King Charles I
Mr. Marco Pierini from Tuscany, Italy has had a life long passion for history and in recent years discovered rum and fell in love with it. He is now "Got Rum?" magazine's Rum Historian.
THE ORIGIN OF RUM - A QUEST PART ONE: RICHARD LIGON’S JOURNEY
London, 4th January 1642. King Charles I is incensed. For years now Parliament has refused to obey him. Not only that, it defies him, tries to limit his power, attacks his ministers and stirs public opinion. The King has tried to bribe the most prestigious Member of Parliament, John Pym, with money and honors, but to no avail. Eventually he decides to use force: his soldiers break into the House of Commons in session to arrest Pym and 4 other eminent Members of Parliament. It’s an illegal, unprecedented act. But the armed assault fails. The 5 Members, forewarned, manage to escape through a small door opening onto the Thames, where a boat takes them to safety. The following days all of London is in uproar. The King leaves the city. Parliament mobilizes an Army. A long, bloody Civil War breaks out. Charles I will lose the Crown, and his head. On 30th January 1649, after being tried for treason and sentenced to death, the first such trial in the history of Europe and perhaps of the world, he is beheaded.
Very interesting, you’ll say. A bit of culture won’t do any harm, but what does this have to do with rum? It does, and a lot. In 1647 the King and his supporters are losing the war. Richard Ligon, a cavalier, a Royalist, ruined by the war, leaves England and sails to the Island of Barbados, an English colony in the Caribbean, to seek his fortune. He will spend 3 years there. Back to England, he will write a book on his journey: “A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados”.
This book is (possibly) the first true evidence of the existence of rum, even though it was not called rum yet: “The drink of the Island, which is made of the skimmings of the Coppers, that boil the Sugar, which they call Kill-Devil.”
Kill-Devil is therefore the first known name under which rum enters History.
“Infinitely strong, but not very pleasant in taste; it is common, and therefore the less esteemed […] The people drink much of it, indeed too much; for it of ten lays them asleep on the ground, and that is accounted a very unwholesome lodging. […] ” Ligon goes on to say that this drink “ … has the virtue to cure and refresh the poor Negroes whom we ought to have a special care of, by the labor of whose hands our profit is brought in.”
“It is helpful to our Christian Servants too; for, when their spirits are exhausted, by their hard labor, and sweating in the Sun, ten hours every day, they find their stomach debilitated, and much weakened in their vigor every way, a dram or two of this Spirit, is a great comfort and refreshing”.
According to Ligon, Kill-Devil was obtained from skimmings and not from molasses; that is, from the floating scum left over after the boiling of sugar cane juice which was skimmed from the coppers. Apparently, at the time molasses was boiled again to produce more sugar, of lower quality.
Later on in the book, Ligon tells about the first victim of rum: a slave brought a lighted candle too close to a jar of rum which caught f ire, killing him. He also says that all important sugar plantations had their own distillery and some skilled workers and that rum represented a relevant integration of the planters’ income, who, as well as using it for the consumption of their black slaves and white servants, sold it on the island and abroad.
Richard Ligon is a fascinating figure and his is a great book – a direct testimony on the first steps towards that economic system based on sugar, rum and slavery which would shape the history of the West and of the whole world. We will speak again about this, suffice it to say now that as early as 1647 in Barbados rum was currently produced, consumed and sold. It was a very strong, not pleasant-tasting spirit. It was cheap and was drunk in great quantities by the lower classes. It could be harmful, but at the same time it was thought to have healing qualities too. And it was already economically relevant. Not bad for a new product, which seemingly had been invented only a few years before.
The Rum Historian: My name is Marco Pierini, I was born 59 years ago in a small town in Tuscany (Italy) where I still live. A long time ago I got a degree in Philosophy in Florence, Italy and I studied Political Science in Madrid, Spain. But my real passion has always been History. Through History I have always tried to understand the world and humans. Life brought me to work in tourism, event organization and vocational training. I own and run a small tourist business in my seaside town. A few years ago I discovered rum and it was love at first sight. Now,with my young business partner Francesco Rufini, I run a bar on the beach, La casa del Rum (The House of Rum) and we distribute Premium Rums across Tuscany.
Most importantly, I have returned back to my initial passion: History. Only this time, it involves the History of Rum. Because rum is not only a great spirit, it’s produced in scores of countries, by thousands of companies, with an extraordinary variety of production processes, of flavours and spices. It has a terrible and fascinating history, made of slaves and pirates, imperial fleets and revolutions and a long etcetera. And it has a complicated, interesting present too, made of political and commercial wars, of big multinationals that dominate the market, but also of many small and medium-sized enterprises that resist trivialization. It is a world which deserves to be known well so that it can be appreciated as it deserves.
All this I try to cover in my Italian blog on Rum: www.ilsecolodel rum.it