Drink (19 page)

According to the records of the Spanish who colonized Florida and explored the Gulf of Mexico, and of the French who settled in Florida and Canada, sobriety was universal among the cultures inhabiting the eastern and southern seaboards of North America. While the Spanish were careful, as usual, to write down the diets of the people they came across on the Terra Firma, alcohol only appears on their own provision lists, or in expressions of grief over its absence. For instance, the destruction of communion wine by belligerent Indians near Mobile was ranked an equal loss to that of gunpowder, bullets, and valiant comrades by Rodrigo Rangel, a participant in Hernando de Soto’s crazed 1539 drive from Cape Canaveral to the Mississippi River.

Although they found no evidence of indigenous tippling, both the Spaniards and the French had commented on the potential of the land for making wine. Every tree seemed draped with vines; indeed, the original name for the Island of Orleans opposite Quebec was Bacchus Island. It is a matter of dispute as to whether it was the French or Spanish who were the first to make an American vintage. The evidence rests on the word of Sir John Hawkins, an English slave trader who dropped anchor by the French settlement in Florida in 1565. Sir John was disgusted by the inability of its starving inhabitants to support themselves by growing food, and noted that their token gesture toward self-sufficiency had been the manufacture and consumption of twenty butts of wine. However, René Laudonnière, the governor of the colony, makes no mention of the wine in his account of the settlement, indeed takes pains to make clear that the first drink he’d had since arriving was the one given to him by Hawkins, which “greatly refreshed me, forasmusch as, for seven months’ space, I never tasted a drop of wine.” The Spanish, however, were producing Floridian wine by 1570 from the native muscadine grape.

Cheered by the excellent reports that Amidas and Barlow had brought back, Raleigh followed up in 1585 with a full-scale expedition, whose mission was the plantation of an entire English village in the New World. This venture consisted of five ships, which together carried 108 settlers and most of the paraphernalia thought necessary to survive and thrive in America. It was commanded by Sir Richard Grenville, a violent Devonian, who had spent his youth fighting Turks. Sir Richard possessed idiosyncratic drinking habits, in keeping with his bellicose reputation. According to a contemporary, “He was of so hard a complection” that “he would carouse three or four glasses of wine, and in a braverie take the glasses betweene his teeth and crash them in pieces and swallow them downe, so that often times the blood ran out of his mouth.”

Grenville was also a stickler for form. Dinner aboard the
Tiger,
his flagship, was served off gold plate and accompanied by martial music from the ship’s band. There was plenty to drink, for in addition to beer rations for the settlers and sailors, the entire spectrum of Elizabethan alcohol was on board—ale, sack, other kinds of wine, cider, and
strong waters,
i.e., spirits. After crossing the Atlantic, the expedition paused in Hispaniola,
¹⁴
where it purchased livestock from the Spaniards, then continued to
Virginia,
as the territory it intended to settle had been named. Before, however, it could land the colonists and their supplies it was struck by a storm that drove the
Tiger
ashore, drowned the livestock, and ruined all the seed. Most of the alcohol supply was destroyed. Despite such grievous losses the colonists knuckled to and built a fort, a church, storehouses, and stables, and christened their settlement Roanoke. Mission accomplished, Grenville returned to England, capturing a rich prize en route.

The colonists meanwhile set to planting, traded with the Indians, and even managed to brew ale from corn: “We made of the same in the country some mault, whereof was brued as good ale as was to be desired.” Despite this show of industry, they were discontented—with one another and with Virginia. Their number included gentlemen, who, by definition, did not work. It also contained a tailor, a mathematician, and a former MP. Its practical men, however, were few. Accusations of bad attitudes and indolence flew back and forth; meanwhile, supplies ran short, and relations with the Indians deteriorated into conflict. When, by chance, Sir Francis Drake slid by a year later, fresh from sacking Spanish settlements in Hispaniola and Florida, his appearance was accounted providential. He offered the colony provisions, ships, and even people. With these fresh supplies, and their soon-to-be-ripe crops, the colonists felt optimistic over their prospects. Sadly, the same night a storm dispersed Drake’s fleet and sank the boats he’d earmarked for Virginia. At this the settlers lost heart and went home with him.

Very shortly after Roanoke had been abandoned, a resupply fleet arrived under Grenville. He searched for the missing colonists, concluded they had been massacred by hands unknown, and left a token presence of fifteen soldiers, commanded by Master Coffin. Neither Coffin nor any other member of his team was buried in his namesake. When a new fleet of settlers arrived in 1587, complete with women, children, and farmyard animals, the only trace of Grenville’s caretaking force was “the bones of one of those fifteen which the savages had slain long ago.” The emigrants of ’87 went the same way as master Coffin and his men and vanished without trace.

Serial failure, once again, gave American colonies a bad name in England and it was twenty years before another was attempted. After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, Sir Walter Raleigh, their principal advocate, fell from grace and was imprisoned in the tower of London, where he wrote
The Historie of the World
and experimented with distillation with the Earl of Northumberland, a fellow prisoner. They christened their most palatable concoction
“spiritus dulcis,”
which they stilled from sack, “sugarcandie,” and “spirits of roses.”

However, by 1606, New World colonies were back on the English political agenda. Memories of failure were fading, and most of the written accounts of prior attempts, especially the
Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia
(1588) of Thomas Harriot, painted so attractive a picture of the potential of the Americas that it was decided to have another go. The superabundance of grapes was an important draw to the new generation of would-be colonizers. If wine could be produced in Virginia, it would lessen English reliance on imports from, and its trade deficit with, potentially hostile Catholic countries. A group of London merchants headed by some token peers set up a new Virginia Company, which was granted a royal charter by Elizabeth’s successor, King James I, in 1606. The charter anticipated that settlers would direct their energy toward finding pearls and gold mines, and in planting vineyards and olive trees. An expedition was organized, and in 1607 it set out for the Chesapeake Bay. A hundred and four colonists (out of 144) survived the voyage, and they elected to start their empire on a small, waterlogged island, to the north of Roanoke, which they named Jamestown.

Their first impressions of their new home were marred by the rapid departure of the transport ships, which took with them much of the beer that had been intended to refresh them until they could manufacture their own. As the sails vanished over the horizon, those remaining on American soil questioned the wisdom of their decision to emigrate to a place with “neither taverne, [nor] beere-house.” Ironically some of the colonists had been lured to the New World by the promise of a sober lifestyle and a healthy diet. Virginia, according to the promotional material of the eponymous Royal Company, was the perfect place to escape the temptations of London, with opportunity neither for drunkenness nor gluttony. The marketing proved true, as the colonists died in droves from famine or waterborne diseases. The absence of alcohol, and the consequent necessity of drinking water solo, was held to blame for their deaths in a later postmortem, which concluded: “To plant a Colony by water drinkers was an inexcusable error in those, who laid the first foundacion . . . which until it be laide downe againe, there is small hope of health.”

In order to stem the tide of mortality, the governor and the council of Virginia advertised in 1609 for two brewers. It seems, however, that they failed to attract any applicants, for the absence of alcohol continued to be a matter for lamentation among the Virginians. It was also taken as a sign of potential weakness. The Spanish sent a spy to measure English progress on what they regarded as their soil. His report, to a Spaniard, made encouraging reading: “There are about three hundred men there more or less; and the majority sick and badly treated, because they have nothing but bread of maize, with fish, nor do they drink anything but water—all of which is contrary to the nature of the English—on which account they all wish to return [home], and would have done so if they had been at liberty.”

The salvation of Jamestown was the discovery that it could produce something with a ready market in London—tobacco. England was in the grip of a smoking craze. Its poets and playwrights wrote eulogies in praise of tobacco with the enthusiasm they had hitherto reserved for sack and ale. Smoking was called drinking tobacco or dry-drinking by the English, who had no prior experience of smoking anything and so lacked the vocabulary to describe the act. In their enthusiasm they allotted it virtues—of suppressing appetite, of causing mild intoxication—and considered smokers to be elegant. In 1613, Virginia exported its first crop of the weed to England, in 1620 it shipped twenty thousand pounds of tobacco, and in 1627 it sent five hundred thousand pounds and had begun to prosper.

Experiments with winemaking as per charter were abandoned— the little wine the colony had produced was unpalatable. According to a governor of the Virginia Company, “We must confess our wine to have been more of an embarrassment than a credit to us,” and the vines were grubbed up to make room for more tobacco. With the exception of a little maize beer, Jamestown relied on imported alcohol. Outbound ships in the tobacco trade filled their holds with wine from Madeira and the Canary Isles, and English beer. They were not at all particular as to the quality of their merchandise, for the thirsty colonists would exchange tobacco for whatever they brought. Indeed, the beer supplied by one provisioner named Dupper was so bad that it was reckoned to have “been the death of two hundred.”

The improving fortunes of Virginia were closely monitored in England by its merchants and its dissidents. The proof that English people could live, and even prosper, in the New World inspired many with dreams of profits, or of freedom. King James I had chosen to enforce a very narrow view of Protestantism, centered on the duty of obedience owed by English Protestants to himself. Those who wished to worship otherwise were arrested or fled the country. A group of the latter, who had taken refuge in the Dutch town of Leyden, decided to attempt a colony in North America where they might practice their faith as they wished. They debated the matter at length before committing themselves. Their principal concerns about the proposed venture were that “the change of air, diet, and drinking of water would infect their bodies with sore sicknesses and grievous diseases.” They had read of the damage water drinking had wreaked in Virginia and, once they had resolved to go, included a vast store of
booze
(a neologism for alcoholic drinks) in their provisions.

This group of men, women, and children came to an arrangement with a group of London merchants that gave their proposed voyage legitimacy, and chartered a claret ship from the Bordeaux wine trade named the
Mayflower
for their passage. The hundred and two pilgrims, under the leadership of John Carver, plus perhaps three dozen sailors, had an easy transatlantic voyage until they approached the American coast, when foul weather forced them north of Virginia to Cape Cod, which they sighted on November 19, 1620. On the twenty-first of the same month, the first of their number stepped ashore. Their initial impressions were of fear and wonder—the landscape was wild and forbidding. Like the Virginians of 1587, they mourned the absence of “inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies.”

Their sense of isolation was heightened when they started to explore their new home. Their first reconnaissance party, under Captain Standish, very quickly lost itself in the forest. One of its members recorded the panic when they realized they had no idea where they were and that “our victuals was only biscuit and Holland cheese, and a little bottle of aquavitae.” Fortunately, they blundered upon “springs of fresh water, of which we were heartily glad,” and set an important precedent: “[We] drunk our first New England water with as much delight as ever we drunk drink in all our lives.” One of the party went so far as to claim the water had been “as pleasant . . . as wine or beer.” Hitherto, American water had been viewed with a distrust bordering on paranoia.

Winter was approaching and the pilgrims decided to settle where they were, because “we could not now take time for further research or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our Beere.” The shortage of beer was a point of friction between them and the crew of the
Mayflower,
which remained at anchor while they went ashore daily to clear ground and build houses in the sleet and snow. The winter was fierce, epidemics broke out among the pilgrims and mariners, but the latter, wishing to guard their stock of beer for the journey home, refused to allow it to be given to the sick. William Bradford, chosen by the colonists to be their leader after the death of John Carver, recorded their intransigence: “As this calamity fell . . . the passengers that were to be left here to plant . . . were hasted ashore and made to drink water that the seamen might have the more beer, and one [Bradford himself] in his sickness desiring but a small can of beer, it was answered that if he was their own father he should have none.”

When spring arrived only fifty-three pilgrims remained alive. They disembarked for the last time from the
Mayflower
in March 1621, and she returned to England. As the weather improved, the colonists went exploring again and found, or rather were found by, an English-speaking Indian, Samoset, who had picked up the language from passing fishermen and slave traders. After appropriate introductions, Samoset asked for some beer, which was evidently the thing he had missed most since his last contact with Englishmen. The colonists had none with them but “gave him strong water . . . which he liked well.” Once refreshed, he told the pilgrims that “the place where we now live is called Patuxet, and that about four years ago all the inhabitants died of an extraordinary plague, and there is neither man, woman, nor child remaining, as indeed we have found none, so as there is none to hinder our possession, or to lay claim unto it.”