How did rum ever come to be associated with sailing?
So asks reader Bernard, and I love it. Bernard, it all has to do with the fact that in the Colonial era rum was liquid currency. It was more valuable by weight than any other commodity save gold. It kept indefinitely and like the American Express card was recognized at over 15 million locations worldwide. For a short time the English government even recognized rum as money, which no doubt made banking a whole lot more fun.
As highly valued and heavily transported as it was, rum made an excellent target for privateers. What were privateers? Think of them as early military contractors: government-paid out-of-uniform toughs who sailed the high seas settling scores, exacting retribution and collecting debts on behalf of their masters. Unofficially, of course.
As you can imagine privateers tended to collect quite a lot of loot in pursuance of their duties, a bunch of it drinkable. And very often, they drank it. In fact it happened with some regularity that a ship full of privateers would eventually decide they’d just as soon keep all the booty they collected for themselves and continue on robbing and plundering on a freelance basis, at which point they became known as pirates. So that’s where the yo-ho-ho comes in.
Of course rum drinking wasn’t limited to privateers and pirates. Cargo and military ships would sometimes pay their crews with rum. And let’s face it, how many sailors were going to let that stuff sit around until they made landfall? Eventually rum wages became rum rations, a sort of fighting sailor’s fringe benefit. The American and especially British navies maintained that tradition for centuries after Colonial times. Today rum rations are passé, the practice having been discontinued all the way back in 1970.
I’m sorry, but when I think of rum, I think of pirates. I think of all the ports that there are and the foods that grow well on the coast. Coconut, pineapple, and bananas/plantains — they all go great with rum. Tobacco can be rolled into cigars, and then a person can smoke cigars and have a drink of rum. They also are known to be great together. Rum is an essential ingredient in many recipes, and just a way for people to relax and socialize at the end of the day.
http://askmelissaanything.blogspot.com/
Don’t forget that after all the real “pirates” were gone after about 1720, piracy became more of a middle-man occupation between sellers and smugglers. As the big empires increased import taxes to fund their navies and armies in the Americas, smugglers could get very VERY rich simply by bypassing port authorities.
A lot of rum got moved without ever entering the British, French, and Spanish tax structures, and if you wanted to sell your products without having to pay for an official stamp, an easy way was to have a legit shipment “go missing.” John Hancock (yep, that one) became the richest man in the British Colonies partly by moving untaxed goods for merchants.
At one point in 1768, one of his ships, the Liberty, came into port with only a quarter of its cargo of Madeira, the rest having been unloaded and sold off without custom. The ship was impounded and Hancock charged with smuggling, along with other civil penalties. To the end of the case, everyone involved had the barely-plausible excuse of “the wine went missing.”
It’s not hard to see how this kind of economic policy and prosecution would want to make a (criminally) free-trade merchant sign up to be the President of a body that argued for independence.
Great stuff, fluffy! Thanks!
– Joe
I love the notion of rum as money, because then you could literally consume money. That’s got to be the epitome of wealth. 😉
Like lighting cigars with 100’s? Ya gotta admit that’s pretty impressive as well! 😉
Cheers,
– Joe
This isn’t quite on topic but every time I hear/read the word privateer, I think of Stan Rogers’ song, Barrett’s Privateers. You may not have heard of him but he was a popular Canadian folksinger. This is one of his most well-known songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIwzRkjn86w
Hey Zeddie, great track – it’s been a while, but one of my favourite “Folkies” – thanks for the link!
(So, d’you miss Zeller’s too? Deb in Ontario: )
The way I understood it, the only difference between being considered as a Pirate or a Privateer, was that a Privateer held a Letter of Marque from which ever Sovereign they sailed for to make their thievery Official… ; )