THE ORIGIN OF RUM - A Quest Part three: A Missionary in Martinique
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 three: A Missionary in Martinique
Discovered by Columbus during his fourth voyage in 1502, the island of Martinique has a total area of 680 square miles. It is 50 miles long and 25 miles wide. In the North a mountain exceeds 4.000 feet. It is of volcanic origin and it is part of the archipelago of the Lesser Antilles. It is a French overseas department, therefore integral part of France and of the European Union. The French settled there in 1635. Like the English in Barbados, they tried to grow various crops without much success and, like them, around 1640 they started extensive cultivation of sugar cane imported from Brazil and sugar production.
Distillation immediately became a central element of the local sugar industry. Already in 1640 a manuscript from the island says that “the slaves are fond of a strong eau de vie that they call stomach burner.” “Eau de vie” was the French name for distillates in general. But the first real account of rum production in Martinique can be found in the book “Histoire Generale des Antilles Habitées Par Les Francois“ written by Jean Baptiste Du Tertre and published in Paris in 1667. Du Tertre was a Dominican friar and a man of science. In 1640 he was sent as a missionary to the French Antilles and he stayed there until 1658. He also had the makings of an anthropologist, curious and attentive to the customs of the natives, a very French thing actually. He describes the process of rum production thus: “The spent and exhauted canes and also the skimmings [...] are not unusable, because the skimmings of the second and third cauldrons, and everything that spills over in the stirring on to the cauldron platforms run into a cistern where it is kept to make eau de vie.“
His drawing of a sugar estate includes a pot still, thus showing that distillation was already an integral part of the first sugar plantations on the island.
Du Tertre’s drawing shows just one pot still, with a simple pipe which channels the vapours of alcohol through a wooden barrel filled with water to cool them, into a cistern for the distillate. The pot still is similar to those drawn in the books on distillation of the time. The presence of just one pot still, and not two as in Ligon’s drawing, suggests that the technique was less advanced and possibly the product worse, or anyway that the French colonists of Martinique devoted less attention to rum than the English colonists of Barbados did.
Martinique therefore vies with Barbados for the title of first known producer of rum. Anglosaxon cultural hegemony is a fact. Another irrefutable historical fact is that for centuries the English, or better the British, were by far the biggest producer s and consumers of rum all over the world. All this explains why the attention of academics, popularisers and enthusists has focused on Barbados and much less on Martinique. But the facts are clear : the cultivation of cane, the production of sugar and the distillation of rum, on the two islands, happened at the same time.
But, is it believable that in very few years these colonists started to grow cane and produce sugar, invented rum and developed a regular production and sale too? The English arrived in 1627, the French in 1635. When they arrived they did not have sugarcane. They imported it a few years later, from Brazil, together with the necessary expertise. Cane cultivation on a large scale star ts towards 1640. And few year s later they have already invented rum, that is, they have been the first to apply distillation techniques to the fermented juice of cane. And in these few years, as well as inventing this new production process, they have already made it something normal, widespread, profitable and even technically advanced. And they have done it in two different islands, belonging to two different colonial empires. No, it is not credible. The historical sources show that both Barbados and Martinique were undoubtedly the cradle of rum, but not its birthplace. On the contrary, in my modest opinion, the facts rule it out. Our quest into the origin of rum, therefore, is not over yet.
This article was written by Mr. Marco Pierini from Tuscany, Italy