage of RUM started in Brazil at the beginning of the 1600s; or in other words, Brazil is the real birthplace of RUM.

And yet, the interval between the 1530s and the 1600s is a very long time. During these more or less 70 years of established sugar making, didn’t anybody think of importing a still and trying to distill cane wine? The local demand for alcohol was strong, as in every frontier-like settlement, and the wine and brandy imported from Portugal were both scarce and expensive. The problem is that the hypothesis of an earlier origin of RUM needs reliable sources: archeological finds (stills) or written texts of the time. I do not know any archeological sources and the references to contemporary written texts are vague. I know that we find the word cachazo or similar in many documents of the 1500s, but during most of the colonial period, the word cachaça was commonly used for the foam of the cauldrons where sugar cane juice boiled, not for the spirit.

Some years ago, I dismissed this hypothesis without any doubts. I thought – like all the authors I knew - that commercial production of spirits was not common in Europe before the second half of 1500s. Hence, it was deeply unlikely that in the far, new, colony of Brazil, in the same years, they were already able to invent and manufacture a new kind of Spirit. But now the historic paradigm has changed. In these years of research, I have discovered without any possible doubts that the commercial production and consumption of spirits in Europe began before what was usually thought, at least at the beginning of the 1400s, a century before the colonization of Brazil. Therefore the hypothesis of some sort of early RUM making in Brazil in the 1500s is not unlikely anymore. Moreover, until now, we have considered the transmission of distillation technology and skills from Europe to Brazil via the Western Route. But we must also consider the possibility of a different Eastern Route. Let’s see. Alcoholic distillation and commercial production of spirits is probably a Western invention, as I described in the previous article, but distillation techniques soon arrived in the East, too. And as we know that in the East sugarcane cultivation and sugar making had a long history, couldn’t they have distilled RUM before it was done in Brazil?  It is possible, I dare to say even probable. Then, the Portuguese arrived in India in 1498 and only a few years later trade between Portugal and the East was already widespread. For several decades the fundamental importance of Brazil was as a stopover for the ships sailing to and from the East. The Portuguese could thus have discovered a spirit made from sugar cane in the East, learned the technique, and then used it in Brazil. It’s possible, but I haven’t found any proof. I guess that Brazilian archives hold many written, not yet studied, documents of the 1500s. I think that by pouring on ships’ manifests, wills, plantation inventories and accounting books, we could find new, interesting information about the origin of RUM, but all this is beyond my own strength. 

Therefore, for now, I must insist that RUM was born in Brazil at the beginning of the 1600s and from Brazil it moved to conquer the world.

See you next month.

Marco Pierini