A blend of the very finest high proof Caribbean rum, to which was added creamy Madagascan vanilla and a generous helping of zesty orange peel. A secret recipe was followed, and the Professor finished his hearty tipple with a handful of cinnamon and cloves and just a hint of cardamom.” For those left on the island, fortune meant sugar, and the product was a harsh mistress. Transplanting the sugar culture from Brazil to Barbados was “complicated and costly.” ( No Peace 76) Once the industry did reach the island, its requirements in a preindustrial world were forbidding. “That the work of managing a sugar plantation demanded all of the time, intelligence, and energy of the owner must be immediately recognized.” ( No Peace 92) There are instructions to make rum drinks and a few recipes that are either inadequately explained or painfully obvious. K. Kris Hirst, “The History of Distilling,” http://archaeology.about.com/od/foodsoftheancientpast/fr/smith06.htm

There are a number of small mysteries about the introduction of sugar culture to Barbados, but the main outline of the story is clear enough.” Arawaks who accompanied the English had planted cane on the island during the first year of settlement, but neither they nor the English knew how to make sugar and in any event the plants failed to flourish. (Dunn 61) Early cultivation of tobacco and cotton on Barbados produced indifferent results: By 1640 its enterprising and ambitious inhabitants had determined that the island needed a new crop. (Dunn 61; No Peace) The Portuguese had produced sugar in Brazil for over a century before the English settled Barbados in 1627. Those planters in Brazil also produced a distilled drink from cane, agua ardente, but it probably was something closer to cachaca or vodka than to rum, and in particular the amber and darker rums produced by the English in the Caribbean. As Richard Dunn notes, they “were apparently the first sugar makers to discover how to distill molasses and other sugar by-products into a potent alcoholic drink with a sweetly burnished taste.” (Dunn 196) In strength if not in flavor, seventeenth century rumbullion probably resembled the ‘overproofs’ of as much as seventy-five percent or more alcohol available today. A seventeenth century Barbadian statute “stipulated that any rum that would not take fire from a flame without being heated had to be thrown away or the maker would be fined L100,” a considerable sum. ( No Peace 297) A little less mystery surrounds the genesis if not the name of the great spirit of the Caribees, and historically of New England and beyond. Rum began, on Barbados, sometime after 1640 and before 1647. Historically, distillates based on cane have started out as a byproduct of the sugar industry and that was true on seventeenth century Barbados. The cane was crushed to extract its juices, boiled to produce crystals and then ‘cured,’ or dried and drained of molasses. Sugar planters could sell the molasses, but it was bulky to transport and fetched a lower price, much lower, than the white sugar that Europe and New England craved. Broom also describes seventeenth century Barbados as “an almost mythical place, a fantastical, fertile island where fortunes could be made with virtually no effort. It soon became painfully fashionable.” (Broom 92) Visitors to Barbados did find the place ‘fantastical,’ but not in a way that Broom implies, and its was a fertile environment, particularly for the cultivation of cane, at least until the planters exhausted its soil. Otherwise his breezy contentions are wrong.

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Bridenbaugh dates the development of the sugar culture on Barbados, as well as the expansion of sugar trading, a little later than the sequence outlined by Dunn and adopted here. Both studies of the English in the Caribbean are superb, and without recourse to a raft of primary sources, our choice must be considered arbitrary.

A thriving post-Annales school of historiography has developed. Practitioners like David Abulafia at Cambridge University emphasize the primacy of human will and structures both physical and political on historical phenomena. Human enterprise, whether the choice of crops to plant or goods to trade, is more important in this view than the natural world that Braudel considers paramount.

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Whenever it first appeared, however, brandy “only broke away from doctors and apothecaries very slowly.” (Braudel 243) Customs records identify brandy merchants at Colmar in 1506, but not in Venice until 1596; its appearance in other sixteenth century locations remains conjectural, and after sifting the evidence Braudel admits “that we are still no nearer to the answer to the problem: when did distilling begin?” (Braudel 243, 248) In any event he considers distilled alcohol a “great innovation” and in his judgment “[t]he sixteenth century created it; the seventeenth century consolidated it; the eighteenth century popularized it.” (Braudel 241) The LIVE virtual tastings are carried out in the last week of the month. Please keep an eye on our socials for confirmed dates! It would be unfair to continue piling on, but worst of all Broom does not even include in his international directory of rums the Editor’s three favorites: Coruba, Pampero Anniversario and Westerhall.