Where’s the Pirate? Or, why I wrote a history of rum with only a few pirates in it

The innocents in their midst told another story. Since boarding Thomas Downing’s sloop near Virginia, the crew darted up the North American coast with a few final scores in mind. They plundered three sloops: “one from Virginia, one from North Carolina to New-York and one from Barbados to Philadelphia.” According to the August 11 issue of the Boston News-Letter, the pirates “took a cable and anchor and 4 hogsheads of rum and other things out of the Philadelphia Sloop.”

Rum was an integral part of the world inhabited by pirates. Produced from the wastes left over after boiling and curing sugar on Caribbean plantations, the upstart commodity added even more value to one of the most lucrative colonial systems that the world had ever seen. Treasure pooled in the form of slave-produced sugar and rum in the English Caribbean and in North American port cities alike. The emergence of rum—eminently desirable, fencible, and valuable—supported many different forms of profiteering during Atlantic piracy’s “golden age” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

You won’t find this story of pillaged rum in my forthcoming book though. I am more concerned with how the rum was made and under what circumstances it circulated when not snatched by pirates. Nonetheless, pirates—and privateers skirting the edges of legal plundering—make several appearances. Maritime raiders certainly understood the cultural and economic possibilities of rum. The privateer-turned-lieutenant governor of Jamaica Henry Morgan’s drunken antics in 1680s Port Royal show how colonists in one port city responded to the recent profusion of rum production in Jamaica. Alternatively, a brief report from a century later of how several enslaved men (including an expert distiller named Jeffery) were “taken off the island opposite the works by the crew of a Pickaroon about Midnight” offers a powerful reminder that pirates engaged in the kidnapping and sale of human cargoes.

Nonetheless, people listening to me speak on my research often ask why pirates do not factor more prominently in my work. And they are not alone. In some of the most generous feedback that I received on my book manuscript, one mentor questioned the decision “to avoid talking about pirates” with back-to-back-to-back question marks!

My journey as a scholar and teacher makes pirates’ limited cameos even more surprising. Like many history students of my generation, I was entirely taken with Marcus Rediker’s ability to bring pirates to life in Villains of All Nations. Intent on building on this work, I wondered how historians might connect the experiences of 1,000 or 2,000 freebooters whom Rediker portrayed as outsiders to the broader society that they in some ways rejected. I made my earliest forays into archival research in London a couple of years later as I conducted research for a senior thesis examining the tavern culture of Port Royal, Jamaica. This project tested what could be learned about shadowy pirates by focusing on the spaces where they rubbed shoulders with colonial society writ large. Over time, the history of what was consumed in those taverns became more interesting to me than a rather limited subset of drinkers.

Even as piracy has become less central to my research, though, I have sought to pass on the excitement that I experienced as an undergraduate learning about pirates in a history class for the first time. Each fall, I teach a first-year seminar at Widener University on the history and memory of Atlantic piracy. First-year seminars at Widener are expected to build on the expertise of faculty members, but the expectation is that they will introduce students to a subject in ways that transcend the conventional methods by which individual disciplines approach a topic of general interest.

My class responds to this imperative by pairing learning about the history of piracy with inquiries into how these real-life figures and events have been memorialized in novels, popular film, and even a festival near campus. It offers what I hope is an exciting way to probe the discrepancies between history and how it is invoked in popular culture. This class is also where my clearest argument for why pirates must remain ancillary characters in a history of rum took shape.

One of my favorite parts of teaching this course is that I get to regularly reread and rethink Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Besides forming my most vivid memory from being in seventh grade, the book is simply inseparable from modern stereotypes of pirates. As literary scholar John Sutherland writes in the introduction to the critical edition that I read with my students, Treasure Island “has become folkloric and part of the stuff of popular entertainment.” Almost one hundred and fifty years after the novel’s release, the most indelible twenty-first century invocation of pirates—the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise— “is, of course, pure Treasure Island, as filtered through Peter Pan’s Captain Hook.” More than anybody else who came before him, Stevenson left his readers with enduring images of pirates reading treasure maps, walking on pegged legs, and training parrot companions. As my students wrestle with each fall, he too linked pirates to a seaman’s brogue that Jim Hawkins’ allies spoke without.

Stevenson also lashed together rum and piracy. The pirates’ anthem, which appears to have been this author’s invention, begins, “Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.” The mysterious Billy Bones cannot stop drinking rum in the Admiral Benbow Inn. An early premonition that the voyage for treasure is blowing off course comes in Jim Hawkins’ observation that “double grog was going on the least excuse.” And when facing a seemingly insurmountable numerical disadvantage upon reaching the island, Jim and his compatriots’ only hope rests in “two able allies—rum and the climate.” Such references are difficult for a scholar of rum to ignore!

The consumption of different alcohols also differentiates good and bad in Treasure Island. Squire Trelawney and Doctor Livesey strategize over a quart of ale. Later aboard ship, the captain, doctor, and squire pour Jim a glass of Spanish wine. Long John Silver, the story’s most complicated character who is both a leader of the pirates and occasional friend to Jim, oscillates between “the drunken folly of the pirates” and moments of restraint. But other pirates’ preferences for strong liquor (in this case brandy) over other alcoholic beverages are so absolute that Jim immediately knows that Israel Hands’ request for a bottle of wine is merely a pretext to send him out of sight. For Stevenson, a thirst for rum—or at least the apparent inability of pirates to drink only a little bit of it—is as clear a sign as the Jolly Roger.

Hierarchies of more and less healthful alcohols—often locating rum toward the bottom of the scale—were nothing new when Stevenson wrote in the nineteenth century. In Scotland in the mid-1680s, defenders of a nascent domestic rum industry fought vigorously to prove that their rum was every bit as wholesome as brandy. More famously, Benjamin Rush first published his “Moral and Physical Thermometer” in 1784. Wine and beer consumed in reasonable quantities and at appropriate times promoted “cheerfulness, strength, and nourishment.” Even a weak punch could have positive effects. But the stronger concoctions of rum—and most of all “pepper in rum”—sent consumers on a path toward “suicide,” “death,” or the “gallows.” In this regard, Stevenson picked up on a trend dating back to rum and piracy’s heyday.

But Treasure Island was very much a product of the late nineteenth century. First printed as part of a serial titled Young Folks in 1881 and 1882, it was designed to impart moral lessons to youthful readers. One central lesson to those readers was that “demon” rum posed a unique harm to its drinkers because of its potency, affordability, and its addictiveness. As Doctor Livesey—who shared a surname with one of the most prominent British temperance campaigners of the nineteenth century—told Billy Bones early in the book, “one glass of rum won’t kill you, but if you take one you’ll take another and another,” ultimately hastening death.

The concept of drinkers being unable to control their impulses to consume more rum, and the advice to quit drinking in the first place, were not common medical advice in the era when pirates sailed. Instead, eighteenth-century writers generally held that overconsumption was an individual failing that could be overcome with personal discipline. By the late nineteenth century, however, rum’s looming threat became a common trope in temperance campaigns. Teetotalling was one response to this threat that Stevenson personally experimented with, as evidenced by a short-lived attempt in 1884 to quit “grog forever.”