Barrelling Through History

Alcoholic beverages of various sorts conjure up distinct images. Wine suggests French vineyards or Tuscan villas; beer, English pubs or German gasthäuser; and whisky, either Scottish oak casks or cowboys in rough Western bars. Rum is no exception, evoking thoughts of Caribbean plantations, crusty one-eyed sea dogs, and bottle-label pirates like Captain Morgan. The spirit has inspired quotations from famous figures, well beyond Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Yo‑ho‑ho, and a bottle of rum!” Lord Byron deemed it a partner of “true religion” (with which, by all accounts, his acquaintance might be described as “complicated”) as an effective calmer of the soul. Winston Churchill, the one-time First Lord of the Admiralty, was not a rum drinker (preferring whisky in the morning, champagne at lunch, and brandy in the evening) and supposedly dismissed it as a naval tradition coequal with “sodomy and the lash.” More favourable was the golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez, who drank an entire bottle of rum before his first Masters tournament and “shot the happiest 83 of my life.” According to legend, Lord Nelson’s corpse was preserved while shipboard in a cask of rum after the Battle of Trafalgar, giving the liquor the nickname “Nelson’s Blood.”

Allan Greer’s short book, based on his 2024 Joanne Goodman Lectures at Western University, in Ontario, takes us into a world in which rum served as the dominant social lubricant among certain classes and as an important item in both transatlantic and local commerce. Greer, a leading scholar of North American colonial history at McGill University, maintains a light but scholarly tone as he takes us through what he calls “the Age of Rum” in what became Canada — an age that was over well before Confederation (we all know that Sir John A. Macdonald was a whisky man). Along the way we are given lively anecdotes concerning the rum trade and the ill effects of this “demon water,” unearthed by Greer through work in a dozen archives and wide reading in contemporary printed sources.

One of the most fascinating characters to emerge from Greer’s narrative is the North West Company fur trader Alexander Henry the Younger, in whose writings rum features prominently, not least for its horrific impact on Indigenous people. Henry, who kept a journal from 1799 until his early death in 1814, does not come across as an especially attractive figure, given his seeming indifference to the human cost of his business. When a voyageur drowned while shooting rapids on the Winnipeg River, Henry noted with relief the salvaging of most of the cargo but declined even to mention the victim by name. Henry also recounted, in prose that is flat and mainly unemotional (one might dare say “dry” or “sober”), such episodes as an old Saulteaux man, drunk on rum, stabbing his young wife (who survived to beat her abusive spouse with a firebrand during a later drunken revel); a Saulteaux woman biting off the finger of a female opponent during an intoxicated squabble; and, worst of all (though, as Greer notes, perhaps exaggerated by Henry), two Saulteaux men arguing about the custody of a child and literally pulling the infant apart while in their cups. Henry’s accounts, written by a colonizer observing the misbehaviour of people he regarded as racially inferior, helped to create the modern “drunken Indian” trope. His attitude to French Canadian trappers and voyageurs was not much different from his view of First Nations people, all described equally as “savage.”

Yet this is no mere litany of tales of drunkenness, alternately amusing and appalling. The book stands as the latest homage (and corrective) to the influential “staples thesis” posited by Harold Adams Innis (among others) almost a hundred years ago. Innis argued that economic drivers lay behind the settlement of Canada and its expansion beyond its Maritime and Quebec beginnings, as a series of trade items — initially fish, then timber and fur — drew Europeans to our inhospitable climate. Greer is not the first to expand the scope of Innis’s work, a blind spot in which was its focus on the commercial barons (whose entrepreneurialism undoubtedly helped build an economy) with only token attention given to the thousands of individuals, both European and Indigenous, who did the actual work of creating and transporting goods. To Innis’s distributors (“pushers,” as Greer puts it in an analogy to the modern drug trade), the author adds the perspective of the “user.” In the case of rum, a beverage built not on barley or wheat but on sugar, one must add enslaved people to the discussion, especially those whose Middle Passage from Africa ended in the dreadful conditions of Caribbean plantations.

Greer’s attention to the relationship of the rum trade to the wider transatlantic slavery system of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries puts his story onto the world stage in a way that effectively merges the local with the global. We learn about more than just the beverage: as the book’s title suggests, rum is not merely the subject but also the unifying theme in a panorama of the transcontinental economic and social system two to three centuries ago. Greer explains the connections between colonists, Indigenous communities, and European imperial powers.

Canada in the Age of Rum begins with a brief history of the distilling of spirits generally and of rum in particular. Originally known as “kill-devil” and described by one mid-seventeenth-century source as “a hott, hellish and terrible liquor,” it improved in quality with advances in technology. The future demon drink derived its modern name from the Devon dialect word “rumbullion” (denoting a great tumult), shortened into “rum” by the early Barbadian colonists, many of whom originated in that southwestern English shire. Rum was nowhere more popular than in the future Canada, especially in the Atlantic colonies. Greer’s statistical sources show that annual alcohol consumption today is a fraction of what it was 200-plus years ago. Newfoundlanders in 1770 and New Brunswickers in 1821 drank, respectively, an average of 34.6 and 31.2 litres of rum alone. Spirits tended to be more easily and cheaply transportable than many other consumables. Of Nova Scotians, one wag remarked that “the business of one-half of the people was to sell rum, and the other half to drink it.” (In 2019, Greer notes, the average Canadian consumed a mere 2.2 litres of spirit-based alcohol.)

A key feature in rum’s popularity was its utility in the recruitment of workers into a highly competitive labour market (not everyone was willing to spend several months a year in either the fisheries or the fur trade routes) and eventually as an outright substitute for wages. The trades were economically inefficient, and profit margins were slim — so much so that without using rum as a form of payment, many merchants would have operated at an unsustainable loss. The employers would also commonly provide equipment to their recruits with the expectation that the cost would be recovered in the form of fish or pelts at the end of the season. Employees would often conclude their year’s work with a net debt to the company. Many were obliged to work this debt off by staying on for an additional year, turning the system into something resembling indentured servitude. This system was an early progenitor of the rapacious “company store” in the North American mining industry (of which Merle Travis, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Nova Scotia’s Men of the Deeps, and others sang in “Sixteen Tons”).

Attitudes to alcohol in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were quite different than in the censorious, temperance-influenced atmosphere of a century later. Inebriation was certainly regarded as a problem, from whatever source, with spirits deemed the riskiest of quaffs (consider William Hogarth’s engravings contrasting the evils of “Gin Lane” with the prosperity of “Beer Street” during the campaign for the 1751 Gin Act). Yet medical knowledge of the day considered drinking in moderation a good thing. That said, the earliest North American trade in liquor had its foes, including the Jesuits, for whom it was a barrier to bringing Indigenous people to Christ. Consumption in the seventeenth century seems to have been considerably lower than in the eighteenth, by which time promoters of white dominance over the continent, including Benjamin Franklin, began to see among rum’s merits its use in suppressing or even wiping out the existing occupants of desirable land. One military official at the end of the century even suggested rum as a more effective alternative to “fire and sword”— or to the smallpox-infected blankets that the British general Jeffery Amherst deployed during Pontiac’s War.

Greer devotes a chapter specifically to “Indigenous rum” and has to face head‑on the challenge of balancing victimhood with agency: that is to say, making clear the exploitative nature of the trade and the use of alcohol as a tool of colonization, while demonstrating that First Nations were far from incapable of pushing back. Already in the seventeenth century, Indigenous leaders had recognized the dangers of alcohol and joined with the Jesuits in calling for restrictions on the French wine and brandy pouring into New France. By the late eighteenth century, with rum widely circulating, cultural differences would often impede business: what the traders saw as a strictly financial transaction was viewed by Indigenous people as a ritual of gift giving. When Alexander Henry found himself in the future province of Alberta, he noted that the Piikani, who had only just discovered rum, refused to pay for it. With no European concept of individual ownership and a price on goods, some saw rum as a kind of “milk” that a benevolent “father” figure such as Henry should freely bestow on his children.

Global events influenced all forms of trade, rum included. Following the Seven Years War, New England rum dominated the drinks market in Canada, partly because it was so cheap. With France now out of the picture, it could be imported into Quebec tariff-free. The American Revolution shifted things yet again; efforts to replace American rum with British brandy during the war did not find long-term favour, encouraging domestic distillation and the importation of raw materials from the British Caribbean. The sale of rum was also closely tied to the development of an internal grain trade. Merchants such as the German Jewish immigrant Samuel Jacobs dealt in both, sending wheat out and receiving rum in return. By 1770, it was Jacobs’s most profitable item.

Rum’s dominance in Quebec would soon end as brewing families such as the Molsons of Montreal turned to whisky from the 1830s. And between 1820 and 1850, with consumer tastes shifting away from rum to whisky, or to abstinence, the Age of Rum drew to a close. Today, nearly two centuries on, rum makes up a more modest fraction of the national sales of alcohol — well behind beer, wine, whisky, gin, and vodka. (It retains a much higher regional popularity in, for instance, Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia.) The Rum Guide to Canada, an online resource, nonetheless reports a healthy craft distillery business as far west as Alberta, and recent publicly available statistics show sales of Canadian rum steadily increasing in recent years. Yo‑ho‑ho, indeed.