The Rum Historian title
What's In A Name?
The substance that we now call alcohol was first discovered in 11th century’s Italy; in the Middle Ages, Latin was the common language of cultivated people, and the new, strange and wonderful substance was first called aqua (water), because it was as colorless as water. Later, in the 1200s, when alcohol production spread in Northern Italy, they referred to it as aqua vitae (water of life) or even aqua ardens (burning water). Aqua vitae resulted in the Italian acquavite, the French eau-de-vie, the German aquavit, the Scandinavian akvavit and more, including the Gaelic uisgebeatha, which then became whisky. Aqua ardens resulted in the Spanish aguardiente and the Portuguese aguardente.
Between the 1500s and the 1600s, the Spanish and the Portuguese introduced sugarcane in America, producing great quantities of sugar and also a new, strong alcoholic drink that they called aguardiente de caña and aguardente de cana (sugarcane burning water). Then, depending on different places, periods and languages, came many other names: Chinguirito, Roma, Gerebita, Eau-de-vie de canne, Tafia, Guildive, etc. Even today various distilled beverages made from sugar cane have different names than Rum, the most famous is the Brazilian Cachaça, but there are also the Mexican Paranubes and Charanda and others.
In the second half of the 1600s, also in Barbados and in the other English colonies in the Caribbean, to designate sugarcane spirit they used many names, such as Kill-Devil, Rumbullion, Barbados Water, This Country’s Spirit, etc. Among those, over time the use of the word Rum emerged and it became dominant during the 1700s. And, since in the 1700s Great Britain became the most important producer, consumer and importer of rum in the world, the English word spread in Europe and then all over the world; sometimes with local adaptations, like the Russian and Swedish Rom, other times adopting the English word directly, as in German and Italian.
But where does the word Rum come from? According to Wikipedia, the origin of the word “rum” is unclear. I agree with this opinion and, I’ll tell you straight away, even more after writing this article.
As our readers know, one of my passions as a Rum Historian is the study of the Origin of Rum. Well, I believe that finding out the origin of the word Rum is fascinating in itself, but it can be very useful too in order to understand the origin of the thing Rum. Unfortunately, I am not an etymologist and I have never carried out specific research on the origin of the word. Therefore you won’t find any new discoveries and original hypotheses in this article. More simply, since the hypotheses that are circulating have not convinced me, I have tried to put in order the things I have come across about the name during these years of work on the history of Rum, and while doing so, I have done some thinking. What’s more, in some cases I have been able to verify the sources personally, directly in the texts; therefore they are primary, reliable sources. In other cases, on the other hand, this has not been possible, so I had to rely on secondary, second-hand sources, regarding which I have to trust those who quote them. In the latter cases, however, I have tried to use the oldest sources and the ones which seemed the most authoritative. If any reader should be interested in this subject, you may write to me and I will detail which sources are first-hand and which are second-hand.
According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary online:
RUM
Noun a strong alcoholic drink made from the juice of sugar cane
Adj. [usually before noun] (old-fashioned, BrE, informal) strange SYN odd, peculiar
WORD ORIGIN
noun mid17th cent. Perhaps an abbreviation of obsolete rumbullion, in the same sense.
Let’s clear immediately the field of a hypothesis that reappears every so often, according to which the word comes from the contraction of Saccarum Officinalis, the scientific name for sugar cane. This hypothesis is senseless, for two reasons: first because in the 17th-century texts I have read in which the word Rum begins to appear, the word cane or sugarcane is used, and certainly not the scientific name; and second, the scientific name of sugar cane, with the system of binomial nomenclature, comes, I believe, from the Taxonomy of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus who published the first edition of his “Systema Naturae” (The System of Nature ) only in 1735, many decades after the first use of the word rum.
Therefore, according to the dictionary, rum probably derives from rumbullion, and this the prevailing opinion in the rum world too.
However, as far as I know, the first time that new spirit – the thing, not the name - clearly appears in an English published text, is in the deservedly often quoted “A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados” by Richard Ligon, published in 1657, which chronicles Ligon’s stay in the island between 1647 and 1650.
“We are seldom dry or thirsty, unless we overheat our bodies with extraordinary labor, or drinking strong drinks, as for our English spirits, which we carry over, or French Brandy, or the drink of the Island, which is made of the skimmings of the coppers, that boil the sugar, which they call kill-Devil.”
Why Kill-Devil? Maybe the new liquor was so strong and harsh to kill even the Devil? It would seem that from Kill-devil derived then the French word guildive, used for a long time in the French Caribbean to designate our spirit (even if there are those who maintain that things went the other way round, that is, that Kill-devil is an anglicisation of the original French guildive).
According to F.H.Smith in his seminal “Caribbean Rum”, 2005, “The lack of a common name for a sugarcane-based alcoholic beverage underscores its novelty. The earliest document to specifically use the term rum is a plantation deed recorded in Barbados in 1650, which identified Three Houses estate in St. Philip parish as having ‘four large mastick cisterns for liquor for rum. The name rum originated in the British Caribbean in the seventeenth century and derivated from the English word rumbullion” From the English term Rum, it would seem, originated also the French term Rhum and the Spanish Ron.
For some time our spirit was called both Rumbullion and Rum, later, though, Rumbullion disappeared, replaced by Rum, whereas Kill Devil continued to be used for longer, especially in New England:
“Rum is a spirit extracted from the juice of the sugar-canes, commonly, twice as strong as brandy, call’d Kill-Devil in New England, whither ‘tis sold, at the rate of twelve pounds of sugar per gallon ” (G. Warren “An impartial description of Surinam upon the continent of Guiana …” 1667)
Many texts concern themselves with the derivation of Rum from Rumbullion; the most interesting one seems to me N.D. Davis’ essay The Etymology of the word “Rum“ (Timehri 1885). Let’s read some extracts.
“In the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, is a manuscript entitled ‘A briefe description of the Island of Barbados’. It is undated, but from internal evidence it must have been written about the year 1651. In describing the various drinks in vogue in Barbados, the writer says: ‘The chief fuddling they make in the Island is Rumbullion alias Kill-Divill, and this is made of sugar canes distilled, a hot, hellish, and terrible liquor. In a News’ Letter from Leyden, dated 23rd February, 1652, and published in No 90 of Mercurius Politicus for the week from the 19th to the 26th of February, 1652, there is a report of the latest intelligence from Barbados, which includes the following statement: ‘ So that part by the Brandywine, wherewith we have furnish him, the spirits of Rombullion”
In an order of the Assizes of Bermudas in 1660 we find “a caske of Rumbullion”. And a little later, “So early, however, as the 3rd of July 1661, the word rum is used in the Orders of the Governor and Council of Jamaica … and, by 1675, not only had the word itself come into use in the Bermudas, but it was even found necessary to pass a Law there on the 23rd of June in that year to prohibit the making of ‘unwholesome liquor called Rum’
”Barbados 1668: “Act to prevent the selling of ‘Brandy and Rum in Tippling houses” near the broad paths and highways”
Regarding the meaning of Rumbullion, Davis writes:
“As regards the word RUMBULLION itself, HALLIWELL, in his Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words gives it as a Devonshire word meaning, A great tumult; and, as many of the settlers in Barbados, at the time when Sugar-making was being established in that Island, came from Devonshire …”
This hypothesis seems likely to Davis and the meaning would derive from the confusion that the excessive consumption of rum caused among the settlers. Davis then continues “the English had by 1600 substituted RUM for Kill-Devil. In enquiring how the new form of appellation came into the language, there seems strong reason for coming to the conclusion that as in the case of the word cab , which has been cut off from its original cabriolet, and of tat from tarpaulin, which was Jack-Tar’s earlier designation, so RUM has been clipped from RUMBULLION.”
Davis adds another hypothesis too. “A simpler theory is that the word ‘rum’, a colloquial term in Elizabethan times for something excellent, was combined with the French word for hot liquid, buillon, thereby giving us a description of a fine, hot drink”. I’m not buying this, because all the sources tell us that rum was a hellish drink, anything but fine; however, the reference to the French word buillon, meaning hot, boiling liquid, is extremely interesting.
According to P. Poiré in the “Dictionnaire des Sciences et leurs applications”, 1890 -1910, though, the word Rum has a completely different origin. It comes – he says - from the Malay word brum meaning liquor. And also in “Cuba. The Legend of Rum” published in 2009 by A.Miller and J.Brown with D.Broom and N. Strangeway, we can read: “According to the nineteenth-century philologist Walter William Skeat, the term is an Anglicised version of the Malay word brum, which is an arrack made from sugarcane juice.” As far as I am aware, this is possible. The commercial production of Spirits is a Western invention, but the distillation techniques arrived also in the East, where sugarcane cultivation and sugar making had a long history and where they soon began to distill spirits from many plants, including rice and sugarcane. Moreover, we know that also the English word Punch, - one of the most popular English beverages often made with Rum - came from the East in the same period.
Last but not least, there is a consensus in the Rum World that the first to appear was the English word Rum and that Rhum is a later French version. Moreover, it is often said that the letter H was added for the first time in the “Encyclopédie”, possibly to ennoble the word, and only later did it come into common use in the French language.
And yet …
John Josselyn was born in Essex, England, in 1608. We know little about him, but surely he was from a well-off family because he had received a good education and he could pay for two expensive voyages to America. He traveled to New England for the first time in 1638, for more than a year. Then he returned there in 1663, for eight years. We ignore the exact purpose of his voyages, but we know that a brother of his was an important planter in the colony. Back in England Josselyn wrote a book, “An Account of Two Voyages to New England”, published in 1674. He was a keen naturalist and observer, particularly interested in medicine and botany and the I is one of our fundamental sources about New England in this early phase of settlement. Josselyn’s is also a handbook, a guide for settlers. In the description of his first voyage, he advises the colonists to take a number of things with them: food, medicines, weapons and various tools and he even quotes their prices. And “One gallon of Aqua vitae”. This is very interesting, Aqua vitae, that is, Water of Life, the first name for distilled spirits in Europe. We don’t know what spirit it was, maybe brandy, anyway it tells us that in 1638 England the consumption of spirits was already common.
But we are here for Rum, and here it is:
“The fourth and twentieth day [September 1639] being Munday, I went aboard the Fellowship of 100 and 70 Tuns a Flemish bottom the master George Luxon of Bittiford in Devonshire, several of my friends came to bid me farewell, among the rest Captain Thomas Wannerton who drank to me a pint of kill-devil alias Rhum at a draught”
According to John McCusker’s classic “The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies 1650-1775”, 1970, West Indians found a market for it in New England as early as 1638 “The reference appears in John Josselin’s … The wealth of detail in which he tells the story suggests that his published version was set down at the time and not remembered, potentially inaccurately, and recited at some later date. What details we can check verify some of the elements of his story. Contemporary sources, for instance, show Wannerton’s action to be entirely in character.”
Let’s read this sentence again: “kill-devil alias Rhum”. First, it is one of the few pieces of evidence we have that kill-devil and Rhum are two different words for the same thing, 9 years before the arrival of Ligon in Barbados. Secondly, why Rhum with an H? This source was published in English, by an Englishman, about a spirit produced in an English colony, more than 70 years BEFORE the publication of the “Encyclopédie”! In conclusion, the real origin of the word Rum is really obscure.
Marco Pierini
