A Tale of Rum 3. St. Christophe

                                            A TALE OF RUM

                                    3. SAINT CHRISTOPHE   

As I told in a previous series of articles - AND IF IT WERE THE FRENCH CARIBBEAN THE FIRST CRADLE OF RUM? -  published in 2018, France began late its colonial expansion. 

Only in 1626, on direct instigation by the State in the person of Cardinal Richelieu, was the Company of Saint-Christophe founded to promote the colonization of Saint-Christophe (present-day St. Kitts) and other Caribbean islands. The Company got from the Government a monopoly over trade, land ownership, and various rights over the settlers. Like the contemporary English settlers, the French too were looking out for land to grow the tropical products so in demand all over Europe. In the beginning, they grew tobacco and then they tried with other staples, among which was sugarcane.

The French settlers drank a lot and wine and brandy were among the most sought-after goods. The Company endeavored to get sufficient quantities through, but due to the lack of a strong merchant navy it failed and wine and brandy legally imported from France were both scarce and very expensive. The settlers resorted to contraband, buying from the omnipresent Dutch, but the prices stayed high. The French were expert distillers, they had been distilling wine to make brandy for centuries, and soon someone tried producing in loco something to drink which was strong, plentiful, and cheap. 

On 13 August 1639, a Jean Faguet requested the Company to grant him an exclusive license to make spirits on the islands of Martinique and Saint-Christophe for six years, both from wine and “any other fruit or legumes that he will be able to grow or find in the islands”. In return, he pledged to pay 20 pounds of tobacco for each cask of water of life produced, on condition that no-one was allowed to distill spirits on the islands. The Company accepted the request. 

What kind of spirits did Faguet produce? Definitely, he used cheap local-growing plants, and not imported and expensive wine. It is possible and even almost certain that he made a spirit from sugar cane, but we cannot be completely sure. The natives made various fermented beverages, the most widespread ones were Masbi, made from sweet potatoes and Oüicou, made from cassava and the settlers drank them for want of anything better. Therefore, perhaps, Faguet distilled these beverages.

In a book written by Jacques Bouton and published in France in 1640, we find that the slaves “are fond of a strong spirit that they call stomach burner”. What was this spirit drunk by the slaves? We don’t know for sure, but definitely, it must have been a cheap product, not at all as expensive as imported brandy.

The Capuchin friar Hyacinthe de Caen came to Saint-Christophe in 1633 with a brother friar following Pierre d’Esnambuc, the founder of the colony, and participated in the early colonization of Martinique in 1635. He later met the Dominican missionary Raymond Breton, the great anthropologist, and ethnologist, author of the first Caribbean-French dictionary. The Capucins clashed with the local authorities in Saint-Christophe, and he was arrested and expelled from the island in 1646. He went ashore in Guadeloupe with another friar, and nothing further was heard of them. In 1641, de Caen wrote his “Relation of the islands of Saint-Christophe, Guadeloupe and Martinique …” which was not published until the year 1932. In this work, we read that sugar cane cultivation and sugar making was already widespread and also that the colonists distilled spirits. 

In the early years of French colonization, the number of colonists and African slaves was limited, while the indigenous population was numerous; probably the best way to get strong drinks quickly and cheaply would have been to distill ouïcou and other fermented beverages traditionally made by indigenous peoples. In the following years the number of French colonists, and especially the number of slaves, grew rapidly, while the indigenous population continued to drop as an effect of wars, diseases etc. The production of traditional fermented beverages had to decrease together with the indigenous population, just as the demand for strong drinks for the newcomers was growing. Maybe this change spurred the colonists to ferment and distill the abundant and cheap by-products of sugarcane.

Later, the Company decided to start making sugar in their own right in Guadeloupe, where a few settlers had already been growing sugar cane for years. On 7 January 1643, the Company granted a Captain Flament “to make the water of life for a period of three years without prejudice to the public freedom to produce it as it is common, and to ship it from France to the islands.”  The Company granted Captain Flament permission to produce spirits, but not exclusively. Other settlers could continue to produce spirits, as they had been making for some time. 

Capucin Friar Maurile de Saint-Michel published in 1652 a report of his voyage to Saint Christophe and other Caribbean Islands. Actually, our Friar had been very impressed by the number of alcoholic beverages consumed by the colonists in Saint Christophe. He lists them one by one, both the imported ones and the locally-produced ones, among which we find cane spirit: “everybody works hard to get spirits to the island, and that is the lifeblood of this country. Some send it thereof Rosossol (rose oil?); others produce it from sugarcane wine, and I will soon tell you how it is produced; others from Oüicou; others from Masbi.” Here there can be no doubt whatsoever: Maurile de Saint Michel tells us clearly that on Saint-Christophe several types of spirits were regularly produced, among which one made from sugarcane: our RUM. 

Last, but not least, Dominican Friar Jean Baptiste Du Tertre traveled to Guadeloupe in 1640 with two other missionaries during that island’s grueling war with the Indians and remained there until 1647. He is relatively well known among rum history enthusiasts because it is commonly believed that we owe him the first clear and exhaustive description of rum production in the French Caribbean, contained in his much-quoted  “General History of the French inhabited Antilles…”  published in 1667. “Neither the crushed cane nor the scum that is removed from the second and third sugar boiling cauldrons is useless. The scum is reserved in a trough where it is kept to make eau-de-vie, or brandy. The slaves prepare an intoxicating drink from it, and it sells quite well on the islands; … They [the slaves] are not given the water of life to drink, except when they are obliged to do very hard work, or when they are planting tobacco under pouring rain. Water of life has been a bit more common on the islands since sugar started to be produced there, thanks to the secret which has been discovered of making it from the skimming taken from the cauldrons …” (translated by Bernie Mandelblatt in her seminal essay “Atlantic consumption of French Rum and Brandy …”).

Du Tertre clearly tells us that rum has become quite common in the islands since sugar production began and it was cheap enough to be given to slaves as a reward for some, particularly hard or unpleasant work. Du Tertre traveled to the French Caribbean from 1640 to 1647 and he described sugar cane cultivation, sugar production, and rum production as an ordinary part of the life and work of the French settlers, but he got back to the Caribbean again in 1656/57 and published this book only in 1667, ten years after his last voyage and more than twenty years after his first stay there. Therefore we can’t be sure that this description describes his first stay, we can’t use it as a sure, reliable, historic source proving the existence of rum production in the French Caribbean in the 1640s.  Nevertheless, some years ago I discovered with amazement that Du Tertre had previously written a first, shorter, almost forgotten, report on his voyages immediately after his return to France in 1647. This first book circulated in manuscript form for some years among his circles of relations. Only in 1654 did he decide to publish it in print.

In this first book, we find a large and detailed description of the technicalities of sugarcane cultivation and of sugar production. A complex, difficult, little known skill, Du Tertre writes, a veritable industrial secret the French settlers at the beginning found it hard to master; and we find rum too:  “Another great bounty is obtained from this sugarcane; because from it excellent spirit is produced, which is sold at a high price in the country.”

In the Rum World, there is a strong belief, a sort of Barbados Consensus, that is the common, shared, widespread, conviction about the primacy of Barbados in the Origins of Rum. Books, articles, web sites and blogs tell the same old story: Ok, they say, maybe Barbados was not the very birthplace of rum, maybe they did not exactly “invent” it, but for sure it was the cradle of rum, the place where it grew up to adulthood. For only in Barbados did the English settlers start for the first time a real commercial production and massive consumption of rum. The source of this opinion relies mainly on the book of Richard Ligon “A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados” published in 1657. It is a great book indeed, we will deal with it in the next article, but the French sources I have quoted above were published before Ligon’s book. 

Thence, can we deny the Barbados Consensus and declare that the French were the first to commercially produce rum and that the English came in second? No, not exactly. There are other documents on Barbados, less clear, but older than Ligon’s book, and they should be studied thoroughly before making such a statement. Furthermore, in Saint Christophe, there were not only French colonists, but English colonists as well, and this also ought to be studied better. So who came first? I cannot tell precisely, but probably it is not so important: anyway, it would be merely a matter of few years. What I can declare loudly is that the starting of commercial production of rum was both a French and an English enterprise.

To finish this article, allow me a historic digression not strictly linked with rum. The history of the early English colonization of the Americas is by far better known than the simultaneous French colonization. 

Many authors who have published important works on English colonization tend, whether consciously or not, to treat it as a unique phenomenon, something truly and only English. Yet the French and English colonial enterprises were very similar, as were the societies they created in the Caribbean. They even had similar tastes; both, for example, loved pineapple. The two people were both looking for the same thing: tropical products to send to Europe that would allow them to get rich quickly. Some of the colonists did get rich indeed, even very rich, but the majority of them did not, on the contrary, they had very hard lives. They had to deal with an alien and often hostile natural world; they suffered the devastation of hurricanes and earthquakes, and they suffered from horrible new diseases and an oppressive climate. What’s more, they were living in a state of permanent war: the English and the French fought each other, and both fought the Spanish, the pirates, and the Carib. Even during rare times of peace, the rich feared the mass of indentured servants, and all the whites feared a revolt of the increasingly numerous slaves. To escape from this hell on earth, both English and French settlers sought oblivion in alcohol. 

In short, the French colonization of the Americas was very much like the British one. With one important difference: in numbers. French migration was small. Historians estimate a figure of 60,000 to 100,000 French leaving for the Americas from 1500 to 1760. Very few if compared to 746,000 British subjects, 678,000 Spaniards, and even 523,000 from thinly populated Portugal. This low number of settlers has been the structural weakness in the French colonization of the Americas.

Marco Pierini