sugar cane figures prominently in the history of spirits because it has provided the basic sucrose necessary for the fermentation and distillation of a wide variety of alcoholic beverages, most notably rum. The production of fermented and distilled alcoholic beverages made from sugar cane follows the historical migration of sugar cane around the globe. Botanists believe that sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum) was first domesticated in New Guinea about eight thousand years ago. It spread throughout the Pacific islands, reaching Hawaii around 600 ce.
From the Pacific, sugar cane spread to India and China, and it is here that we find the earliest evidence for the production of sugar-cane-based alcoholic beverages. In his search for the origins of sugar production, anthropologist Sidney Mintz argued that the earliest datable mention of sugar cane is from Alexander the Great’s general Nearchus, during his conquest of the Indus river region in 327 bce. Nearchus noted, “A reed in India brings forth honey without the help of bees, from which an intoxicating drink is made though the plant bears no fruit.” Ironically, the reference is not to sugar but to an alcoholic beverage made from sugar-cane juice. There are numerous other references to the fermentation of sugar-cane juice in ancient India. For example, the laws of Manu, dating to 200 bce–200 ce, placed restrictions on the use of alcohol among Hindus, including alcoholic drinks made from sugar cane. The Caraka Samhita, possibly written as early as 78 ce, identified sugar as one of the nine sources for wine. Ye-lu Ch’u ts’ai, the Chinese minister to Genghis Khan, wrote during his travels to the Indus valley that sugar cane was cultivated and from its juice “people make wine.” Fermented sugar drinks were also described in the Arthashastra of Kautilya, which may have been written as early as the third century bce. Thus, the evidence indicates that India developed the earliest tradition of using the juice of sugar cane to produce alcohol.
The Muslim expansion in the 700s spread sugar cane across the Mediterranean, yet its use as an alcoholic beverage failed to take hold in these new territories. By the 900s, sugar making had reached as far west as the island of Sicily and southern Spain, confirming the saying that “sugar followed the Qur’an.” The Crusades helped introduce sugar to Europe, and Crusaders themselves became sugar producers in some parts of the conquered Arab world in the 1100s. For almost six hundred years, until the fifteenth century, the supply of sugar to the Muslim and Christian worlds came exclusively from the Levant and Mediterranean sugar industries. There is some evidence that sugar cane was used in the production of alcohol in the Arab world. In 1200, Marco Polo wrote that in Zanzibar “they have no grape vines, but make a sort of wine from rice and sugar, with the addition of some spicy drugs.” Yet despite the strength of the Levantine and Mediterranean sugar industries, as well as the knowledge, at least in some parts of the Arab world, that sugar cane could be used to produce alcohol, there is no clear evidence of any concerted effort to advance the production of sugar-cane-based alcoholic beverages. The technological inefficiency of Mediterranean sugar production, the high value of even poorer quality sugar, and the Muslim prohibitions against alcohol drinking probably helped ensure that few Mediterranean sugar producers would turn their sugar-cane juice and the byproducts of sugar making into alcohol.
In the mid-fifteenth century, the production of sugar began in the Atlantic islands off the West African coast. Spanish and Portuguese investors, with the help of Italian merchants and sugar producers, transferred the capital, technology, and knowledge necessary to cultivate sugar cane and produce sugar in the Atlantic islands. The main islands included Madeira, the Canaries, and Sâo Tomé. Madeira, under Portuguese rule, was the earliest and most successful of the Atlantic sugar islands. Sugar producers in the Spanish Canaries began exporting sugar at least as early as 1506, and producers in Sâo Tomé were also producing sugar in the sixteenth century. Yet despite the presence of sugar, the increasing knowledge of alcohol distillation in Europe, and a growing urban population of avid alcohol consumers in Europe, there is no evidence for the commercial or even local production of alcoholic beverages from sugar cane in the Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic islands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Christopher Columbus carried sugar cane to the Caribbean on his second voyage in 1493, and a sugar factory was established on Hispaniola ten years later. Small mills produced sugar for export, as well as molasses for local consumption, but it appears that Spanish colonials in Hispaniola had little interest in the byproducts of sugar production. In 1535, Spanish colonial official Gonzalo de Oviedo y Valdes wrote, “The ships that come out from Spain return loaded with sugar of fine quality, and the skimmings and syrup that are wasted on this island or given away would make another great province rich.” Although sugar-cane juice and the byproducts of sugar making were readily available in the Spanish Caribbean in the sixteenth century, there is no clear evidence that colonists used these materials to distill rum, nor is there incontrovertible evidence that colonists in the sugar-cane growing regions of Brazil and New Spain (Mexico) distilled rum in the sixteenth century.
Guacapo, or more commonly guarapo in the Spanish colonies, was the first specific name for an alcoholic beverage made from sugar-cane juice in the New World, and it was a fermented drink produced on a small scale for local consumption. Regional variations of the name sprang up throughout the Americas. In Brazil, fermented sugar-cane drinks were called garapa, and in the French Caribbean they were called grappe. In Barbados, enslaved peoples consumed a fermented sugar-cane-based drink called grippo, which seems to be analogous to guarapo, garapa, and grappe.
These were fermented alcoholic drinks that should not be confused with distilled rum. Yet it is quite possible that they coexisted with distilled drinks. Certainly such drinks were no novelty, at least in theory. Iberian brandy was common in sixteenth-century Latin America, as was the local version, produced in Peru and shipped (illegally) around the region. Many of the Spanish and Portuguese colonists would have even encountered cane spirits in Asia—both empires featured a good deal of back and forth between their Asian and American holdings. See Pisco.
When the French traveler François Pyard de Laval, who visited Brazil in 1510, wrote that there “they make wine from sugarcane, which is cheap and is only for the slaves and the natives of the place,” the word he used for wine, vin, is the same one he used for the distilled palm arrack he encountered in Goa, in Portuguese India. And certainly when the viceroy of Mexico prohibited distillation from cane in the 1630s, he noted that it had been practiced “for many years,” which means the miners who were recorded selling “vino de azúcar”—“sugar wine” in Taxco in 1600 may have been selling rum (it has often been remarked that one of the biggest obstacles to understanding the early history of distilling is the slow development of a specialized vocabulary). None of this is conclusive, but that may be the best we can hope for; the lives of enslaved African and indentured Native American sugar-mill workers and their lower-class European managers in sixteenth-century Latin America were barely documented to begin with, and the centuries that have passed since then have been turbulent ones and not always conducive to preserving documents.
In any case, enslaved Africans in the Caribbean played a key role in the manufacture of these cane drinks. In Santo Domingo, Las Casas’s mid-sixteenth-century reference to alcoholic sugar-cane-based concoctions hinted that Africans were the primary consumers and, perhaps, producers, of these beverages; this is corroborated by Pyard de Laval for Brazil. Enslaved Africans, as with Europeans, sought to reestablish traditional patterns of alcohol use in the Caribbean. In Martinique, at least, some planters allowed their enslaved workers to collect the unwanted skimmings that spilled over the cauldrons during the sugar boiling process, which they then used to ferment (and possibly distill) “intoxicating drinks.” Although Europeans recognized the alcoholic potential of sugar cane, Africans also came from societies that produced a wide variety of fermented alcoholic drinks, and they, rather than the Europeans, may have conducted some of the initial experiments with fermented varieties of sugar-cane juice in the Caribbean. As for distillation, the history of its extremely rapid spread in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century West and Central Africa and the great ingenuity displayed there in making stills from materials at hand show that it need have taken no time at all, historically speaking, for it to spread throughout the enslaved African population in Latin America. See
Sugar cane spread out of the South Pacific eight thousand years ago and returned as rum in the hulls of the ships of Captain James Cook and other European explorers. Those explorers recorded the widespread presence and cultivation of sugar cane in the Pacific, though Pacific Islanders used sugar cane only as a vegetable plant. In 1788, the British brought its industrial cultivation to Australia, but they were only following what the Dutch had done in Java. See Australia and New Zealand and arrack, Batavia. By the early nineteenth century, American firms had built sugar estates in Hawaii that soon began distilling rum. In 1827, the Hawaiian governor Boki sold his sugar factory to a syndicated company that abandoned sugar making for rum distilling. Christian missionaries objected to the distillery and persuaded King Kaahumanu to destroy the plantation. In the 1880s, the French Pacific colonies of Tahiti and New Caledonia also produced rum and even managed to export some twenty thousand gallons a year to France. Today, cane is grown throughout the tropics, and everywhere it is grown rum is made from it.
See also Cane-Based Spirits and Caribbean.
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Smith, Frederick H. Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.
By: Frederick H. Smith