Rum Historian by Marco Pierini
The Origin of Spirits: Pride and Prejudice
For the second time, this month our readers will not find our customary article on the history of Cuban rum. Not because the series is over, but because I want to dedicate this month’s column to one of my favorite topics: the Origin of Spirits, or better, the origins of the commercial production and pleasure consumption of Spirits in the West.
Some years ago, I did a long, exciting piece of research on this issue that I told about in several series of articles (see “The Origins of Alcoholic Distillation in the West”, “And if it were the French Caribbean the First Cradle of Rum?” and “A History of French Rum”, in the 2018 and 2019 issues of our magazine) and that I then resumed and investigated further in my second book “French Rum A History 1639-1902” published in 2020.
To clarify again the purpose and the scope of my research, I would like to repeat here that I was not looking for attempts which were not followed through, or experiments, even intriguing ones, which remained isolated. I was not interested in the discoveries of some individual apothecary, doctor, alchemist, monk, craftsman, etc. which died with them or with their close disciples, without yielding long-lasting fruit. My focus was, and is, the commercial production and pleasure consumption of Spirits in the West: when, where and how producing Spirit Drinks became a veritable business of distilling. I was looking for the moment, the place and perhaps even the people that gifted to us the decisive passage of alcohol from an apothecary’s laboratory to the tables of a tavern.
This month instead, mostly on the basis of the sources that I had already available then, but also of something new, I want to write about an error which in my opinion is very common in academic works about this topic. According to the few scholars that have studied this topic, in Europe the shift of alcohol from a drug to a beverage, a Spirit, occurred in England and in the Netherlands, only around 1650. Perhaps the clearest and most authoritative description of this scholarly consensus can be found in an essay by John McCusker: “The business of distilling in the Old World and the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the rise of a new enterprise and its connection with colonial America”, in McCusker and Morgan (eds.) “The EARLY MODERN ATLANTIC ECONOMY”, 2.000. I think it is useful to quote a few lengthy extracts:
“Five hundred years intervened between the introduction of the process of alcoholic distillation into Europe and the development of the alcoholic beverage distilling industry there. The distilling of spirits in the West dated from roughly 1150. Even though beer and wine had been known and drunk widely for several millennia before the first European tasted distilled spirits, a clear preference for distilled spirits emerged rapidly, no doubt because of their great potency. Yet the widespread realization of that preference and the establishment of an industry to serve it were initially thwarted by the considerably higher price for spirits than for beer and wine. Distilled alcoholic beverages became products of mass consumption only after 1650. Two developments in the middle years of the seventeenth century combined to lower the cost of spirits sufficiently for people to afford to substitute them for wine and beer. First, improvements in the distilling apparatus were implemented that greatly increased the scale on which distilling could be conducted. Second, sugar and sugar byproducts emerged as a new, cheap base material to be distilled in the larger, more efficient apparatus. Much of this change had its roots in the New World where sugar planters had learned by the late sixteenth century to distill rum from sugar cane juice and sugar cane molasses. … Although the distillation of spirits was originally undertaken in Europe in twelfth-century Italy, the scale of production remained small until the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when major technological innovations began a transformation that had implications for the entire Atlantic world.”
“In summary, then, by 1650 the art of distilling had emerged from the mists of alchemy and become an industry … As we have seen, the common spirits distilled in Europe up to the seventeenth century had been made from either wine or grain. French, Spanish and some German distillers turned wine into brandy. The high cost of all but the worst of wine limited the source of this base material and made their brandy expensive, kept their operation small, and thereby inhibited them from taking advantage of increased scale and associated economies. … After a start early in the seventeenth century, the commercial distilling of brandy in France grew only slowly for several decades” Grain, writes McCusker, was expensive, scarce and necessary to make bread “As a result of all these obstacles, distillers of both grain and wine were on the lookout for an alternative base material. They found it in sugar.”
From the beginning, ten years ago, my own research led me to question this statement and when in 2017, I published my first book “American Rum A Short History of Rum in early America”, I put the date backward to 1500s’ Netherlands.
But historic research is a work in progress, and this is much of its charm. After the research that I told about in the series of articles mentioned above, I can state that, with the respect due to a great scholar from whom I have learned a lot, McCusker was wrong. In the West, the commercial production of Spirit Drinks was an Italian invention that spread quickly to France and Germany and later all over Europe. And it happened much earlier than McCusker asserts. Maybe already at the beginning of the 1300s, following the publication in Bologna, of Taddeo Alderotti’s magnus opus “Consilia” (Pieces of Advice) with the last seven consilia dedicated to aqua vitae. In any case, surely before 1450, as the “Libreto de Aqua Ardente” (Booklet of Burning Water) written by the famed physician Michele Savonarola (grandfather of the more famous and ill-fated Friar Girolamo) in Ferrara, between 1444 and 1450, tells us clearly.
All over southern Europe, wine was abundant, often of very poor quality, and moreover it deteriorated quickly. Consequently, European distillers had at their disposal a plentiful, low-cost raw material far earlier than the colonization of America and the mass production of sugar and its by-products took place. Therefore, the development of commercial distilling didn’t need to wait for sugar. Quite the opposite, I would say that it was precisely the technical progress in distilling apparatuses and the habit already acquired of consuming Spirits (plus the need of escapism of the settlers) that led to the invention, production and mass consumption of a new Spirit made from sugarcane, Rum.
Having clarified the above, I must respectfully beg to engage in a small dispute. McCusker was wrong concerning the origins of commercial distillation and I believe that I have proved it beyond the shadow of a doubt. Now, I would like to briefly discuss the reasons for this error, so widespread in British and American academia.
One simple reason could be the sheer lack of knowledge of the texts. This unfamiliarity is wholly understandable: Ars longa, vita brevis - as the ancient Romans wisely said (meaning more or less, “It takes a long time to acquire expertise, but life is short”). No one can know everything or have read everything, even in a limited field of studies like ours. Moreover, the books of Taddeo Alderotti and Michele Savonarola, the key figures of my research, are not so easy to find and read. Actually, they are virtually forgotten even in their own (and my own) mother country, Italy, and despite a degree in Philosophy and a life-long passion for History, I myself only discovered them a few years ago when I began investigating the origins of alcoholic distillation.But the problem is that the same conclusion could have been easily reached by reading well-known English-language authors as well. Let’s read, for example, some much quoted excerpts from Richard Ligon’s little, big work “A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados”.
“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.”
Obviously, the attention of all the rum enthusiasts focuses on the second part of the sentence, where kill-Devil (both the word and the thing) makes its definitive entry into the English language. But let’s reflect on the first part of this quote. Without doubts, Ligon is telling us that English spirits and French Brandy were well known, commonly drunk products, so common that they were already exported to Barbados in 1647, when Ligon arrived on the island, a colony very far from Europe and settled in only 20 years before. Therefore, we are sure that in England and France they were commonly drunk BEFORE that date, or better, long before that date.
This quote could be enough, but there are also other well-known sources by early English authors that tell us the same thing. Let’ examine just two:
According to many visitors, English settlers in Barbados drank a lot. “Sir Henry Colt, who arrived on Barbados in 1631, was one such visitor. He noted he had long been accustomed to downing two or three drams of spirits daily in his native England. But his new companions on Barbados, he said, soon had him up to thirty drams daily.” (Wayne Curtis “And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails” 2006)
Last, but not least, there is John Josselyn. He was born in 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, and the Account 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 and would deserve to be examined further, starting from the word he uses, Aqua vitae, that is, Water of Life, the first name for distilled spirits in Europe. We don’t know what spirit it was, at the time, maybe a kind of brandy. But as a matter of fact, it tells us that in 1638 England the consumption of distilled beverages was already common, so common that it is advisable to take some with you, without having to explain what it is.
Hence, this can’t be only a question of simple, easy to understand lack of knowledge of ancient, almost forgotten sources written in foreign languages. We are instead dealing with a case of clear blindness before well-known and much quoted English sources. Why? Well, I dare say that the problem is the weight of a prejudice. I’ll try to explain myself better.
Many British and American scholars, rightly proud of the great contribution that their Countries have given to the history of the modern world, have developed, I fear, a profound, even though often unconscious, prejudice. They believe that in the history of early modern European economy and technology practically everything that is important and innovative is due to the English (with a little help from the Dutch). Of course, they readily recognize the importance of other peoples in the history of craftsmanship, arts, literature, fashion, cuisine etc. But regarding heavy-weight things, such as business and technology, they have a deeply ingrained prejudice: that virtually all the true early modern European entrepreneurs and inventors have been English. Therefore, such an important industry as the business of distilling must obviously be an English innovation too. But this is simply not true.
Marco Pierini
