Originally posted 10 May 2012

In the era before television and radio, music was the mass media that reflected the issues of the day. Topical songs were composed to argue points of view, and within days of a news story hitting the headlines, sheet music would appear advocating or satirizing both points of view. The anti-alcohol forces in the USA in the late 1800’s churned out sheet music along with an endless stream of tracts and flyers, most of which depicted alcohol use in apocalyptic terms. A shining example is “Father’s a Drunkard and Mother Is Dead,” which marries a catchy tune to some very bad rhymes. Here’s a sample couplet:

“We were all fine before daddy drank rum, then all our problems and troubles begun.”

There are many words in the English language that rhyme with “rum”, but that doesn’t mean that Stella the Poetess actually knows any of them…

This piece has a personal side for me – that picture is of a page in my great-grandmother’s scrapbook from the early 1900’s in which she pasted the lyrics of these and other temperance songs that were printed in the Baltimore Sun. I had been amused by the dreadful poetry for many years before I ever heard the tune. Not all the songs are that bad; another temperance song called “The Rum Seller’s Farewell” has surprisingly good lyrics and an interesting premise. The rum seller in question is boarding up his shop on his last day of business – his custom has dwindled because everyone has embraced the virtues of temperance, and now all his former customers are drinking tea with their families instead of carousing all night. Needless to say, the day those crusaders dreamed of never actually came to pass…

Originally posted 09 May 2012

I was exchanging emails with Captain Jimbo of Captain Jimbo’s Rum Project, and he brought up one of the mysteries of rum – that it was not invented earlier. After remarking that sugar and the use of the alembic still both spread westward across the Mediterranean, he wrote, “To deny that this coexistence did not result in distilled cane spirits much earlier (and not in the Caribbean or Brazil) is not convincing. Anything that could be run through an alembic probably was, not least something as common as sugar cane.”

He is right that sugar was widely available in cultures where distilling was a commonplace task. Unfortunately, in some of the likely places nobody made or kept records of economic activity. Sugar was grown in Sicily as early as the year 1000 – is it credible that for over 500 years nobody thought to run the byproduct of refining through a still? Or in Madeira, where the Portuguese were growing sugar by 1400? Unfortunately, with the exception of monasteries where monks used alembics for medicines, almost everyone who might have been involved in the distilling business was illiterate. What few records survived from that turbulent era were made by the aristocracy and concerned with their affairs, not the commercial dealings and diet of their inferiors. At least that is the case of the documents that have been translated – it may be that someone could delve through monastic records or the private letters of merchants and find some casual mention of a new distilled drink. The evidence may languish in some archive, waiting to be found and to extend the history of rum back by hundreds of years. We can only wait and hope.

Originally posted 08 May 2012

If you were a general in the midst of a war, wouldn’t you want your opponents to be drunk? This is a question that might occur to a modern general, but not to an eighteenth-century commander. The proof is in this regulation issued by Sir William Howe to the citizens of occupied Philadelphia:

Rum rations were important to the morale of both sides, and Howe tried to prohibit rum trade as vigorously as he did salt and medicines. Why salt? It was used in pickling, and armies depended on pickled and preserved rations. Howe’s regulation was ineffective and counterproductive – since rum and salt were both used as currency in the coinage-poor colonies, this amounted to a shutdown of economic activity. The trade continued regardless, and the regulation was widely ignored.

Originally posted 07 May 2012

Poets have celebrated rum, lyricists have sung its praises, and artists… well, with the exception of pictures of canefield workers and revelers roistering in taverns, they have mostly left it alone. An exception, perhaps, was Picasso, who painted a picture called “Still Life With a Bottle of Rum” in 1911.

Some people claim to see a rum bottle in this picture. I don’t, so will have to take their word for it.

Originally posted 05 May 2012
In a recent post I asked readers to help identify the approximate date of a picture showing Russian sailors standing around a rum pot on the deck of a warship. The fellow who owns the photo, Mike at The Pirate’s Lair, sent me another shot which is slightly clearer:

I contacted my friendly local Russian Orthodox liturgical music expert, a gentleman named Bernard Brandt, who was able to make out the name embroidered on the sailors’ hats. This reveals that the shot was taken aboard the Dmitri Donskoya between 1885, when the ship was commissioned, and 1905, when the vessel was scuttled by its captain to avoid capture by the Japanese after the Battle of Tsushima.

The next question is where Russia was getting rum for their navy. I was surprised to find that the first sugar cane processing factory in Russia opened in 1723, with some rum production commencing shortly thereafter. Sugar cane grows well in sourthern Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, and there may have been some importation of molasses from other areas to feed the distilleries. Russians are skilled at extracting alcohol from just about anything, so it is no surprise that a high volume of fairly bad rum was available for their warriors at sea. I have not been able to find any information about whether rum rations continued after the Bolshevik revolution – anybody out there who knows is invited to enlighten me.

Originally posted 04 May 2012

The crusade against alcohol in America continued long after Prohibition was repealed, and at the outset of World War II anti-alcohol activists tried to use that conflict as an excuse to reinstate the ban on liquor production. A San Diego-based editorial cartoonist named Theodore Geisel responded with this cartoon:

Yes, that is Carrie Nation as envisioned by Dr. Seuss, axe in hand and ready to smash rum barrels. Geisel’s work as an editorial cartoonist is less known than his children’s books, but it is worth a look just to see how his graphic style was used to make fun of Hitler, Mussolini, and other targets. (Photo used by permission of Geisel archive.)

Originally posted 03 May 2012

In the book I mentioned a sea shanty called “Sally Brown” that reveals a lot about a sailor’s vision of the good life. You can hear it at this link – the file will open in a new window.

There is a clear West Indian beat in Simon Spalding’s rendition of this song about a mixed-race woman who “drinks rum and chews tobacco”, an ideal of womanhood far from the more genteel ladies back at home. Another vision of the good life that awaited ashore is in the song “Rolling Down to Old Maui,” in which a sailor sings

We’re homeward bound from the Arctic Sound
With a good ship taut and free
And we don’t give a damn when we drink our rum
With the girls of Old Maui

This is an old song, the earliest version of which was first recorded in 1858, but it is not a sea shanty – it was not designed as a work song to be sung in unison while accomplishing a task aboard ship. It is technically a forebitter – a ballad to be sung after the work is done. And if it’s a happy song, why does it have that name, with the word bitter right there to be seen? It actually comes from the forebitts, a place by the bow of the ship that is convenient to sing and play music. If you are interested in nautical lore and sailor songs, I recommend that you investigate MusicalHistorian.com, the webpage for shantyman and historian Simon Spalding. He learned from Stan Hugill, the last man alive to sing those songs aboard a British Merchant Navy sailing ship, so there is a chain of tradition here.

Originally posted 02 May 2012

I was interviewed for a local paper about rum history, and when the piece came out I was puzzled by an allusion the writer made to Mary Poppins drinking rum. I wondered if there was perhaps a scene that I missed due to a trip to the snack bar at the theatre – perhaps a subplot where Mary gets tired of taking care of the kids, leaves them with Uncle Albert, and heads to the local pub for a double navy grog with a shot of old Jamaican heavy for a chaser. When she is thrown out of the place for being drunk and disorderly and singing lewd sea shanties, she lands in the arms of Mr. Binnacle, who is always at that location around closing time because it’s a good place to meet women who are being thrown out of bars for singing lewd sea shanties.

If Disney did film that scene, it ended up on the cutting room floor, but it is clear that Ms. Poppins did enjoy her tipple. In the scene after the rainstorm in which she informs the children of the virtues of taking a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, she pours three colors of liquid from the same bottle. The two children take a sip and in turn report the flavor as lime cordial and strawberry. Mary takes her own sip and purrs, “Rrrrrrum punch” with much more enthusiasm than is usually shown for alcoholic beverages in movies made for children. You can see the clip here – go to the one minute mark.

I asked a friend who is a Disneyphile, and he thinks this may be the first instance in a Disney film of a woman drinking alcohol. It would also fit very well with the practice of an earlier era – in the early 1800’s rum punch was indeed recommended by doctors. So Mary was probably just following her mother’s family recipe for taking care of a sudden chill – a modest serving or rum punch for herself and the children.

Originally posted 30 April 2012

When you try to accurately recreate historic foods and beverages, some of the difficulties are obvious; a recipe that says to cook something until it “looks right” is not very helpful if you have never seen the finished product before. Measurements calibrated in handfuls are an obvious problem, so the modern cook is grateful when they come across a recipe list that specifies “four eggs,” “a cup of milk,” or “the juice of five lemons.” If you have studied the history of agriculture, you know that your problems are just starting. If the recipe calls for four eggs, you should probably use three – thanks to a hundred years of breeding chickens that lay big eggs, they are about a third larger than they used to be. They taste different, too, thanks to the chickens’ diet of vitamin-enhanced commercial feed. The milk we buy now has been homogenized, pasteurized, and has less butterfat – you may want to experiment with a mix of 3/4 milk and 1/4 cream. As for the five lemons, you might get something closer to the original if you use three lemons and a lime – lemons a hundred years ago were smaller and more tart. The liquor is different too – in the case of the Colonial American drinks that were originally made with inferior local spirits, it is now hard to find rum as bad as the best they could get. A book could be written on the differences in the raw ingredients of prior centuries and the ones we use now… I may even write it, despite being warned that the subject is too arcane to interest major publishing houses. I tested all the recipes printed in Rum: A Global History and have verified that they work, and if each is made by someone who follows directions and obtains good ingredients, they are at least close to what was eaten and quaffed in days gone by.

Originally posted 27 April 2012

Stroh of Austria has an endearingly odd way of making their commercials memorable. Their original mascot was a stylized bear, and as time has passed the bear has become less and less lifelike. Even when the bear is rendered in a drawing, it looks like a guy wearing a rented bear suit that doesn’t fit very well. This first ad is not too bad, with the mascot resembling a bear cub that has been stuffed by an unimaginative taxidermist.

This one looks like he at least enjoys drinking the product he is advertising::

And then we have this awesomely lifelike fellow:If you are camping and are suddenly face to face with a cuddly looking ursine with rum on his breath, that is probably him. (Images used by permission of Stroh & Co.)