Bittersweet (15 page)

Where rum was used on ships after Vernon wrote his order, throughout the navy the daily allowance of one pint of rum mixed with one quart of water was issued in two parts: one in the forenoon and the other in the evening. In 1824, the evening issue was stopped and in 1850 the ration was cut to one gill (one-eighth of a pint) of rum with two gills of water per man per day. In 1937 the amount of water was halved, and in 1970 the ‘grog era' ended when the Royal Navy's rum ration was cut altogether.

RUM, SUGAR AND TAXES

In the eighteenth century, rum was important wherever English was spoken. While Longfellow's story of Paul Revere's ride may have glossed over his stop at Medford, the famous silversmith and equestrian was more open about it, and recalled later that he ‘refreshed himself' at Medford, leaving no doubt that he had taken some of the New England rum centre's most famous product. George Washington is reputed to have gained election to the Virginia House of Burgesses as a result of his judicious sharing of 75 gallons of rum among the voters.

In the infant colony of Australia rum was important because the colony at Botany Bay was run by naval men while the soldiers who guarded the convicts were marines. Both naval officers and marines (a separate service) had a high regard for rum, and the marines especially saw it as a way to make money. Rum became a major item of currency in the settlement at Sydney Cove. William Bligh, of
Bounty
fame, and later the governor of the colony, noted:

A sawyer will cut one hundred timber for a bottle of spirits—value two shillings and sixpence—which he drinks in a few hours; when for the same labour he would charge two bushels of wheat, which would furnish Bread for him for two months.

Convinced that rum was an evil, Bligh ran foul of the marines—known locally as the Rum Corps—who had gained a stranglehold on the small colony. He seized an illegally imported still and provoked the Rum Rebellion, a mutiny which should by rights have led to the hanging of those responsible, but did not. The Rum Rebellion, and the English government's varied responses to it over two decades, led in the end to the colony of New South Wales gaining a measure of self-rule.

Rum and sugar meant money, and money meant power, so rum and sugar influenced the way power was used, and not just by way of dispensing strong spirits to the voters. Because of the wealth it brought, and the way that wealth was used, the sugar trade can be credited with (or blamed for) the large number of people of African origin in the Americas and Britain today, the spread of English-speaking influence across North America, and much more. It is even possible to make the case that today's political world was shaped by events and forces associated with sugar. This process can be readily traced in England, where members of Parliament were often elected by ‘rotten boroughs', localities which might once have had many voters but now had a bare handful who did as they were told.

All forms of sugar were highly taxed, and the English government (amongst others) took the view that as much profit as possible should be returned to the ‘home' nation. This meant that the sugar colonies were forced to send raw sugar back to Europe, where the value-added procedures of refining could be carried out. As those who are taxed always do, the planters complained, and sought relief from the taxes, which they saw as adding to the price—or worse, filching their profits. Not unnaturally, they felt that all the money paid by the end consumer should go to them, the sugar producers. In England, because the planters were rich (even with the taxes they were paying), ‘sugar interests' were able to buy up many of the rotten boroughs, in order to force changes favourable to them, by holding the balance of power.

In 1767 Lord Chesterfield tried to buy a rotten borough for his son, but found that the cupboard was bare, according to a borough-monger who said that ‘there was no such thing as a borough to be had now; for that the rich East and West Indians had secured them all, at the rate of three thousand pounds at least; but many at four thousand; and two or three, that he knew, at five thousand'. In the longer term, this abuse of the rotten boroughs helped to build up the pressure for electoral reform, leading to a more democratic Britain. The connection with sugar and rum is small, but they did play a part.

Around 1780, King George III was riding in a carriage with the then Prime Minister, Pitt the Elder, when he saw a carriage far outclassing his. He asked who the owner was, and learned that it belonged to a West Indian planter. According to the tale, the King, who was not always dotty, said, ‘Sugar, sugar, eh? All that sugar. How are the duties, eh, Pitt, how are the duties?' The tale may be apocryphal, but it illustrates the nature of sugar wealth, and how it was seen as a source of revenue.

This was the pattern of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England that Jane Austen showed us in
Mansfield Park
, where a plantation-owning family had become immensely rich and bought themselves an estate. The ‘new rich' were looked down on by their neighbours, but as they spent their way into power and influence, so the West Indian plantocracy managed to infiltrate the lower ranks of the aristocracy, and to become, at the least, suitable for marrying to younger sons and daughters.

There was a major difference between the French sugar islands—which were a market for French brandy—and the English islands—which provided rum for the English drinker. While Jamaica and the other English islands used all of their molasses to make rum for a market they controlled, the French planters needed to dispose of their molasses somewhere away from France, so quite a lot of it ended up in what were then Britain's American colonies.

Much French molasses was shipped to Rhode Island, where it was converted to rum and smuggled to the other colonies. Here we find one of the major causes of the American Revolution— but to place it properly, we need to consider the Seven Years' War of 1756–1763, mainly involving Britain and France in a struggle for world supremacy. It was a worldwide conflict fought in Europe, North America and India, with Austria, Russia, Saxony, Sweden and Spain joining with the French, and Prussia and Hanover supporting Britain. It ended with the defeat of the French.

In the peace negotiations that followed, neither side cared much about who ended up with the Canadian colonies, but the sugar colonies were valuable. There were those in England who thought in terms of tax revenues, and argued that Britain should hold on to the captured French islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia. Against this, England's ‘American interests' wanted the French out of North America. The sugar interests realised that sugar from a British-owned Guadeloupe would compete in the English markets on equal terms with their own sugar, and they argued for the return of the Caribbean islands to France. In the end, England offered an exchange: some of the sugar islands for all of Canada (an offer which Voltaire mocked as exchanging sugar for snow).

This exchange had far-reaching consequences, but it was only part of the war settlement. To prevent the entire Louisiana territory falling to the British, in 1762 the French had secretly ceded (under the Treaty of Fontainebleau) the area west of the Mississippi and the Isle of Orleans to Spain. The Treaty of Paris (the 1763 peace treaty) ceded all French territory east of the Mississippi, except the Isle of Orleans, to the British, which meant that it would soon become part of the new United States. In an 1800 treaty, Spain transferred the land west of the Mississippi back to France, setting the scene for the Louisiana Purchase. The cards were dealt, the play was about to begin—and once again, the play revolved around sugar.

Returning to the Seven Years' War: after 1763, Britain continued to hold the ‘ceded islands' of Dominica, Grenada, St Vincent and Tobago, which were still allowed to import timber from Canada and the New England colonies, and to export molasses and rum to those places. The next year England made an unwise move, when Parliament passed the
Sugar Act
of 1764. The effect of this was to continue the
Molasses Act
of 1733 and place a duty

. . . for and upon all white or clayed sugars of the produce or manufacture of any colony or plantation in America, not under the dominion of his Majesty . . .; for and upon indico, and coffee of foreign produce or manufacture; for and upon all wines (except French wine) for and upon all wrought silks, bengals, and stuffs, mixed with silk or herba, of the manufacture of Persia, China, or East India, and all callico painted, dyed, printed, or stained there; and for and upon all foreign linen cloth called Cambrick and French Lawns, which shall be imported or brought into any colony or plantation in America, which now is, or hereafter may be, under the dominion of his Majesty . . .

Other parts of the Act placed duties on rum, spirits and molasses, and the Americans suddenly realised that England was surplus to their requirements. The merchants of Rhode Island had lost a great deal of shipping in the Seven Years' War and now were suffering from a tax that cut directly into their profits— and they did not like it. The smugglers of Rhode Island also found themselves under threat, and in 1764 the excise schooner
St John
was driven off by fire from a shore battery—Rhode Islanders still claim these as the first shots in the coming war. Another excise schooner, the
Liberty
, was burned by the people of Newport in 1769. In 1772 a third schooner, the
Gaspee
, was lured onto a sandbar and the Rhode Islanders went out in longboats and burned the ship.

Britain had been able to get away with taxing the American colonies when the French in Canada were a threat, but now, because of Britain's own choices under the Treaty of Paris, the colonies no longer felt at risk, and concluded that they were free to control their own destiny. It was sugar politics that had cleared the major part of the North American continent of other European powers; and it was sugar politics that led to the formation of an independent nation that could buy the land west of the Mississippi from the French, and so extend the realm of the English speakers across the whole continent. That in turn allowed the expansion of the United States, so early nineteenth-century sugar politics and policies can be said to have played a very real part in the shaping of the balance of power in the twentieth century.

On a much smaller scale sugar also shaped the future of Fiji. While formal power had been ceded to the British by the islands' chiefs in 1874, the Governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, was determined to avoid the land alienation that had happened in Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand. To make sure planters and other immigrants did not take over all the land, he formalised the Bose Levu Vakaturaga, the Great Council of Chiefs, to advise the governor on ‘Fijian affairs'. The tensions now seen between the descendants of Indian indentured labour and modern Fijians stem from this decision.

SEA POWER, SUGAR AND WAR

One curious effect of the American War of Independence was the British build-up of naval power. After a fleet of 24 French ships stopped a British fleet from entering Chesapeake Bay to relieve the army of Lord Cornwallis in September 1781, Britain's navy went into a decline which saw most of the British sugar colonies picked off by the French until Admiral Rodney's victory at The Saints in 1782 stopped the French taking Jamaica, the greatest prize of all. Whatever interpretation we put on the French role in America's war, the French had no doubts of what it was really about: the control of sugar colonies and sugar incomes.

After the peace of 1783, Britain began to rearm, building 43 new ships of the line, repairing 85 others, establishing a base in Australia and another on Norfolk Island in the nearby Pacific Ocean. (The French had looked at the island and dismissed it as only ‘fit for angels and eagles to reside', because it lacked safe anchorages.) While Norfolk Island was useless as a naval base, the British saw the Norfolk Island pines as timber for masts and spars, and they set about growing flax as the raw material for sail canvas. They ‘imported' (that is, kidnapped) two Maori men to weave the flax, not realising that among the Maori, weaving was done only by the women.

Most Australians believe their nation was created solely as a dumping ground for convicts, but the authorities also saw it as establishing a base that might support the British navy in the East Indies, still very much a theatre of war. James Matra, a Loyalist who had sailed to the Pacific and visited Norfolk Island and the Australian coast and Botany Bay with Cook in 1770, argued in 1783 for an Australian settlement, drawing in timber from New Zealand for naval purposes, and growing spices:

. . . as part of New South Wales lies in the same latitude with the Moluccas, and is very close to them, there is every reason to suppose that what nature has so bountifully bestowed on the small islands may also be found on the larger. But if . . . it should not be so . . . as the seeds are procured without difficulty, any quantity may speedily be cultivated.

Matra argued that ‘we might very powerfully annoy' either Holland or Spain from the new base in time of war. He also argued from time to time that Australia might offer a good home to American loyalists, and that various trades might prosper there, but oddly enough he never mentioned sugar, perhaps because Britain already had an excellent source of sugar in the West Indies.

It was this wealth of sugar, and the wealth of the sugar growers, who held a bloc of seats in the British Parliament, that would shape British naval policy and rearmament and influence the way in which the 1793 war with France (which ran in fits and starts until 1815) would be fought. In the long term, the far greater maritime and naval strength of Britain in the Caribbean could be seen to have encouraged sugar growing in other areas, particularly Mauritius and Brazil—and, in the longer term, to have fostered the use of sugar cane's greatest competitor, the sugar beet.

BRANDY FROM OIL COGNAC

Take of pure spirits 10 gallons, New England rum 2 quarts, or Jamaica rum 1 quart, and oil cognac from 30 to 40 drops, put in half a pint of alcohol, colour with tincture of kino, or burned sugar, which is generally preferred. Mix well and bottle.