Original photo by LWH/ Alamy Stock Photo
Today Captain Morgan is one of the world’s most well-known buccaneers — not for the Welshman’s very real 17th-century exploits (of which there were many), but because of the spiced rum bottles that bear his name. History knows him as Sir Henry Morgan, lieutenant governor of Jamaica and arguably the most infamous buccaneer who ever lived. In the 17th and 18th centuries, buccaneers were a distinct flavor of privateer (sort of a legal pirate), usually bankrolled by the English, who harassed the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a factHistorians don’t know how pirates spoke when sailing the high seas, but the pirate-speak of today (“arrg,” “ye matey,” etc.) can be traced to the 1950 Disney film “Treasure Island,” with Robert Newton as Long John Silver. Newton created the accent based on his West Country dialect.
Morgan first arrived in the Caribbean around 1654, and became captain of a privateer vessel eight years later. Soon, he was plundering Spanish colonies in the Caribbean with support from the English crown. Morgan proved so adept at the trade that he amassed a great fortune, established sugar plantations in Jamaica, and by the decade’s end, had 36 ships and around 1,800 men under his command. Then, in 1671, Morgan attacked Spanish-held Panama City, not knowing that England had signed a treaty with Spain a year earlier. To appease the enraged Spanish, England arrested Morgan and sent him to London, but he received a hero’s welcome there, with King Charles II knighting him in 1674. Morgan soon returned to Jamaica, where he lived out the rest of his days. Even before his death in 1688, published stories detailed Morgan’s buccaneering career. Around 250 years later, in 1944, a distiller named Seagram’s bought a spiced rum recipe from a Jamaican pharmacy. The infamous Captain Morgan seemed a fitting namesake for the Caribbean-born liquor.
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The island of ______ in the West Indies is home to the world’s oldest rum distillery.
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The island of Barbados in the West Indies is home to the world’s oldest rum distillery.
Rum was the most popular liquor in colonial America.
Today the U.S. is known for its world-class whiskey and craft beers, among other beverages, but in colonial America, rum was king. By the 1630s, distilleries in the West Indies began transforming molasses into rum, a liquor perfectly suited for colonial society. Rum kept better than beer and cider, and with easily available raw materials (due to the grossly exploitative Atlantic slave trade) and a higher alcohol by volume than its competition, the liquor quickly became popular with colonists as both a libation and a medicine. The first colonial rum distillery opened on Staten Island in 1664, and another opened in Boston three years later. By one account, colonists drank 3.7 gallons of the stuff annually per person by the time of the American Revolution, and the sweet liquor was so valuable that it was sometimes even traded as currency. As the colonies’ relationship with Britain soured — most directly in the forms of the Molasses Act (1733), the Sugar Act (1764), and eventually a wartime blockade — distillers moved away from increasingly costly rum. Instead, they began producing more of a corn-based alcohol known as whiskey, a liquor that soon became synonymous with American patriotism. With that, the reign of rum was more or less over.
Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.
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