Non-European Worlds
Alcoholic beverages did not originate in Europe, but in the thousand years up to 1500, they became entrenched in European popular and elite cultures to an extent that was not only unprecedented but also unparalleled anywhere else in the contemporary world. Even though large numbers of Europeans must (for simple financial reasons) have drunk only water on a daily basis, beer and wine had become so widely consumed in Europe by 1500 that we must consider them staples of the region’s diet. When Europeans began systematically to contact, conquer, and colonize regions in the Americas, Africa, and Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, alcohol was so integral to their material, social, and cultural lives that living without it was almost as inconceivable as living without bread.
When Europeans sailed the vast distances to the Americas, Africa, and Asia, they took alcohol as part of their subsistence supplies during the voyages that involved weeks and months at sea. Early explorers shared alcohol with the indigenous inhabitants they encountered, just as they used alcohol for hospitality purposes in Europe. Then, as contact with specific regions became more regular and European settlements were established, traders and settlers began to introduce their alcoholic beverages on a more regular basis to the indigenous populations of regions as disparate as Peru, New England, and India. They used alcohol as a medium of exchange to purchase everything from beaver pelts in North America and spices in south Asia to slaves in West Africa and sex everywhere. Eventually, as Europeans established permanent settlements, they planted vineyards, built breweries, and later constructed distilleries, making themselves self-sufficient in alcohol in many parts of the non-European world.
But the Europeans who settled far from their points of origin did not simply replicate the drinking patterns of the places they came from. Alcohol consumption has historically reflected more general social and cultural conditions, and these were often quite different in colonial contexts from those in Europe. Colonial populations were often (especially during early phases of settlement) composed largely of adult men, the heaviest-drinking demographic in Europe. This meant that per capita alcohol consumption in the colonies was higher than in Europe, where it was moderated by the presence of women and children, who drank much less. Indigenous populations that began to consume the European settlers’ alcohol created their own patterns of consumption, and the interplay between the two drinking cultures frequently gave rise to problematic relationships.
But before these relationships developed, Europeans had to reach the far-flung destinations they would eventually turn into colonies. The importance of alcohol on long-distance voyages is well known. Crews expected regular, if modest, servings of alcohol, and alcohol lasted better than other beverages at sea. Barrels of beer, wine, and brandy were generally among the supplies of food and drink taken onboard to sustain the crew for weeks and months at a time. When the Arbella ferried Puritans from England to Massachusetts in 1630, it carried 10,000 gallons of wine, 42 tons of beer, 14 tons of water, and 12 gallons of brandy. On longer voyages that followed coastlines more closely than a transatlantic crossing, stops might be made to restock food and fresh water. But there were few, if any, opportunities to replenish alcohol supplies. Longer voyages necessitated more alcohol, and it is estimated that the Portuguese expedition to India in 1500 carried more than a quarter of a million liters of wine, and that the 1,200 men involved in the expedition drank about 1.2 liters of wine a day. Wine not only was a vital part of the crew’s diet and helped sailors overcome their fears about sailing through unknown waters; it was also useful ballast for the ships, even though its effectiveness was reduced as it was consumed.1
Maintaining food in edible condition was often difficult, and keeping water safe and potable was no easier. Stored in wooden barrels, water fouled within weeks and took on unpleasant odors and flavors. In the late 1600s there were projects to construct desalinization plants onboard ships so that seawater could be made potable enough for drinking by crews. But effective and efficient desalinization plants were far off, and one way to preserve water in potable condition in the meantime was to add brandy to the water barrels. The concentrated alcohol, even when diluted, killed some of the bacteria and slowed, if it did not prevent entirely, the spoilage of a ship’s water supplies. Beer and wine were also taken onboard and served (often diluted) to the crew, but they could also spoil over time, especially when ships sailed through hot climates. Distilled spirits alone survived these voyages in good condition.
Very long voyages, such as those from Europe to Asia around Africa, posed particular problems. When, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch established a lucrative trade in spices with the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), their ships were at sea for more than six months each way. These voyages taxed supplies onboard, and even though ships stopped at stations on the African and Indian coasts to take on food and water, alcohol provisions were stretched thin. The Dutch planted vines in their colony near what is now Cape Town—thus inaugurating the important South African wine industry—for the express purpose of providing wine for their ships at this halfway point. Jan van Riebeeck, a doctor, established the first vineyard in 1658, and the first wine was made the following year. Cape wine was consumed by the local settlers, taken onboard ships for consumption during voyages, and shipped for consumption by Dutch settlers in their Asian colonies—although these settlers complained that the quality was much lower than the European wines they received.2
Alcohol was by no means unknown to most of the populations with whom Europeans made contact in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Van Riebeeck might have been the first person to make wine from grapes in sub-Saharan Africa, but peoples in many parts of Africa had long made low-alcohol beverages by fermenting such products as cereals, honey, fruit, sap from palm trees, and milk.3 They were consumed at myriad ceremonies, such as marriages, and were used to mark social and economic transactions, as well as for ancestor worship. They were also served as a sign of hospitality: when the first Portuguese emissary visited the kingdom of Kongo in 1491, he was given palm wine.4 Subsequent Portuguese visitors probably reciprocated sporadically with gifts of wine, and European alcohol began to reach southern African populations in a consistent way in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Portuguese explorers and traders deployed wine as a commercial medium of exchange. At this time, wine was an important Portuguese export product, and it had value to Africans, even though they had their own fermented beverages, because wine had a much higher alcohol content. The local cereal-based beer probably had about 2 percent alcohol; palm wine, 5 percent. But the wine imported from Portugal very likely had an alcohol content of 10 percent or more and was much more potent than the locally produced beverages.
Distilled spirits were much stronger, of course, and in the 1700s, volumes of rum and grain-based spirits began to flow into regions of Africa, and alcohol and firearms became the preferred commodities of exchange. Much of the grain-based alcohol originated in Hamburg, Europe’s second-largest port after London. Some rum arrived on the west coast of Africa from New England, while distilleries were built in Liverpool, the English port, to produce gin specifically for export to Africa.5
Portuguese wine, much of it transshipped through the Canary Islands, played an important role in the slave trade from Angola to Brazil, starting from the mid-1500s. Violent disputes between indigenous and Portuguese slave parties led the governor of Luanda, the region at the heart of the Portuguese slave trade, to ban the transport of alcohol to the interior slave markets. But by then wine was established as a valued medium of exchange, and in some cases it was the main means of payment for slaves. The importance of wine was thrown into relief when the Dutch seized Luanda for several years in the 1640s. Although they found about 70,000 liters of wine, it was soon consumed or traded away, and the Dutch discovered that the indigenous slave dealers were unwilling to sell slaves without some payment in wine. They were forced to order wine from Spain.6
The Dutch were also active in the Caribbean region, where the Carib peoples of the Lesser Antilles (and the nearby regions of South America) produced a fermented drink from the root of the cassava (or manioc) plant.7 Called variously oüicou and perino, it was made by Carib women who grated the cassava root, added water, and let it soak until it became a thick, brown, gravylike substance. It was then strained, and the moist flour was formed into cakes and baked. Women chewed the cakes and spat the masticated liquid into a container, where it fermented into a beverage with an alcohol level similar to beer’s.8
Chewing introduces enzymes from saliva that transform the starches in the cassava root to sugar, which allows fermentation to occur, and this process both fascinated and disgusted Europeans—not least because they knew that the cassava root is extremely toxic, as it produces cyanide on contact with the human digestive system. One account from Barbados in the mid-1600s describes a drink “made of cassavy root, which I told you is a strong poison; and this they cause their old wives, who have a small remainder of teeth, to chaw and spit out into water. . . . This juyce in three or four hours will work [ferment] and purge itself of the poisonous quality.” Some Europeans reported trying the drink, and a few found it “fine” and “delicate”; at least one noted that the flavor belied the “beastly Preparation” that produced it.9 Charles Darwin described the practice in Tierra del Fuego as “disgusting.”10 But Europeans had no such qualms about mobbie (or mabi), an alcoholic drink made by the Carib from sweet potatoes, and it became popular among whites until the eighteenth century.11
When the Spanish conquistadores invaded Central and South America, they brought wine with them and were continually reprovisioned, but they soon set about planting vines to make themselves independent of supplies from Spain that must often have arrived in poor condition. But the indigenous peoples they encountered already knew various kinds of alcohol, made from the raw materials readily available to them. In preconquest Mayan society, public ceremonies were accompanied by the drinking of balche, a beverage with strong religious associations that was made from fermented honey and tree bark. It was low in alcohol, so considerable quantities had to be consumed before anyone would get drunk on it.12 But public intoxication did occur, and it was often followed by ritualized violence that is said to have reinforced rather than disturbed the social order.13
In many Andean regions, people drank beer (called chicha) made from maize (as well as yucca and other fruit) as part of their daily diet and had possibly done so for more than a thousand years when the Spanish arrived. Maize beer was part of the diet of the Inca, who also used it on ritual and ceremonial occasions, such as funerals, when chicha was offered to the dead. It was produced by women in every community within the Inca empire but always under central control, and the state looked after its distribution to people employed on massive public projects such as roads, canals, and buildings. The Spanish were initially hostile to chicha and banned its production, but it was so embedded in the Inca economy as a medium of exchange that they soon abandoned this early prohibition policy.14
In Mexico, too, the Spanish encountered peoples who for thousands of years had consumed various fermented beverages. The best known is pulque, a milky beverage with an alcohol content of about 5 percent made from the fermented sap of the agave (or maguey) plant (but a different variety of agave than that used for making tequila). A big agave could yield 4 to 7 liters of sap a day and produce up to a thousand liters of pulque before it died. A plantation could thus produce considerable volumes of pulque. Pulque had dietary and health benefits (it is a rich source of vitamin B1) and might have played a role in reducing the incidence of dysentery and other diseases. It would also have been a safer drink when water supplies were polluted and a source of liquid where water supplies were scarce.15 Even so, pulque must be consumed within a day or two of being made because it degrades quickly and takes on a strong, unpleasant odor. One Spanish account from 1552 suggested that the smell was worse that the stench given off by a dead dog.16
Pulque was not part of the daily diet of Mexico’s peoples; but it was used in religious celebrations, and there are parallels between the cultural uses of pulque in Mexico and of wine in ancient Middle Eastern and Chinese cultures. The indigenous Mexicans had many wine gods, all known under the generic name Ometochtli (Two Rabbits). A Huaxtec (Aztec) account of the origins of pulque has a woman discover how to tap the agave for its sap, just as Babylonian and other ancient cultures stressed the roles of women in the discovery of wine. A story of the first pulque feast has all present being given only four cups so that no one would get drunk, except a Huaxtec chieftain who had five. Echoing the biblical story of Noah, who stripped naked after becoming intoxicated by wine, the Huaxtec leader is said to have become so drunk from pulque that he took off his clothes, so offending the others present that they decided to punish him.17
Although the Spanish were spectacularly successful in establishing wine production throughout Latin America in the sixteenth century, especially in Chile and Peru, viticulture failed in Mexico. Pulque retained its importance as a source of alcohol; indeed, it not only survived but became known as Mexico’s national drink in the first half of the twentieth century. But the early colonial Spanish authorities became concerned when production increased and pulque, which was much less expensive than wine, became a regular drink not only of the indigenous peoples but also of poorer Spanish settlers. The authorities thought that simple, white pulque (pulque blanco) was not problematic, but that when mixed with herbs, roots, and other additives (pulque mezclado), its effects were extreme, bordering on what might be called hallucinogenic. Although the colonial authorities tried to discover what the additives were, they only came up with an unwieldy list that included orange peel, the root of various trees, peppers, meat, and animal excrement.18 As early as 1529, only ten years after Spanish settlement began, edicts were issued against mixing pulque with other substances, but unadulterated pulque was freely produced, sold, and consumed. By the late 1500s, the church and secular authorities were expressing alarm at increased consumption,19 and in 1608 the Spanish viceroy gave jurisdiction over pulque to the indigenous leaders. In 1648, a commission of judges was established to regulate the beverage.20
Tolerance of pulque was cemented by the 1650 decision to allow the colonial government to tax it and by the realization soon afterward that the revenues thus raised were considerable: according to a report sent to Spain in 1663, the pulque tax could raise as much as 150,000 pesos a year. The prospect of such fiscal benefits led to a new appreciation of the beverage. A report to the royal government drew attention to its “healthy and medicinal” properties and suggested that even when people abused it, the consumer, not the drink itself, was the problem. The report pointed out that if excess consumption were a ground for outlawing pulque, it could just as well be argued that wine should be banned. Still, there was some concern about the effects of pulque on the indigenous peoples, and the viceroy of Mexico was asked to report on whether it caused them “more drunkenness than wine” and led them into “public sins and other insults to the service of God.”21
Pulque remained an issue between the Spanish government, which wanted the tax revenues that the drink brought in, and the Spanish viceroy in Mexico, who regarded pulquerías (the stands where pulque was sold and which could attract large crowds of drinkers) as sites of immorality and criminality. The colonial authorities blamed pulque for fueling the violence that led to the destruction of the royal palace and other government buildings in Mexico City in June 1692, even though the uprising reflected popular frustration with food shortages. The Spanish viceroy immediately banned the consumption of pulque in Mexico City, and ten days later he extended the ban to the entire colony. But two weeks after that, pulque was again legalized, as long as it was pulque blanco, unmixed with roots and herbs. One historian has drawn attention to the parallel between the duality of “good, healthy” pulque (pure pulque) and “bad, dangerous” pulque (mixed pulque), on one hand, and the desire to prevent the mixing of ethnic communities in the Spanish colony, on the other: three weeks after the uprising, the viceroy commissioned a proposal to divide Mexico City into separate Spanish and indigenous zones, the way it had originally been set out. The danger of mixing pulque became, then, a metaphor for the danger of mixing ethnic communities.22
But when the Spanish first conquered the Americas, they were far less interested in pulque than in fostering the production of wine. By the early 1500s, when the Spanish extended their empire down the west coast of South America, wine was consumed by all levels of the population of Spain. The expulsion of the Muslims had cleared the way for the recovery of Spanish viticulture and wine production, and consumption had risen. Most Spaniards were accustomed to drinking wine every day, so it is not surprising that when they settled in the Americas, one of their priorities was planting vineyards. In 1519, a royal instruction ordered that vine cuttings and rootstock should be sent on every ship bound for the New World, particularly in regions where water suitable for drinking was scarce.23 Wine was also needed for religious purposes, and viticulture became closely associated with the Jesuit and other missions throughout Latin America. Even so, only the priest drank wine at communion at that time, so the volume of wine required for religious rituals was very small; the specific needs of the church cannot explain the vast amounts of wine that the Spanish American colonies were soon producing, and it was clearly far more a secular commodity than a religious one.
Although wine could be—and for some time was—shipped from Spain to the New World, doing so was not only expensive but also risky, because the wine was unstable and often arrived on the other side of the Atlantic in poor condition. Even so, Spanish producers saw the colonies as potentially lucrative markets for their wine, and they attempted to restrict wine production there. In 1595, under pressure from Spanish producers, Philip II forbade the planting of more grapevines, except by the Jesuit missions, in the American colonies. But his edict was largely ignored, and by then, in any case, the Spanish settlers and missions had firmly established viticulture throughout the region. The first vines in Latin America were planted in Mexico in the early 1520s, and vineyards were established in Peru by about 1540, in Chile in the 1540s, in Argentina in the 1550s, and in Bolivia and Colombia in the following decade. In short, viticulture was extended throughout much of the continent (and in many specific regions now known for quality wine production) within fifty years of the beginning of Spanish colonization. Compared to this, the millennia-long progress of viticulture from Mesopotamia to Egypt and then to Greece moved at a glacial pace.
The church took a pioneering role in promoting viticulture in many regions, and the skill of Jesuits and Augustinians in identifying suitable vineyard sites was important. But the authorities also encouraged secular participation in wine production. In 1524, Hernán Cortes, the commander of New Spain, ordered settlers in the district that was to become Mexico City to plant vines; any settler who had been granted land and indigenous laborers to work it was required to plant a thousand best-quality vines for every hundred indigenous people he owned. But the attempt to make wine in the area was futile because the climate was unsuitable. Northern Mexico was another matter, and by the end of the 1500s, wine was being produced near the current border with Texas. One winery established there, on land granted by King Philip II in 1597, is still in operation. The first vines in Baja California, close to the Pacific Ocean and now Mexico’s main wine-producing region, were planted more than a century later, in the early 1700s.
Maintaining and extending the area in vines remained a preoccupation of the early colonial administrations, and soon Peru became the key wine-producing region in Latin America. Vines were first planted about 1540, and in 1567 an official visiting southern Peru called for the planting of more vines in a vineyard near Lake Titicaca. The aim—to guarantee a local supply of wine so as to free settlers from dependence on imports from Spain—was soon realized. Growing conditions in some Peruvian river valleys were so good that by the 1560s, only twenty years after the first vines were planted, there were 40,000 hectares of vineyards. One of the most important regions, the Moquegua Valley in the south of Peru, also benefited from proximity to silver-mining communities, which became important markets.24 Peruvian wine and, later, brandy not only served local markets but were important commodities in trade with other regions of Latin America, and they became second in importance only to silver in the development of the Peruvian economy.25
The Peruvian wine industry hit a boom cycle in the late 1500s with growing demand for wine, and the number of wineries increased rapidly. Perhaps they increased too rapidly, for in the early seventeenth century a glut of wine depressed prices. Together with some natural disasters (a volcanic eruption in 1600 and an earthquake in 1604), the depression caused the industry to contract, although it expanded again in the eighteenth century when the growing popularity of brandy created renewed demand for grapes. By the late 1700s, a frenzy of planting had led to vineyards replacing other crops in the fertile Moquegua Valley, forcing the inhabitants to buy the beans, corn, wheat, and potatoes they had previously grown. By then the region was producing massive volumes of wine for distillation into brandy for export. In 1786 nearly 7 million liters of wine were produced for this purpose.26
The extension of grapevines and the production of massive volumes of wine throughout the Spanish colonies of Latin America in the 1500s were an inspiration and a model for the English when they began to colonize North America early in the following century. Apparently unaware of, or discounting the significance of, the vastly different climatic and other conditions that distinguished South from North America, the English planned to cultivate grapes on the eastern seaboard of North America and thus free England from dependence on France for its wine and brandy supplies. In the first permanent English settlement, Jamestown, in Virginia, there were attempts to grow grapes during the first two years of settlement, from 1607, but despite constant failures, the inhabitants came under regular pressure to make wine. In 1619 each householder was instructed to plant and maintain ten vines a year and to learn viticulture. The results must not have been impressive because three years later each household received, on the king’s command, a manual on cultivating vines and making wine. The French author, who had never been to America, recommended using indigenous grapes; he suggested optimistically that those who followed his advice “may presently have wine in Virginia to drink.”27
Further acts mandating the planting of vines in Virginia followed in 1623 and 1624, but as with Spanish attempts a century earlier to get settlers in Mexico City to grow vines, official policy foundered on climatic and other conditions. Vines imported to Virginia from Europe died from winter cold or from diseases they were not accustomed to. Meanwhile, wine made from indigenous grapes was rejected as having unattractive flavors. A few individuals claimed to have made excellent wine with native grapes, and some barrels of Virginia wine were sent to London in 1622 to demonstrate the colony’s potential. But it spoiled en route and probably did more harm than good to the colony’s prospects as a wine region. Only when tobacco became a successful crop in Virginia did the English lose interest in trying to make wine there.
Producing wine proved as elusive to other settlers in North America. Dutch colonists planted vineyards near New York in the 1640s, Swedish settlers did the same along the Delaware River, and Germans tried to cultivate vines for wine in Pennsylvania.28 Later, in the 1680s, William Penn, after whom the state was named, vigorously supported viticulture and expressed the hope that his land would soon be producing “as good wine as any European countries of the same latitude do yield.”29 He planted Spanish and French vines in eastern Pennsylvania, but there are no records of the success of the wine. There are, however, records of Penn’s purchases of French, Spanish, and Portuguese wines from an importer, and they probably speak loudly about the success of his own vineyards.
The Virginia settlers eventually turned to brewing beer using indigenous corn, but Dutch migrants in their New Amsterdam colony are generally credited with making the first European-style beer in America as early as 1613. Beer became the staple alcohol for Europeans in North America during the seventeenth century, as production of wine—the drink of the upper classes in northern Europe, where most of the migrants came from—seemed to pose an insurmountable challenge. When a group of English migrants, the Puritans, arrived in Plymouth Bay in 1621 onboard the Mayflower, they reported seeing “vines everywhere.” These were the indigenous vines that were failing to make acceptable wine in Virginia at that time, but they caught the eyes of the Puritans, who undoubtedly imagined bountiful supplies of wine, and not only for communion.
The Puritans saw rivers and streams everywhere, too, but their English experience made them suspicious of drinking the local water. Having run out of beer, the first Plymouth settlers had to drink water for some time, but they did so reluctantly and only as a last resort. The irony was that the available water was (unlike much water in England) quite safe to drink, as the settlers discovered. William Wood wrote of it in 1635 that “there can be no better water in the world, yet dare I not prefer it before a good Beere, as some have done, but any man will choose it before bad Beere, Wheay, or Buttermilk. Those that drinke it be as healthfull, fresh and lustie, as they that drinke beere.”30 Living in Massachusetts, the Puritans seem to have been more fortunate than their compatriots in Virginia. As early as 1625, the water in Virginia was described as “at a flood verily salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men.”31 Not only were many Virginia wells contaminated by salt, but the warmer climate enabled bacterial growths that produced epidemics in 1657–59 and for much of the 1680s and 1690s.
Although drinking water ran against almost all medical advice in contemporary England, many Puritans clearly did so, perhaps on a regular basis. But for cultural and probably aesthetic and sensory reasons, they preferred alcohol, especially beer. Their ships carried substantial supplies. The Mayflower had provisions of beer and brandy; the Talbot, which arrived in 1628, off-loaded 45 tuns (about 10,000 gallons) of beer, while the Arbella, which took Puritans to Boston in 1630, brought thousands of gallons of alcohol in the form of wine, beer, and brandy. Immigrants to Massachusetts, whose number increased dramatically during the 1630s, were advised to bring with them barley, hop roots, and copper kettles—the basic necessities of beer production. In the same decade, rye, barley, and wheat were planted, and many Massachusetts inhabitants became self-sufficient in beer by the mid-1630s.32
Most brewing was done by women in their kitchens, as it had been in England a century or two earlier. In 1656, women in the Chesapeake area were denounced for being too lazy to brew: “Beare is indeed in some places constantly drunken, in other some, nothing but Water or Milk and Water or Beverage; and that is where the good wives (if I may call them so) are negligent and idle; for it is not for want of Corn to make Malt with (for the Country affords enough) but because they are sloathful and careless.”33 In this respect, America represented an earlier stage of brewing organization than contemporary Europe, where much domestic brewing by women had been replaced by commercial brewing by men. But a 1637 law requiring a £100 license to brew beer for sale—far too steep for most women to afford—indicated that brewing in the American colonies would take the same direction. Additional regulations controlled the price and alcohol content of beer, but although they were repealed as unworkable within two years, they set the tone of the complex regulation of alcohol that would follow in British North America.
For a time after the 1637 rules were repealed, brewing in Massachusetts was unregulated, and it continued to fall to domestic brewsters (women brewers) who probably made a batch of beer every four or five days. Most was made for consumption within the household where it was brewed, but some was sold or bartered for goods as disparate as fish and millstones. When it was not drunk within the household where it was made, it might also be consumed in public, on festive occasions, at funerals, and at the completion of building projects. Knowing beer’s nutritive value, women purchased it to drink during pregnancy and childbirth, and the elderly bought it to drink when they were ill. For the great part, however, brewing at this time was irregular and unorganized; beer was made simply when and where it was needed.
Beer was embraced by Puritans as a healthy beverage. “Puritanism” has become associated generically with an abhorrence of drinking and many expressions of sexuality, but while it is true that seventeenth-century Puritans opposed activities such as gambling, playing games, and dancing, they were not worried about moderate drinking for nutritional purposes; consuming alcoholic beverages on a daily basis was as acceptable as eating bread. The Puritans recognized the particular cultural and religious value of wine among the other alcoholic drinks available; but it did not travel well across the Atlantic, and sporadic attempts to make it from indigenous vines failed. One prominent preacher, Increase Mather, called wine “a good creature of God” but warned that no one should drink “a Cup of Wine more than is good for him.”34 The Puritans, boat-people who fled the Anglican religious settlement in England, were largely followers of John Calvin, who had imposed rigorous drinking laws on Geneva in the mid-1500s. Calvin approved of moderate drinking but drew a line at the point where consuming any form of alcohol became simply a social act for pleasure, when a drinker might easily slip over the line into drunkenness.
Drunkenness alone was sin enough, but it was compounded when it resulted in blasphemy, immorality, and violence. This was a mainstream attitude common to all Christian denominations, and it informed policies toward alcohol throughout the English colonies in America during the 1600s. But no authorities strove as hard to implement it as the Puritan leaders of Massachusetts. They believed the Catholic and Anglican churches in England had been lax in enforcing God’s laws and had allowed alcohol to undermine morality and social order. They were determined to prevent the same thing from happening in Massachusetts, and throughout the seventeenth century, they fought a continuous battle against the excessive consumption of alcohol.
Many of their regulations focused on the providers of alcohol: taverns, inns, and “ordinaries,” the American version of the alehouse, typically a room in a private dwelling where neighbors could drink homemade beer served by members of the family. Most ordinaries, which probably provided their owners with no more than a secondary income, were modest and spartan, but a few provided luxuries such as cloths on the tables, cushions on the chairs, and candles. One partial financial account from Essex County, Massachusetts, shows that a Samuel Bennett drank at Thomas Clark’s ordinary nineteen times between June 1657 and September 1658 and downed 3 quarts of beer (at 2 pence a quart) on each occasion. Visiting once every three weeks cannot have made him a regular patron, and his spending all of 9 shillings and 6 pence in a fifteen-month period would not have made Thomas Clark rich. Other public drinking establishments in the colonies—inns and taverns—varied in their services. Some served food, some provided accommodations, and depending on the licensing rules in force, they served beer, wine, cider, and spirits.
All were regulated in some way. In the 1630s, laws specified how much owners could charge for meals and beer, how many nights a guest could stay in a tavern, and even the maximum time a patron could spend drinking in a tavern or ordinary: “ye space of halfe an houre.”35 As early as 1637, the General Court of Massachusetts expressed its horror at behavior in drinking establishments: “It hath appeared unto this Court, upon many said complaints, that much drunkenness, wast of the good creatures of God, mispence of precious time, & other disorders have frequently fallen out in the inns, & common victualling houses within this jurisdiction, whereby God is much dishonored, the profession of religion reproached, & the welfare of this commonwealth greatly impaired.”36 The magistrates’ solution was to limit the price of all alcohol to a penny a quart, which effectively restricted sales to beer. Constables were urged to investigate and prosecute all suspected alcohol offenses.
For all that laws focused on drinking in taverns, much colonial drinking took place where alcohol (especially beer and cider, but also distilled spirits) was produced: in the home. In 1636 and 1654, Massachusetts law specified that only members of families (not strangers) were permitted to drink homemade alcohol, and they were forbidden to drink to excess. In 1675, Massachusetts established the office of tithingman—one for every ten or twelve families—whose responsibility was to report violations of alcohol laws in the colony’s homes.37 Because these “sober and discreet” men were appointed in open meetings, all the people under their surveillance knew who they were, so it is unlikely that they were very effective—although their very presence might well have been a deterrent to excessive drinking.
Massachusetts laws also regulated beer production. Brewing was forbidden on Sundays, and in 1651 brewers were required to make their beer from barley, not from the less expensive maize. Regulations stipulated the price of beer according to the amount of malt used; the higher the malt content, the higher the price. More stringent measures followed in the 1670s, when beverages with much higher alcohol levels became widely available. In 1672, three-quarters of Boston’s ordinaries sold only beer, but by 1679, all sold beer and cider, two-thirds also sold wine, and half sold distilled spirits, in addition. There was also a steady growth in the number of liquor retailers, and they far outnumbered the ordinaries. In response to the widening availability of alcohol, a 1680 Massachusetts law limited the number of drinking places in each town. Boston, with a population of 4,500, was allocated only sixteen (ten inns and six wine taverns), a reduction of about half, plus “eight retaylors for wine & strong licquors out of doores.”38Other major towns were permitted between two and six establishments, and smaller communities were allowed just one each. One result was the decline of small-scale brewing and the rise of fewer, larger, commercial breweries, each associated with an ordinary.
Massachusetts also set down guidelines for acceptable levels of drinking, just as many modern governments recommend maximum daily servings of alcohol. In 1645, the General Court declared that it was “excessive drinking of wine when above halfe a pinte is allowed at one time to one [person] to drinke,” and that a fine of 2 shillings and 6 pence would be levied on anyone “for sitting idle, & continuing drinking above halfe an houre.”39 Later laws provided a fine of 5 shillings for drinking “at unseasonable times” or after 9:00 PM and set down penalties for alcohol-sellers who permitted patrons to drink excessively, for more than half an hour, or too late at night. Needless to say, gambling, playing games, and dancing were forbidden in taverns. The result was a complex of regulations surrounding the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol, all designed to prevent the excessive drinking that Massachusetts leaders thought so harmful to religion, morals, and social order.
The penalties for drunkenness were set out time and time again, which suggests that compliance was far from common, and there were ascending scales of punishments for recidivists. In the 1670s and 1680s, anyone who drank excessively was fined 3 shillings and 4 pence, while anyone found drunk was fined 10 shillings. Second and third offenses were punished by double and treble the fines, and anyone unable to pay was whipped “to the number of ten stripes” and could be put in the stocks for three hours. Anyone convicted of excessive drinking or drunkenness a fourth time was imprisoned until two people provided sureties for the offender’s good behavior.40
Despite the anxiety about excessive drinking, access to alcohol was clearly a priority in the early settlement of America, so much so that when Georgia was established in 1733, each new settler was offered 44 gallons of beer.41 At 2 quarts a day per person, that would have lasted one person about three months (if the beer remained drinkable that long), time enough to start brewing to satisfy their own needs. The plan was to encourage beer-drinking in the colony, but the governor’s generosity went further and undermined the intention, for he also offered settlers 65 gallons of molasses, the raw material for rum. The settlers quickly fermented and then distilled the molasses, making themselves a much stronger alcohol that lasted much longer than beer in Georgia’s climate.
Rum became popular in taverns in European and North American port towns that were frequented by crews on shore leave. Although it never gained much of a market in the main inland population centers of Britain and Europe, rum became a very popular drink throughout North America. Rum and molasses, as well as sugar, became key export commodities from the Caribbean to the North American colonies from the middle of the seventeenth century. Molasses was used for sweetening foods and for rum production at distilleries closer to markets in the American colonies, and sugar producers in the Caribbean were happy to export the raw material to North America, thereby saving themselves the cost and risks of making and shipping rum. By the end of the 1600s, there were numerous rum distilleries in the British colonies, especially in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
Even after Americans began making whiskey from corn, rum was the preferred “strong drink” and the main alternative to beer until the American War of Independence disrupted the sugar trade with British colonies in the Caribbean. In this sense, the European (especially the British) settlers in North America established drinking patterns different from those they had left on the other side of the Atlantic. Beer was the most widely consumed alcohol in Britain and many of its widely scattered colonies, but distilled spirits—mainly rum—had a much higher profile in North America. The raw materials were readily available, and given the lower volume per unit of alcohol, it was much more easily shipped—a real advantage, when supplies needed to be transported by land to the remote communities that were established deeper and deeper in the interior of North America.
Not only did European settlers in North America diverge from European patterns of alcohol consumption; they introduced alcohol to the continent’s indigenous peoples. Despite occasional references to beer made from birch bark, there is general agreement that fermentation was not known, even for limited ceremonial purposes, in native North American cultures before the arrival of Europeans. The exception was several tribes in the southwestern United States who made alcohol for religious purposes by fermenting cactus juice. Elsewhere on the continent, there were beverages containing caffeine and others having a stimulant effect. Although this effect can result from alcohol consumption, the peculiar series of effects of alcohol—including elation and risk-taking—were unknown before European contact. Native Americans had no words to describe alcohol, the kind of drinking it made possible, and the sensory effects it produced, and new words were introduced to their languages to denote them.42
Early European explorers gave Native Americans wine and brandy (as well as food, firearms, and other goods) for many reasons, sometimes as greetings and offerings, sometimes as trading commodities, and sometimes for other purposes. Europeans are said to have plied Native Americans with alcohol until they agreed to transactions they would not have made if they were sober.43 In the early 1600s, English explorer Henry Hudson provided alcohol to the people he encountered “to find out if they had any treacherie in them”—presumably meaning that under the influence of alcohol they would reveal any plans to attack Hudson’s party. The voyage’s chronicler noted that when one of them became intoxicated, “it was strange to them, for they could not tell how to take it,” reinforcing the belief that alcohol had been unknown to this population.44
Transactions involving alcohol between Europeans and Native Americans seem to have become increasingly common in the first half of the seventeenth century. As European settlement extended down the eastern seaboard of North America and inland, and as supplies of locally produced beer and rum became more plentiful, the indigenous populations had ready access to alcohol. It was supplied by explorers and merchants at remote trading posts to such an extent that, by the 1630s, exchange rates between alcohol and beaver skins had been formalized. In Maine, 4 pounds of skins could be exchanged for 7 gallons of brandy and spice, while 2 pounds of skins netted the hunters 6 gallons of mead.45 Indigenous peoples also had access to alcohol in the heart of European settlements. Some bought alcohol directly from producers, such as women who made beer in their homes; some were given alcohol as payment for work they did for Europeans, while others occasionally drank alcohol alongside Europeans in town taverns.46
These increasingly common transactions aroused anxiety among the colonial authorities, and from the middle of the seventeenth century, one colony after another enacted laws forbidding the sale of alcohol to Native Americans. The Dutch in New Netherlands did so in 1643, and Connecticut followed suit in 1687.47 There was a general belief that Native Americans could not hold their alcohol, that they frequently drank to a point of severe intoxication and often drank only to get drunk, and that their drunkenness created problems of social order. In 1684, a woman was charged with having provided alcohol to “an Indian Squaw.” She pleaded in her defense that her husband was at sea, she was supporting small children, and “the Indian tempting me with Sixpence for my pains, I was willing to get a penny to relieve my Self and children, and so fell into this offence.”48
It is clear that whatever the advantages Europeans got from these transactions, the native peoples themselves regarded the alcohol they received as a valuable commodity. It was not part of their daily diet, as Indians drank the potable water that was readily available in colonial America and drank other beverages for ceremonial purposes. Throughout the Southwest, Native Americans ritually consumed “black drink,” a tea made from leaves of the yaupon holly tree, which contained caffeine and theobromine.49 The rituals involved vomiting, either artificially induced or brought on by the volume of the beverage consumed while the drinker was fasting. After alcohol was introduced to Native American societies, it was not only consumed for the pleasure it gave but also integrated into hospitality ceremonies, marriages, ceremonial dances, and mourning rituals.50 In short, Native Americans employed alcohol for as many and as varied purposes as Europeans did.
We should note that if alcohol was part of the daily diet of early European colonists, it was no longer because it was a safer beverage than the polluted water that was available, because North America offered plenty of potable water, at least in the colonial period. Rather, Europeans drank alcohol for cultural reasons: it was embedded in their daily diet and in the relationships of exchange and sociability they carried over from Europe, and alcohol gave them pleasure. In functional terms, then, both Europeans and Indians consumed alcohol for largely the same purposes: it gave individuals pleasure, marked cultural exchanges of many kinds, and could be a force for sociability, both within and between social and ethnic groups. It has also been suggested that Native Americans in the Northeast used alcohol for its ability to engender a dreamlike, spiritual state that had religious meanings, but this is a contested notion.51 The major difference between the consumption patterns of the two populations was that alcohol was not integral to the daily diet of Native Americans, as it was among Europeans.
Despite the varied contexts of alcohol consumption by Native Americans, many of the contemporary European accounts of their drinking patterns focused on episodes of severe intoxication and of disorder and violence that were attributed to alcohol. There is some evidence that among the Iroquois, at least, offenses committed when the perpetrator was drunk were not punished, as intoxication was viewed as exculpatory. One historian writes that Iroquois men drank not for pleasure but to get drunk, such that they would only start drinking if there was enough alcohol to ensure intoxication. Once they were intoxicated, they often destroyed property and assaulted and killed one another. Clearly, these acts were considered problematic, at the very least, because Iroquois chiefs requested traders and the political authorities to stop selling alcohol to their people. At the same time, “Iroquois society was willing to excuse even the most horrendous behavior provided the perpetrator was intoxicated.”52
Intoxication and drunken violence were themes repeated over and over in descriptions of Native American drinking behavior in the early period of European contact. Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary in the St. Lawrence Valley in the 1630s, commented, “The savages have always been gluttons, but since the coming of the Europeans they have become such drunkards that . . . they cannot abstain from drinking, taking pride in getting drunk, and making others drunk.”53 In New France (Québec), the indigenous people were said to become “swinishly intoxicated” on brandy, get into fights with one another, and murder colonists. By the 1660s, the bishop of Québec ordered the excommunication of any traders who supplied alcohol to the local native peoples.54 One of the problems that missionaries associated with alcohol was that it made Native Americans more difficult to convert to Christianity. One Jesuit in New France wrote that “the greatest evil done here by drunkenness is, that its consequences Utterly estrange the savages from Christianity.”55
Such accounts of intoxicated natives gave rise to the image of the “drunken Indian,” with its implication that Native Americans had an innate propensity to become intoxicated that distinguished them from Europeans, and that drunkenness was more pervasive in Native American than in settler society. Undoubtedly some Native Americans became drunk, and some became violent when intoxicated. But we have no way of knowing how reliable or accurate the accounts are, even when they purport to be eyewitness descriptions, or how often violence was associated with drinking. Given the anecdotal and episodic character of the evidence, it is no more possible to assess or quantify Native American behavior than to calculate what proportion of Europeans at that time regularly drank heavily to the point of intoxication. It is possible that some or many of the accounts of alcohol-driven mayhem and killing were constructed to conform to the contemporary European imagination, as was the case with many accounts of cannibalism by indigenous peoples elsewhere.56
Accepting the premise that Native Americans who drank alcohol generally did so heavily, some scholars have suggested a genetic explanation: that Native Americans process alcohol differently from Europeans. But there is no evidence of such a difference, and the wide variations in drinking patterns among Native Americans argue against it—as do the patterns of heavy drinking and persistent intoxication within the European populations themselves.57 Some historians have suggested a cultural explanation: that some Native Americans learned heavy drinking behavior from the traders who provided them with the beverages. There is another assumption at work here, of course: that these traders themselves were heavy drinkers and given to drunkenness. Perhaps they generally were. They were adult males who worked in remote locations far from the surveillance and social controls of their communities of origin. In the mid-eighteenth century, Jean Bossu, a French traveler in the Mississippi Valley, wrote that “drunkenness . . . is corrected with difficulty even amongst the French. The Indians imitate them easily in it, and say the white people have taught them to drink the fiery water [brandy].”58
There is another important point to remember here: European populations developed their cultures of alcohol consumption over thousands of years. At first, alcohol was available in limited quantities, and as it became more commonly consumed, protocols for drinking were established and the consequences of excessive drinking became known, if not always heeded. Some people broke the protocols, and some were punished. The indigenous peoples of North America, in contrast, had no alcohol tradition until Europeans introduced rum and other beverages, and there was no gradual, centuries-long phase-in of alcohol to their communities. Thanks to the fur trade, some of the indigenous populations were awash in alcohol within decades of European contact. In the absence of effective communal restraints, excessive consumption might quickly have become established as their alcohol culture, whether or not European traders and merchants were their models.
We do know that heavy drinking and intoxication were far from uncommon among European colonists. As we have seen, as early as 1637 the General Court of Massachusetts took steps to curb what it believed was widespread drunkenness. A drunk person was defined as someone who “either lisps or falters in his speech by reason of much drink, or that staggers in his going, or that vomits by reason of excessive drinking, or cannot follow his calling,”59 or who was “disabled in the use of his understanding, appearing in his speech or gesture.”60 Colonists convicted of drunkenness were sometimes whipped, on the ground that a drunk was no better than a beast and deserved to be beaten as a beast would be.
Despite consequences that could be quite severe, drunkenness seems to have increased in the early colonies as locally produced alcohol added to imported supplies. John Winthrop, a Puritan leader, noted that young people commonly “gave themselves to drinke hott waters [spirits] verye immoderately.”61 As early as 1622, the Virginia Company called on the colony’s governor to do something about excessive drinking there, news of which “hath spread itself to all that have but heard the name of Virginia.”62 The court records of all the American colonies are full of charges for drunkenness, despite the efforts of the authorities to reduce its incidence. Although young people and the transient population were often cited as being particularly problematic, it is not clear whether any demographic was overrepresented among the consumers convicted of alcohol offenses. (Innkeepers and other retailers were sometimes charged—for allowing drunkenness or serving alcohol past closing hours, for example—but they are a group apart.)
There remains the fundamental question of whether there was a significant difference in the frequency and scale of intoxication between the indigenous and European communities. The insistence by European commentators on the ubiquity of native intoxication is all too reminiscent of middle-class commentaries on the drinking behavior of the poor and working classes in Europe or the allegations made by any number of groups that other populations drank to excess and disturbed the social order. The colonial authorities in America clearly thought there was a difference between the two drinking cultures because they adopted divergent policies for each community. As we have seen, they attempted to regulate alcohol distribution in colonial towns so as to limit the places colonists might drink—although the aim was clearly to limit the volume that colonists might drink. Policies directed at Native Americans, on the other hand, attempted to prevent their access to any alcohol whatsoever.
The difference might well have rested on the authorities’ assumptions about the ability of the respective populations to drink moderately: impossible in the case of Native Americans, but generally possible as far as the colonists were concerned. On the other hand, the divergent policies might have reflected more pragmatic judgments: it was possible to cut off the alcohol supply to Native Americans, for whom alcohol was still a novelty, but it was unthinkable to do the same to Europeans, for whom alcohol was a nutritional and cultural necessity. The authorities who tried to impose prohibitionist policies on Native Americans in the 1600s (and later) were themselves consumers of alcohol and had no thought of depriving themselves or their fellow colonists of a staple commodity. Prohibition was a policy that made sense in universal rather than ethnic terms only three centuries later.
The seventeenth century saw the beginning of a complicated relationship between Native Americans, Europeans, and alcohol. Almost from the very beginning, Europeans attributed pathological drinking behavior to Native Americans and strung episodic accounts into a narrative of the “drunk Indian” who was unable to resist alcohol and who drank to the point of oblivion or violence. It proved to be an enduring stereotype that underpinned government policies toward indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada until the twentieth century. Like most stereotypes, it generalized uncritically. In this case, it treated Native Americans as an undifferentiated group, rather than recognizing that experiences with alcohol varied from region to region and from population to population. As we shall see, many Native Americans were dispossessed of their lands and cultures, forced to abandon their family and social networks, and coerced to adopt European religions. Like the dispossessed in other societies and social classes, some native populations turned to alcohol and other drugs. The introduction of alcohol, then, was one facet of a broad upheaval experienced by Native Americans. This was no less true of indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, but only in North America did such a particular and enduring drinking stereotype emerge.