Map of Barbados
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 TWO: BARBADOS IN 1647: SUGAR, SLAVERY AND RUM
Barbados is a small island, 21 miles long and 8 miles wide at its widest, for a total of a little more than 160 square miles. It ’s the easternmost of the Lesser Antilles. It ’s low and flat and not easy to sight, but due to the prevailing winds it was of ten the first land which ships sailing from Europe came upon. It ’s an independent country , member of the British Commonwealth.
The English settled there in 1627. They were looking for a tropical land where to grow some lucrative crops. They tried cotton, tobacco and other crops, but with little success. Then they tried sugarcane cultivation and it was an explosion. When Ligon arrived in Barbados in September 1647 sugar was already the heart of the local economy. To make room for cane, forests were cut down while other crops were abandoned. This took labor, and plenty of it.
The cultivation of cane was extremely hard work. First the cutting, appalling toil, under the sun, with tight labor times to take advantage of the short period in which the sugar content was at its highest. Then the cane had to be quickly crushed. Again hard work, and dangerous too. Often the arms of the slaves were crushed together with the cane. Later, some “philanthropic” planter supplied the slaves with a machete to cut off the imprisoned arm and save the man. Finally, in order to obtain sugar, the juice had to be boiled several times in great coppers, in an already hot tropical climate.
In Ligon’s Barbados most of the labor force was made up of “our Christian servants”. They were called “indentured servants”, that is, contract-bound servants. They were poor English citizens who, in the hope of a better life, tried their luck in the colonies. But they had to get there, and travel costs were high. So these wretches agreed to give up their freedom and to serve a master for a certain period of time, typically 5 years, in exchange for transport, accommodation and a small final sum. Once the contract had been signed -because it was a proper legal contract- the master could use them as he pleased, treat them as he pleased and even sell them to others. Sometimes they were not willing, but recruited by force.
Then there was a minority of black slaves bought in Africa. If they survived their reduction to slavery and the terrible “middle passage” on the slave ships, their life was, according to Ligon, slightly better than that of indentured servants. Slaves were their masters’ property, and also their children, if they had any. So, it was in the planters’ interest to keep them alive and (relatively) healthy, while from white servants they simply wanted to extract the maximum profit before the contract expired.
Over the next decades things changed. The white servants left the island as soon as they could and fewer and fewer came to replace them, so planters had more recourse to slaves. Today, the great majority of the inhabitants of Barbados are of African origin.
This is how Ligon describes the rum production process:
“ As for distilling the skimmings, which run down to the Still -house, from the three lesser Coppers, it is only this: After it has remained in the Cisterns, which my plot show, you in the Still -house, till it be a little sour, (for till then, the Spirits will not rise in the Still) the first Spirit that comes off, is a small Liquor, which we call low-wines, which Liquor we put into the Still, and draw it off again; and of that comes so strong a Spirit, as a candle being brought to a near distance […] the Spirits will fly to it.”
In these lines Ligon describes an already advanced process, with double distillation and the use of two different Stills. The fermenting cistern could contain hundreds of gallons of wash, while the two stills could distil around 100 gallons each. Such a quantity, in the middle of the XVII “ century, was not a simple domestic production.
So, only few years after the beginning of large scale sugarcane cultivation, in Barbados it was already common to distil, consume and even sell this new Spirit. And this is not easy to understand if we assume that rum was born in Barbados.