Fatal sip
Have some rum grog. Very fitting for the holidays.
Had I not tasted rum
I'd be content with juice,
But alcohol has newly made
My former tastes vamoose.
— Felicia Nimue Ackerman
This poem first appeared in The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin and is reprinted with permission.
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New England became British Colonial America’s distilling center for rum. The liquor is made from molasses, mostly from Caribbean slave-worked sugar plantations. New England’s rum leadership in the 17th and 18th centuries was due to its metalworking and cooperage skills and abundant lumber and its ports and other maritime shipping strengths.
Most New England rum was was lighter than others and more like whiskey. Much of the rum was exported, though New Englanders bought and drank a lot of it themselves. (They also drank a lot of ale and beer; drinking water could be dangerous.) But distillers in Newport also made an extra strong rum specifically to be used as slave-trade currency, and rum was even an accepted currency in Europe for a time.
New England’s role in the rum business was one reason that southern New England merchants got heavily into the slave trade. Africans, of course, were kidnapped and taken by the millions to the Western Hemisphere, mostly to work on the plantations.
The infamous “Triangular Trade.’’ “Sugar’’ means molasses.
British Royal Women’s Naval Service (“Wrens”) members serving rum to a sailor from a tub inscribed "The King God Bless Him" during World War II.