Rum
The name is doubtless American. A manuscript
description of Barbadoes, written twenty-five
years after the English settlement of the island
in 1651, is thus quoted in The Academy: "The
chief fudling they make in the island is
Rumbullion, alias Kill-Divil, and this is made of
sugar canes distilled, a hot, hellish, and
terrible liquor." This is the earliest-known
allusion to the liquor rum; the word is held by
some antiquaries in what seems rather a strained
explanation to be the gypsy rum, meaning potent,
or mighty. The word rum was at a very early date
adopted and used as English university slang. The
oldest American reference to the word rum (meaning
the liquor) which I have found is in the act of
the General Court of Massachusetts in May, 1657,
prohibiting the sale of strong liquors
"whether knowne by the name of rumme, strong
water, wine, brandy, etc., etc." The
traveller Josselyn wrote of it, terming it that
"cursed liquor rhum, rumbullion or
kill-devil." English sailors still call their
grog rumbowling. But the word rum in this word and
in rumbooze and in rumfustian did not mean rum; it
meant the gypsy adjective powerful. Rumbooze or
rambooze, distinctly a gypsy word, and an English
university drink also, is made of eggs, ale, wine,
and sugar. Rumfustian was made of a quart of
strong beer, a bottle of white wine or sherry,
half a pint of gin, the yolks of twelve eggs,
orange peel, nutmeg, spices, and sugar. Rum-barge
is another mixed drink of gypsy name. It will be
noted that none of these contains any rum.
In some localities in America rum was called in
early days Barbadoes-liquor, a very natural name,
occasionally also Barbadoes-brandy. The Indians
called it ocuby, or as it was spelled in the
Norridgewock, tongue, ah-coobee. Many of the early
white settlers called it by the same name.
Kill-devil was its most universal name, not only a
slang name, but a trading-term used in bills of
sale. A description of Surinam written in 1651
says: "Rhum made from sugar-canes is called
kill-devil in New England." At thus early a
date had the manufacture of rum become associated
with New England.
The Dutch in New York called the liquor
brandy-wine, and soon in that colony wherever
strong waters were named in taverns lists, the
liquor was neither aqua vitae nor gin nor brandy,
but New England rum.
It soon was cheap enough. Rev. Increase Mather,
the Puritan parson, wrote, in 1686: "It is an
unhappy thing that in later years a Kind of Drink
called Rum has been common among us. They that are
poor and wicked, too, can for a penny make
themselves drunk." From old account-books,
bills of lading, grocers' bills, family expenses,
etc., we have the price of rum at various dates,
and find that his assertion was true.
In 1673 Barbadoes rum was worth 6s. a gallon.
In 1687 its price had vastly fallen, and New
England rum sold for 1s. 6d. a gallon. In 1692 2s.
a gallon was the regular price. In 1711 the price
was 3s. 3d. In 1757, as currency grew valueless,
it was 21s. a gallon. In 1783 only a little over a
shilling; then it was but 8d. a quart. During this
time the average cost of molasses in the West
Indies was 12d. a gallon; so, though the
distillery plant for its production was costly, it
can be seen that the profits were great.
Burke said about 1750: "The quantity of
spirits which they distill in Boston from the
molasses which they import is as surprising as the
cheapness at which they sell it, which is under
two shillings a gallon; but they are more famous
for the quantity and cheapness than for the
excellency of their rum." An English
traveller named Bennet wrote as the same date of
Boston society: "Madeira wine and rum punch
are the liquors they drink in common." Baron
Riedesel, who commanded the foreign troops in
America during the Revolution, wrote of the New
England inhabitants: "Most of the males have
a strong passion for strong drink, especially
rum." While President John Adams said
caustically: "If the ancients drank wine as
our people drink rum and cider, it is no wonder we
hear of so many possessed with devils;" yet
he himself, to the end of his life, always began
the day with a tankard of hard cider before
breakfast.
The Dutch were too constant beer drinkers to
become with speed great rum consumers, and they
were too great lovers of gin and schnapps. But
they deprecated the sharp and intolerant
prohibition of the sale of rum to the Indians,
saying: "To prohibit all strong liquor to
them seems very hard and very Turkish. Rum doth as
little hurt as the Frenchman's Brandie, and in the
whole is much more wholesome." The English
were fiercely abhorrent of intemperance among the
Indians, and court records abound in laws
restraining the sale of rum to the "bloudy
salvages," of prosecutions and fines of white
traders who violated these laws, and of constant
and fierce punishment of the thirsty red men, who
simply tried to gratify an appetite instilled in
them by the English.
William Penn wrote to the Earl of Sutherland in
1683: "Ye Dutch, Sweed, and English have by
Brandy and Specially Rum, almost Debaucht ye
Indians all. When Drunk ye most Wretched of
Spectacles. They had been very Tractable but Rum
is so dear to them."
Rum formed the strong intoxicant of all popular
tavern drinks; many are still mixed to-day. Toddy,
sling, grog, are old-time concoctions.
A writer for the first Galaxy thus parodied the
poem, I knew by the smoke that so gracefully
curled:---
"I knew by the pole that's so gracefully
crown'd
Beyond the old church, that a tavern was near,
And I said if there's black-strap on earth to be
found,
A man who had credit night hope for it here."
Josiah Quincy said that black-strap was a
composition of which the secret, he fervently
hoped, reposed with the lost arts. Its principal
ingredients were rum and molasses, though there
were other simples combined with it. He adds,
"Of all the detestable American drinks on
which our inventive genius has exercised itself,
this black-strap was truly the most
outrageous."
Casks of it stood in every country store and
tavern, a salted cod-fish hung alongside, slyly to
tempt by thirst additional purchasers of
black-strap. "Calibogus," or
"bogus," was unsweetened rum and beer.
Mimbo, sometimes abbreviated to mim, was a
drink made of rum and loaf-sugar--and possibly
water.
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Rum
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