The oldest rum

About once a month or so I chat with Ed Hamilton, the Minister of Rum, about some rum-related issue. And during that conversation, either he'll ask or I'll ask: "So, have you found any good evidence of rum predating Barbados?"

As I write in my book, Barbados has long claimed patrimony of rum. The islanders often insist it was invented shortly after Barbados was settled by the British in 1627. Indeed, the first documented appearance of rum that I'm aware shows rum, then called kill-devil, being exported from Barbados in 1638.

But it seems more than likely that some sort of sugar cane spirit would have arisen prior to then in one of the several Spanish or Portuguese colonies, where sugar was being produced for more than a century before Great Britain got into the game on Barbados. Beverage distilling technology had been around for about two centuries. That sugar and distillation didn't meet for a century seems seriously improbable.

Yet, no one has come up with a single ship's manifest or plantation deed or journal reference to rum being made or exported from Cuba or Brazil or Guyana or anywhere else prior to 1638.

Why no evidence? Any number of reasons suggest themselves.

First, we English speakers tend to use English language sources, and few of us have ventured into the Spanish or Portuguese archives. Second, Spain had banned rum production (to protect domestic brandy producers), so early rum-making would have been illegal, and not likely to yield a paper trail. Also, as Ed points out, the colonial archives often didn't last long – coastal ports were sacked and burned with numbing regularity.

Anyway, I was thrilled to recently track down a scholarly 2004 book by José Curto entitled "Enslaving Spirits: The Portuguese-Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and its Hinterland, c. 1550-1830." The title certainly held out the possibility of early rum or cachaça production in Brazil. But no: as the book recounts, the 16th-century trade with Africa involved mostly wine from Portugal. Only later do the traders start with Brazilian rum.

In fact, the documentation mentioned in the book doesn't do anything to upend the Barbados-first theory. Curto notes that cachaça (which he sometimes calls sugar cane brandy) was eventually important for ballast in outgoing voyages, and Brazilian tobacco was also exported in quantity. But, he writes, "neither of these Brazilian colonial products were found amongst the numerous items of exchange utilized prior to 1641 by the Portuguese merchants based in this West Central African seaport to procure slaves."

Another excerpt:

Precisely when Brazilian trading interests began to forward cachaça and tobacco to their commercial representatives in the colonial capital of Angola has not been satisfactorily established. In the case of sugar cane brandy, some scholars have stated that it began arriving sometime in the seventeenth century. Others, on the other hand, have been far more specific by suggesting the year 1660. .... The first reference to sugar cane brandy being used to acquire slaves in the hinterland of Angola's colonial capital comes from the late 1650s. Thus the first tobacco and cane brandy shipments from Brazil probably arrived around 1650.

This is certainly not a comprehensive statement – the book deals with rum exports, not Brazilian production. But it does raise a question: If Brazilian rum was being made in quantity by the late 1500s or early 1600s (as many of us assume), why would traders wait a half-century or more to start shipping it abroad? It's the dog that didn't bark.

So the search for documentation continues. In the meantime, Barbados retains bragging rights.