RUM
blend of Guyana, Barbados, and Jamaican rum as part of the sailor’s daily ration in 1687. Vessels were dispatched to collect rum that would be blended and then redistributed to pursers throughout the Caribbean, as well as among those stationed closer to home. Soon this dark, spirituous blend became known as Pusser’s rum. West Indian rum was a lot stronger than the beer and wine it replaced and caused such disorder among the sailors and marines on board ships of the Royal Navy that Admiral Edward Vernon ordered the ration be diluted with two parts water prior to issue. He also ordered sugar and lime juice to be made available as a reward for good behavior, and the drink became known as “grog,” in deference to the popular Admiral who wore his finest grogram coat in battle. While the demand for sugar in- Adjusting the steam at Marie Galante. creased, the taste for Caribbean spirits was also on the rise. By the middle of the 18th century more than 40 New England distilleries were processing fermented molasses to make rum. Much of this rum was sold in England and Europe or shipped to Africa and traded for slaves to fill a burgeoning demand for labor in the Caribbean. Then the British Parliament passed the Molasses Act of 1733. In addition to taxing the raw material for this precious New England export, the Act prohibited distillers from buying molasses from any but English colonies. Other taxes followed the Molasses Act until the colonists displayed their contempt for the mounting burdens by staging what history records as the Boston Tea Party. When you consider that English merchants owned all the tea arriving from England and the colonists owned the molasses arriving from the Caribbean, it’s not surprising that the tea, and not the molasses, ended up in Boston harbor. No doubt the success of that party was cel-
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Southwinds
ebrated with the much stronger and more revered drink. In the French West Indies, in spite of being prohibited from exporting alcohol to France, the planters were enjoying a profitable market for their molasses in New England. But when the Molasses Act threatened their trade in the sticky, black by-product of their own sugarmaking industry, they enthusiastically joined ranks with their North American customers against England in an alliance that couldn’t have been foreseen in the smokefilled chambers of the English Parliament. In the year 1775, driven by insatiable European demand, a ton of sugar from Nevis was worth more than 20,000 of today’s dollars. Sugar was king! The tall sweet grass that Columbus brought to the West Indies on his second voyage in search of the
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