Punch (8 page)

THE AGE OF PUNCH

In a way, despite their isolation, those early India factors were lucky. What with civil war, regicide, religious dictatorship, two naval wars with the Dutch and a plague that killed one hundred thousand Londoners and was only extinguished by a fire that consumed most of the city, the folks back home in England didn’t get a lot of enjoyment out of the middle parts of the seventeenth century. Fortunately, this being a drink book, we can skip over most of the fear, pain, and drama and concentrate on the carousing with which an often intolerable existence was solaced. On January 30, 1649, King Charles I laid his head on a Whitehall chopping block. Then came democracy, of a sort, and then Puritan dictatorship, during which conviviality was, officially, next to rascality. But on May 29, 1660, with the monarchy restored, King Charles II entered London in triumph. As he wound his way through the city’s ancient streets, the fountains literally flowed with wine. Conviviality was restored.

The very next day, however, Charles issued a proclamation against the “vicious, debauch’d, and profane Persons . . . who spend their Time in Taverns, Tippling-Houses, and Debauches, giving no other Evidence of their Affection to us but in drinking our health, and inveighing against all others who are not of their own dissolute Temper.” True, many of the king’s supporters had in fact been using the toasting of his health as a rather shabby on-the-fly loyalty test: drink up, and you were a good Royalist; decline, and you were some sort of Puritan Roundhead and not to be trusted. But there was no dearth of people who would toast him even without coercion: life under Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans had been dreary, what with alehouses and taverns being viewed with official suspicion, sports and games of any and all sorts suppressed, and theaters shut down; and if public morals had slipped a bit in the two years since Cromwell’s death, things were still rather glum. With a Charles back in charge, they would take a decided turn for the merrier, grumpy royal proclamations or no.

Then again, it’s hard to believe that even Charles took that proclamation seriously. If one had to pick a theme for his reign, one could do no better than that conviviality (at least until the very end, when it devolved into a tedious web of cabals, plots, counterplots and executions). The theaters were open, the games were afoot, and the alehouses, inns and taverns were full. A moderate drinker himself, for the most part (we all get ahead of ourselves every now and then), Charles presided over a court that—well, one would have had to scour the kingdom most thoroughly to find a group to whom “vicious, debauch’d, and profane” better applied. They were rakes, roisterers and alcoholics—and, for that matter, duelists, bride-abductors, exhibitionists, atheists and poets (indeed, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, combined all of those things and more). What they were not, however, were Punch-drinkers, at least not at first. Being gentlemen, they drank wine. Being English, they also drank beer and ale. The latter was no doubt of a stronger and better grade than what their fellow countrymen who made up the London mob were drinking, but if those at the lower reaches of society were deprived of alcohol, it wasn’t for long. Before the decade was out, they would discover spirits.

After the Second Anglo-Dutch War ended in 1667, as Daniel Defoe, a schoolboy at the time, would recall in 1727: “Suddenly . . . we began to abound in Strong Water-Shops. These were a sort of petty Distillers, who made up . . . Compound Waters from such mixt and confus’d Trash, as they could get to work from.” The trash was familiar: sour or salt-water-damaged wines, “Lees and Bottoms,” cider dregs, “damag’d sugars,” and so forth. The resulting aqua vitae was then flavored, cheaply, with aniseed or juniper and hawked from “bulks” (shop windows) and market stalls or “by street vendors crying ‘A dram of the bottle.’”
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Whatever their quality, spirits sales in England soared: by 1684, they were topping half a million gallons a year. The causes for this increase could have been as complex as postrevolutionary disorientation and the rootlessness brought on by out-of-control urbanization
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or as simple as the high excise taxes that Cromwell’s Parliament had imposed on beer and ale and Charles’s had retained and extended. But whatever they were, they didn’t just affect the urban rabble, the alehouse classes. Before long, the drinking life of the taverngoer would change as well.

By the time Charles took the throne, Punch had spread far beyond its South Asian cradle. Its earliest appearance elsewhere comes in the often-cited account of the new English colony of Barbados written by Richard Ligon, who was there from 1647 to 1650. Whatever his good qualities, and I’m sure they are many, when it came to Punch, either he got his notes a little mixed up or those early Bajans had picked up the name but not the drink that came with it.
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In any case, he described it as simply fermented sugar water—“very strong, and fit for labourers.” Between Ligon’s years in Barbados and the Restoration, the fortunes of Punch in the West are obscure. In early 1668, however, William Willoughby, the aristocratic governor of Barbados and the Leeward Islands, reporting to London on the typically unruly state of affairs in the English Caribbean, described his intention to place affairs in St. Kitts in the hands of one Colonel Lambert. With half the island being a French colony, they took some management. Fortunately, quoth Willoughby, Lambert “is a man of good reason, and at a bowl of punch I dare turn him loose to any Monsieur in the Indies.” If English colonels and French monsieurs could drink Punch together, one may assume that by then the drink was both well established and, to some degree, socially acceptable in the Caribbean colonies. By then, Punch-drinking had spread to the North American colonies as well, and not only among the servants.

We know this from, among other things, the lengthy tab John Parker ran up between May 1670 and February 1671 at John Richardson’s Talbot County, Maryland, “ordinary.”
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Scattered among all the charges for beer and mum and rum and brandy are entries for a total of thirteen and a half “Bowles of Punch,” at sixty or eighty pounds of tobacco—the local currency—each, depending on what it was made from. Clearly, Parker was no servant—any man who could afford to spend more than eight hundred pounds of tobacco on Punch was not, in that time and place, socially negligible. Things in Maryland would only get worse: by 1708, Ebenezer Cook could write in his satirical but not inaccurate epic
The Sot-Weed Factor
about how, arriving in that same part of the colony, “A Herd of Planters on the ground / O’er-whelmed with Punch, dead drunk we found.”

It’s unclear exactly who brought Punch-drinking to the West Indies and North America, but since English sailors were customarily dismissed from their ships between voyages and had to find new ones, many of those who manned the vessels that serviced the new western colonies would have had East India Company experience. In any case, the Spanish had conveniently planted the islands of the Caribbean with sugarcane and citrus trees, so there was no dearth of raw materials with which to work, and plenty of motivation in the form of lousy beer (for various reasons, it took some time to establish a viable brewing industry in America) and expensive wine. In any case, Punch-drinking spread rapidly, and by the turn of the eighteenth century, it was near universal in the colonies.

By that time, though, Punch had conquered the mother country as well. There, at least, we know how the campaign began. The earliest reference to drinking Punch on English soil I’ve been able to discover comes from the diarist and author John Evelyn, who was well connected and deeply involved in naval affairs. On the sixteenth of January 1662, he accompanied the Duke of York to “an East India vessel that lay at Black Wall.” Evidently the ship’s officers laid out something of a spread, company style. “We had entertainment of several curiosities,” Evelyn recorded. “Amongst other spirituous drinks, as punch, &c., they gave us Canarie that had been carried to and brought from the Indies.” True to his class, he found the Punch curious, but it was the Canary wine that “was indeed incomparably good.” Significantly, the new drink makes no appearance in the diary that Evelyn’s friend Samuel Pepys, almost as well connected and even more deeply involved in naval affairs, so famously kept from 1660 to 1669. Pepys was a curious and wide-ranging tippler and a conscientious observer; if the London gentry had adopted Punch, he would have recorded it—just as he had done for so many other drinks. It’s difficult to think of someone who would have enjoyed it more. Indeed, he might have had the chance to become one of its early adopters, if only Christopher Batters hadn’t liked it quite so much.

A navy gunner “born and bred to the sea,” as Pepys remembered him, who managed to work his way up to captaining his own ship, Batters considered Pepys his patron (Pepys, alas, considered him a “foole” and “a poor painful wretch . . . as can be”). On December 17, 1666, he put in to London to dispose of the cargo of a Dutch “fish dogger” (i.e., cod boat) he had taken. After seeing his patron, he went back aboard his ship, the
Joseph
, in the company of “one Allen, a fishmonger,” to whom he sold his cargo for ten pounds. There was Punch, to seal the deal. We know that because he was overheard telling Allen that “if he drank any more Punch he should tell two shillings for one.” The next morning, he was found floating in the Thames, still with his gold signet ring but with his pocket cut open and minus the sash in which he was reputed to keep fifty pounds in gold. By the time they held an inquest (most likely at Pepys’s prompting), the fishmonger was nowhere to be found. “A sad fortune,” quoth Pepys.
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Who knows—had he taken on board a little less Punch that night, Batters might have survived to introduce Pepys to the joys of the flowing bowl. Pepys got there eventually, as a September 1683 entry from one of his fragmentary later diaries proves, but by that stage in life he was rather more sedate an individual and seems to have been little amused by the new beverage.

But in the 1660s, some landlubbers, anyway, must have known about Punch because it turns up in a list of drinks in
Poor Robin’s Jests
, a 1666 joke book, and again the next year in
The Spightful Sister
, a rather confused tragicomedy written by the teenaged Abraham Bailey in time he should probably have devoted to his legal studies (he couldn’t get it staged, and he never wrote another). In 1670, the pioneering cookbook writer Hannah Wooley even gives us an actual recipe, complete with proportions and all, in her book
The Queen-Like Closet, or Rich Cabinet
. Over the next decade, Punch would become firmly established ashore, ending up as what the sporty young gentleman would drink when he joined his friends on a spree.

Yet as happens so often with mixography, just when we would like the most light we’re granted the least. During those crucial ten years (if I may use a word as serious as “crucial” in connection with something so fundamentally frivolous as the art of mixing drinks), the only times Punch makes it into the written record it’s still sporting its sailor suit. If it’s not physicians praising it for its antiscorbutic powers, it’s drinks writers acknowledging it as something “very usual amongst those that frequent the sea”—an observation amply borne out by the diary of Henry Teonge, a Warwickshire parson who joined the HMS
Assistance
as ship’s chaplain in 1675 and found it flowing “like ditchwater,” the officers going through several bowls of it a day. But that’s pretty much it. Then, in 1680, Alexander Radcliffe, a young man-about-town who clearly espoused the then-popular principle that “
nulla manere diu neque vivere carmina possunt quae scribuntur aquae potoribus,
” which is to say “no poems written by water-drinkers are likely to last,” published a broadsheet titled
Bacchanalia Coelestia: A Poem in Praise of Punch
. In it, he has the Roman gods gather in heaven to assemble a bowl of the new drink, since, as Jupiter says, “We’re inform’d they drink Punch upon Earth, / By which mortal Wights outdo us in mirth.” It’s not much as far as poetry goes, although plenty worse has been published. But its very existence tells us that something major has happened in the perception of Punch, for though Radcliffe was a captain, it was in the army, not the navy, and his connections were with the royal court and the dissolute wits associated with it, not the diligent moneymakers of the East India Company. If Radcliffe, a poetical protégé of the Earl of Rochester, knew Punch, Rochester knew it; if Rochester knew it, every whore and rake and freethinking young gent in town knew it.

Ironically, Punch, the Great Intoxicator, seems to have ridden into town on the back of the ensobering coffee bean. I won’t delve into the history of coffee and tea in England, as fascinating as they might be in their quiet way. But the first coffeehouses began opening in the 1650s, in Oxford; by the 1660s, whether due to interest in the novelty of a stimulating drink that did not intoxicate or a conviction that if something is in Oxford then it certainly must be in London, they were all over the metropolis, too. From the beginning, coffeehouses took on a character of their own. For one thing, they charged admission: to enter, you had to pay a penny, then not a negligible sum. That penny let you read the various newspapers, pamphlets, broadsheets and ballads that were the coffeehouse’s other great attraction (the tangled, bitter politics of the day threw off a lot of print). Or you could just join the general conversation that flowed freely and often heatedly among the various tables. It wouldn’t be entirely wrong to compare them to modern online discussion groups such as MetaFilter or Free Republic, except with the possibility of actual fisticuffs should the snark get out of hand. In any case, they were something entirely new in the way that they brought together the more progressive young aristocrats and the more cosmopolitan members of the commercial classes, in a setting where if not the only then at least the chief currency was wit.