Drink (33 page)

Bold as they were, the members of the Rum Regiment and their associates did not follow the example of the American colonists and declare independence. They were and knew themselves to be a very privileged minority, who had prospered by exploiting the colonial system and their distance from its center. A free land of equal rights was not at all to their tastes. Once they had Bligh under lock and key they set about justifying their rebellion. Major George Johnston of the rum corps, Bligh’s designated successor in the event of his death or absence, was installed as governor. A petition was prepared setting out the reasons for deposing Bligh. It claimed he had been a despot to rival Attila and reveled in commanding the infliction of corporal punishment. As soon as the rebels had knocked their apologia into shape, Macarthur volunteered to take it to Great Britain and to serve there as a delegate of the leading colonists. He was going anyway—the charge of sedition had already been posted, and the best way to demonstrate innocence was to be present to answer it. Meanwhile, all the old abuses were revived. The Rum Regiment resumed its monopoly on imported spirits, to the distress of the free settlers: “They obtain
Spirits
to what Amount they please, which they sell from five Hundred to a Thousand Per cent for Grain to the unthinking Settlers who have been deprived of procuring a single Drop by any other Channel, since the unfortunate day of the unjust Arrest of His Excellency Governor Bligh.”

Such was the time taken for news to travel between New South Wales and London that the second reign of the Rum Regiment endured for nearly two years. Aware that they would have to answer for their actions, they took care to maintain protocol and the semblance of order. In the middle of 1808, Johnston gave way as governor to Joseph Foveaux, technically his superior, who had been away establishing a rule of terror in Norfolk Island at the time of the putsch. Foveaux marked his command by distributing cattle from the government herds among his friends and composing slanderous letters about Bligh to send to Britain. In 1809 Foveaux passed on the command of the colony to another rum corps officer, William Paterson, who was inebriated “the greatest part of his time; so that, from imbecility when sober and stupidity when drunk,” he was “a very convenient tool in the hands of Macarthur, or of Foveaux.” Under the care of this debauched creature, the colony became a parody of the well-disciplined penal settlement that it was supposed to be. A sketch of prevailing conditions and attitudes appears in a letter of Sir Henry Brown Hayes, an Irish baronet transported for abducting an heiress, who led a comfortable exile on the Vaucluse Estate.
²⁹
According to Sir Henry, “forty thousand gallons of spirits . . . were given away to the civil and military officers since Bligh had been deposed, and not anything to the peaceable, industrious individual. . . . Paterson gets drunk at Government House at Parramatta, and Foveaux is left at Sydney to do as he likes, and he gives pardons, grants, and leases to the whores and greatest thieves. . . . Oh, it has been charming times! . . . Hang half this worthy set and it would be justice, for they have been the greatest robbers.”

The idyll that the drink monopoly had generated for the monopolists could not persist. News that Bligh had been deposed had reached London, had been pondered over, and action had been taken. To have one mutiny could be construed as an accident, but two was a record. A new governor, Lachlan Macquarie, accompanied by a pair of British warships, was sent to replace Bligh and restore order. He arrived in December 1809, by which time both Bligh and Macarthur, the principal actors in the drama, had left the stage, Bligh on a naval vessel to Tasmania, where he plotted a countercoup, and Macarthur to London, to explain himself in court.

The new governor was quick to make his mark. The liquor trade was brought under his control and a fair market created. Sunday closing was introduced for taverns to ensure settlers gave their livers a rest on the Sabbath. A number of the ringleaders of the rum mutiny were prosecuted. Instead of working the estates of the officers of the Rum Regiment, convicts were assigned to the deserving smaller settlers, and to serve Macquarie’s mania for monumental architecture. During his tenure, Sydney received its earliest public buildings, the first of which was the so-called Rum Hospital. Built in the Georgian style, with Indian touches, it was financed by the grant of a temporary spirits monopoly to its contractors, who were given the exclusive right to sell forty-five thousand gallons of liquor and to receive the proceeds tax free as reward for their labor. Once their funds had been raised, the market set the price for alcohol, and the same bottle of spirits that had sold for twenty shillings in 1808 cost two shillings by the end of Macquarie’s tenure in 1821. Once the anxiety over supply had been removed, drinking habits changed. Indeed excessive drinking came to be associated with bad times past—a part of their history ex-convicts wanted to forget. The increased size of the colony was a further stimulus to moderation. Settlers had spread more than a hundred miles from Sydney, over the Blue Mountains and into the virgin bush. It was not possible to visit a tavern every morning in such remote places, nor was it practical to carry kegs of porter on horseback to outlying stations. Their residents learned to ration themselves to a glass or so of rum a day.

The rising generation in Sydney and Parramatta drank beer. Australian brewing had progressed from maize and love-apples to barley malt and hops. Hops first had been cultivated in the colony by James Squire, an emancipated convict, in 1805, and he had been rewarded for his efforts with the gift of a cow from Governor King. The following year he opened a brewery and the
Malt Shovel Tavern
at Kissing Point on the Parramatta River. His pioneering efforts with Australian beer were recorded on his tombstone, and its effects on the drinker inscribed on another nearby, in an early testament to the black humor that has since become a characteristic of Australians:

By the 1820s New South Wales was also producing wine. The prime mover was no less than the “great perturbator” John Macarthur, who returned to his sixty-thousand-acre estate from his long exile in London in 1816. Prior to leaving Europe, Macarthur made a trip to France, where he inspected vineyards and collected vines; on the journey back to Australia he had also picked up more vines in Madeira and Cape Town. Although no record of the quality of the wines he produced exists, he built a substantial winery whose ruins still grace the grounds of his palatial home. Wine was also produced by Gregory Blaxland, a settler famous for discovering a route through the Blue Mountains, which hitherto had acted as a barrier to expansion inland. His product—a red wine fortified with brandy—was of sufficient merit to be exported to London, where it was awarded silver (1822) and gold (1828) medals by the Royal Society of Art.

The spirit of intoxication, however, had remained in the land. Exorcised by the Christian immigrants, it now possessed the remnants of the aboriginal tribes of New South Wales. Ab initio, contact between the colonists and aboriginals had been characterized by distrust and violence. Unlike natives on other continents, the aboriginals had displayed little curiosity about Europeans. They did not want to sell their possessions or their women for mirrors or beads. Their first words to the first fleet were “Warra, warra”—“go away.” When they were offered alcoholic drinks to taste they spat them out. Their indifference to booze was confirmed when the colonists decided to kidnap some aboriginals, in the hope that these might be tamed to their ways and so as act as ambassadors between the settlers and the tribes.

Accordingly, in 1790, Governor Phillip sent a party of marines to capture some natives. A group of aboriginals was ambushed on a beach and the marines managed to secure one of them. Their hostage was taken to Sydney, washed, shaved, shown a print of Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Cumberland, and named Manly. He attended dinner at government house on New Year’s Eve, where he was taught how to use a napkin. His appetite was observed with the keenest attention. He ate “heartily” of fish and pork, tried to throw his plate out the window when he had finished, but steered clear of the wine. This dislike persisted, even when he trusted his captors enough to reveal to them his name—Arabanoo—and to accustom himself to a British diet: “Bread he began to relish; and tea he drank with avidity: [But] strong liquors he would never taste, turning from them with disgust and abhorrence.”

But Arabanoo kept trying to run away. He burst into tears when he was allowed to see his friends from a distance and, unless distracted by the settlers’ children, whom he loved, usually was melancholy. A year later he died of smallpox. The colonists replaced him shortly afterward with a pair of orphans, whose parents had perished in the same epidemic. However, these infants did not suit their purpose of acting as a bridge between themselves and the aboriginals, and it was resolved to try and catch some more. Lieutenant Bradley was entrusted with this diplomatic mission “and completely succeeded in trepanning and carrying off, without opposition, two fine young men, who were safely landed among us at Sydney.” These were Bennelong and Colbee. Colbee ran away within a week, but Bennelong seemed determined to look on the bright side of captivity: “Though haughty, [he] knew how to temporize. He quickly threw off all reserve; and pretended, nay, at particular moments, perhaps felt satisfaction in his new state. Unlike poor Arabanoo, he became at once fond of our viands, and would drink the strongest liquors, not simply without reluctance, but with eager marks of delight and enjoyment. He was the only native we ever knew who immediately shewed a fondness for spirits: Colbee would not at first touch them.”

Bennelong was rewarded for his temporizing with a trip to Great Britain. He accompanied Governor Phillip home, spent several years in London, where he was taken to a proper tailor, then was sent back to New South Wales with a medal as a keepsake. He died at the handsome old age, according to the best estimates at the time, of forty-one, diseased, crippled, and an alcoholic. Upon his return from Britain, despite his new wardrobe, he was seen to have lost prestige among his fellows. His wife had run off, and he was defeated in the fight to get her back. The injuries he sustained during this combat never properly healed, and it was noted as he drank himself to death that he seemed to be stricken by anomie. He set a precedent that was soon followed by other aboriginals. Long disdainful of alcohol, as epidemics and conflict reduced their numbers, they turned to the drug as a last resort—a final degradation. Like the convicts, they drank to forget; unlike the convicts, they had no other place to remember in their cups. The forests where they had hunted had been cut down and plowed over; the shoreline where they gathered oysters had been covered in wharves. The land could not support both sheep and aboriginals, so these latter were killed, or died of hunger, or drifted into towns.

17 WHISKEY WITH AN
E

During the same years that the Rum Regiment was establishing control over the British penal colony in Australia by manipulating the supply of alcohol, the United States of America also experienced a challenge to the rule of law, which likewise derived from drink. In 1794, settlers in western Pennsylvania formed a rebel band named the
Whiskey Boys
and commenced an insurrection against the federal government. Their cause of war was an excise on domestic spirits, which had been imposed in 1791 and which was considered on the western edge of the United States to be unequal, immoral, and “dangerous to liberty.” That freedom from British rule, so recently won, should not be considered liberty enough, was a matter of serious concern in Philadelphia, then the capital city of the United States. At stake was the power of the federal government to tax its citizens—even if the taxes it chose to impose were not so very different from those that had been the cause for war with Britain. President Washington responded to news of the revolt by mobilizing a militia army of thirteen thousand.

In order to understand how a constitutional crisis of such magnitude had arisen in the new country so quickly, it is necessary to examine the importance of whiskey to its citizens, especially those on the western fringes of the nation. In the decades prior to independence, and ever since, immigrants had been pushing inland, over the Allegheny Mountains, which had formed a notional border between British colonial limits and land reserved for Native Americans. A high percentage of these settlers were Scottish Irish, to whom free land and no taxes seemed a recipe for paradise, and the inconvenient presence of a few murderous indigenous tribes no worse than what they had left behind. Unlike most immigrants, who acclimatized themselves to their new homeland in its towns or in settled parts of the countryside, the Scots-Irish headed west, toward the interior of the continent, beyond government, where they might live as they wished, in as close to a state of independence as was possible. Their formula for this idyll included self-sufficiency in ammunition (the discovery of “an exceedingly valuable lead mine” south of the Green River was much feted in Virginia), and whiskey.

The art of distilling the water of life was a part of the heritage of the Scotch Irish, and this ancestral solace was prepared wherever they settled. In emergencies, a Scotch Irish could make whiskey using only corn, water, fire, a kettle, and a wet towel. The Wilderness Road, the northern route over the Alleghenies from Virginia, had whiskey for sale at strategic points along its length when it was little more than a path through the forests. In 1775, William Calk, a Virginian moving to what was to become Kentucky, noted its ubiquity in his journal: “Wedn. 22nd we Start early and git to foart Chissel whear we git Some good loaf Bread & good Whiskey.” There was also good whiskey to be found upon arrival. In the same year that Calk set out, corn was being grown around the fledgling town of Boonesborough and converted into spirits. Whiskey had great practical advantages on the frontier. It was more valuable, easier to carry, and less likely to spoil than the grain from which it had been made. It also was freely convertible— whiskey could be exchanged for other commodities, for land, for weapons, labor, food, and for luxuries. In consequence, much of the farmland hacked out of the wilderness was planted with grain to produce whiskey, rather than bread.