Objectives

This report pursued five objectives, fixed before the records were read.

1. To catalogue the alcoholic drink of the island, distinguishing the drink imported by sea from that distilled or made on the island, wherever the records allowed.

2. To document the local distilling of alcoholic drinks, and the link to the destruction of the island's trees that the authorities feared it caused.

3. To recover the licensing, the duties and the regulation of drink, and the line between official, licensed supply and the unlicensed trade the rules sought to curb.

4. To record the consumption of drink and its social effects: the rations, the debt, the drunkenness, the disorder and the response of the authorities.

5. To rest the report on the manuscript record alone, basing every statement on the transcriptions and reporting the limits of the records as limits rather than supplying anything from outside them.

Throughout, the report describes what was supplied, licensed, drunk and traded, as the records attest it, and dates each statement wherever the record allows.

References

References in the footnotes use the short form [file/image]. The first number identifies the transcription document; the second identifies the image, or film, within that document where the passage appears. Thus [008/214] means image 214 within transcription 008, and a reference separated by a comma rests on more than one passage.

The documents are the transcriptions of the original East India Company and St Helena archives, from which the database was built. Each number always denotes the same document. The full list, giving every document's official title, the date range it covers and its British Library Endangered Archives Programme identifier, is set out at the end of this report under the heading Key to the file codes cited.

Transcriptions 001 to 014 and 016 to 030 have all been read in full, and the names and dates throughout are drawn directly from them; document 015 was not supplied, and document 029, a register of land leases, was read in full but held no alcohol content. Nothing in this report rests on an unverified summary. The drinks and period terms named in the report are explained in the glossary near the end, in the section headed Drink and other terms named in this report.

Prices of drink are given as the records state them, in shillings and pence per gallon, and are also standardised to a modern measure, the price per litre, for comparison across the period. The conversion uses the English wine gallon of 3.785 litres, the imperial gallon being a later measure. These per-litre figures are conversions for comparison only, not figures the records themselves give.

Introduction

The records gathered in the underlying database described the alcoholic drink of St Helena across some seventy years, from the island's earliest years under the East India Company in the 1670s to the wills proved in the 1710s and beyond. They were not a survey of drinking but the by-product of administration: the Company's letters from London, the island's own constitution and laws, the council's consultations, the ships' bills of lading, and the registers of leases and deeds. What survived was therefore weighted towards what the Company shipped, taxed, licensed and worried about, rather than towards the drinker. Within those limits the material was unusually full, and it allowed the place of alcoholic drink in the settlement to be reconstructed with some confidence.

This report draws only on those records. Nothing was admitted from outside the database, so that every statement rests on the manuscripts themselves; where they fall silent, the silence is reported rather than filled. The central thing the records disclosed was a small garrison colony heavily supplied with alcoholic drink from two directions at once, and persistently troubled by it. Alcohol arrived in ships by sea, in great casks of brandy and wine and in the arrack of the Company's eastern trade; and spirits were distilled on the island itself, from its roots and fruit. The authorities taxed both streams, licensed their sale, and returned again and again to the disorder, the debt and the felling of trees that the liquor brought with it.

Two questions organised the reading. The first was whether the island drank what it imported or what it distilled, and how the authorities tried to govern each. The second was what alcohol did to the settlement, in revenue and in disorder, and how far the record let that be measured. The answer to the first was that both streams ran strong, and that the Company laboured to license and tax them while fearing the local still above all for the wood it burned. The answer to the second was that alcohol was woven through the colony's finances and its troubles alike, named as a principal cause of the inhabitants' debt and of the garrison's disorder, yet recorded too unevenly for its true quantity ever to be struck.

Drink from the sea: wine, brandy, arrack and rum

The larger and better-documented stream of liquor reached the island by sea. Wine, brandy and arrack were carried to St Helena on the Company's ships, increasingly from Madeira on the outward route and from India on the homeward, and the bills of lading preserved the trade in detail. As early as the 1680s the consignments were large. In 1684 the Royall James, commanded by Captain James Marion and laden at Fort St George by Elihu Yale and his council, carried four puncheons of liquor among its cargo for St Helena; the Governor, John Blackmore, recorded its arrival that November.^[1] Brandy came in still greater bulk on the homeward ships. In September 1687 the Loyall Merchant, under Captain John Harding, delivered its cargo to Governor Blackmore with about eight puncheons of brandy found leaked or damaged on the passage, a loss the records noted as routine.^[2]

The largest single consignments came at the close of the 1680s. In April 1689 the Benjamin, under Captain Leonard Browne, was laden in London with twenty pipes and twenty tuns of brandy for the island, and that August she took on a further thirty pipes of Madeira wine at Funchal, procured on a London letter of credit, together with the same great quantity of brandy again.^[3] Drink also moved outward through the island as well as into it. In August 1687 Governor Blackmore and his council were ordered to send two tuns of brandy on to the struggling settlement at Bencoolen, and arrack was among the timber and grain the island offered to passing Company ships.^[4]

The prices the records preserved show the cost of imported alcohol and its movement over time. In the 1680s the Company fixed the price of brandy at no less than 6s per gallon, allowing for the double casking, the freight and the leakage, and limited the quantity any householder might buy.^[5] By 1704 the price had eased: Madeira wine and brandy were then bought for the island at about 5s per gallon, against an annual island expense reckoned at some £3,000.^[6] The Company watched these purchases closely, questioning in December 1703 why wine and brandy were being bought at excessive prices and demanding a clear account of the quantities, the profit, and how much was drunk at the Company's own table.^[7]

Two notes widen the range of drink the island knew. Rum was named for the first time in the retail rules of 1683, set beside rack, brandy and wine, the earliest mention of the sugar-spirit in the record.^[8] And the social uses of imported wine showed through once, when a gift of Canary wine, remarked as not made on the island, was sent in 1689 for those at St Helena to remember in a shared toast.^[9] Arrack carried from India was treated with more suspicion than ceremony: from 14 November it was ordered that arrack brought from India be inspected in the cask against adulteration, and that no more than thirty pints a month be drawn from the stores without report.^[10]

The Madeira trade ran through named hands. Around 1703 a ship was ordered to call at Madeira for thirty butts of wine and ten of brandy, loaded by the merchants Miles and Jacob, of which perhaps a third was expected to arrive sound.^[11] When the Northumberland could carry no more, further Madeira wine and brandy were sent by Captain Newton in the Heel, with the merchants Dorrell and Morgan at Madeira instructed to make up the shortfall in the island's stores.^[12] Arrack came from further east and under closer suspicion. Mr Courtney wrote from Bombay in January 1713 that butts of arrack had been loaded on the Catherine for St Helena with a sealed bottle as a sample, though the casks proved of doubtful quality, as arrack carried earlier by the Aurengzebe had also done.^[13]

The arrack trade reached back to the island's earliest years and came at first from the Bay of Bengal. In 1678 and 1679 the Council at Fort St George, under the Agent Streynsham Master and his colleague Matthias Gray, shipped butts of Bengal arrack to St Helena on the Nathaniel and the Society, each butt costing some 118 rupees, sent in the belief that arrack was useful in case of attack as a means of heartening the men.^[14] Drink also came through private favour. In 1681 Francis Bowyear, President at Bantam, sent Governor Blackmore a butt of arrack of 133 gallons on the Nathaniel and Emmanuel, consigned to Governor John Blackmore as articles proper for the island.^[15] The malt drink of England came too, strong beer and mumm shipped out among the stores, beside the brandy that arrived at 4s per gallon.^[16]

Not all imported drink was dear. Cider came in by the cask, and in 1697 was issued at a dollar per hogshead, working out at well under a penny per gallon, a cheap and homely drink set against the costly spirits reckoned by per gallon.^[17]

The price of drink

The records quote the price of drink in shillings and pence per gallon, per gallon here being the English wine gallon of about three and three-quarter litres, the imperial gallon not yet existing. To compare prices across so long a span, each is converted below to a modern measure, the price per litre, expressed in pence and in pounds. These conversions are offered only for comparison, and are not figures the records themselves state.

Two quite different prices must be kept apart, and the records reward the distinction. One is the wholesale or import price: what a ship's captain charged the Company, or what the drink cost the Company to lay in. The other is the retail price: what the Company then charged the island's inhabitants. The gap between them was wide, and it mattered, for the Company bought low and sold high, and the markup was part of what drove the inhabitants into the debt the records so often lament.

The clearest case came in 1684, when both prices fall in the same year. When thirty gallons of brandy leaked from three pipes in the store, the loss was charged to the Company at about 2s 2d per gallon, near 7d the litre, a plain statement of what the drink was worth as a cost.^[18] Yet that same year, fixing prices on a perishable cargo so that the goods might be sold, in the Council's words, to the Company's advantage, brandy to the inhabitants was set at £2 per gallon. This is far above every other brandy price in the record, and the reason for so high a figure is not clear; the passage has gaps in transcription nearby, and the figure may not be reliable.^[19] The Company guarded the difference jealously, and in January 1684 it forbade the sale of brandy, arrack or sugar from its stores to the inhabitants altogether, fearing the trade would tempt its seamen to desert.^[20]

Setting the anomalous 1684 figure aside, the two series settle into a clear pattern. On the wholesale side, brandy was shipped in at 4s per gallon around 1680, Madeira drink bought at about 5s by 1704, and the Company paid captains as much as 9s to 12s per gallon for arrack. The store accounts of the 1690s confirm the range: arrack was entered at 9s per gallon in 1693 and at 5s per gallon in 1695, and passed in local exchange at about 2s. Brandy, dearer than arrack, had risen to 14s per gallon by 1699 when reckoned in the officers' allowances. On the retail side, brandy charged to inhabitants stood at a fixed floor of 6s per gallon by the late 1680s, and arrack was sold on the island at five to 7s, a bottle still bought at 4s per gallon in 1701, the Company capping the price of good arrack at 4s in 1715 as consumption rose.^[21]

Read by date rather than by kind, the same figures show how the price moved over the years, and the movement differs by drink. Arrack, the island's staple, held remarkably steady at the retail counter, four to seven shillings per gallon from the 1680s through to 1715, held there in part by the Company itself, which fixed a cap of 6s on arrack bought from ships in 1703 and 4s on good arrack in 1715, against the buying pressure that drove ships to ask 9s or more in a year of scarcity. By 1708 the control reached even to the made drink: a bowl of punch was to be sold at 2s so long as arrack stood at 14s per gallon, the price of the punch tied openly to the wholesale price of its chief ingredient. Brandy ran dearer and climbed, from 4s per gallon wholesale around 1680 to 14s by 1699, and was served out to the sick at 8s per gallon in 1710. Arrack itself, usually held near 6s, was driven to 10s per gallon at the store in the scarcity of 1710. Wine entered the record later and dearer still, Madeira reaching £70 per pipe by 1712, about thirty-five pence the litre as the Company bought it, though sold on more modestly at 5s per gallon, and at 4s per gallon by the 1720s. The directors themselves, writing home in these later years, set the rule they wanted: arrack was to be priced from 6s per gallon to 7s or 8s as the bench was more or less supplied, and dearer in scarcity only at a reasonable profit. Across spirits and wine alike the long direction was upward, as the island grew and its thirst with it, even while the Company struggled to hold the retail price of arrack down.^[22]

One caution belongs with every figure given in dollars. The dollar of these records is the Spanish dollar, the piece of eight, the common silver coin of the age and not the United States dollar, which did not yet exist. On the island it passed at a fixed rate against sterling, six shillings until 1709, when the council brought it down to five to match the rate the ships would give. A price struck in dollars therefore means a different sum in sterling before and after that change, and the conversions here follow the shilling prices the records state wherever they give them.^[23]

Prices charged to inhabitants (retail)

The £2 per gallon fixed for brandy in 1684 was set, with the other goods of a perishable cargo, to the Company's advantage; it is far above every other brandy price and its reason is unclear, the figure perhaps unreliable. It is shown as the record gives it, not explained.

Prices charged by ships to the Company (wholesale)

Consumption over time

Set out by price, the records show what alcohol cost; set out by date, they show how much of it the island drank, and how that grew. The figures that follow gather every datable quantity of alcohol the records give, in the order of the years, so that the trend across time can be seen. The dates matter as much as the amounts, for the whole purpose is to follow the change.

A caution must come first. The records never measure drinking in one consistent way, so these figures are not strictly comparable, and each is marked below with what it actually counts. Some are imports, drink brought ashore in a single shipment. Some are rations, a regular allowance to one household by the month or the day. Some are issues from the store to the garrison, or the totals of a whole Company settlement. One is no figure at all but a remark on the level of drinking. To make the quantities legible across the old units, butts, gallons, leaguers, pipes and tuns, each has been converted to litres alongside, and annualised where the record gives a period, so that a daily ration and a yearly total can be set on the same footing. The litre figures are an approximate modern aid, the old casks having varied, and the original quantity is kept beside them. The conversion makes the scale vivid: the Governor's household at four gallons of arrack a day works out near 5,500 litres a year, while the island's whole usual draught was reckoned about 44,000 litres a year, so that a single household drank an eighth of all the arrack on St Helena. Read with that care, the direction is still plain, and it runs one way: upward.

The earliest drink came in by the butt, a hundred-odd gallons at a time, for a tiny settlement of a few hundred souls. By the mid-1690s the store was issuing arrack by the hundred gallons to the garrison alone. By 1703 the Company's own still turned out over a thousand gallons of arrack and potato arrack in the accounts of a single period. And by the second decade of the eighteenth century Governor Roberts's household by itself was charged with four gallons of arrack a day, while the records complained that consumption stood at more than four times its former level. No one figure proves the rise, but the pattern across all of them does: alcohol consumption on St Helena grew with its people and its trade, and the records, uneven as they are, leave no doubt of the way it ran.^[24]

One month shows how sharply demand could spike. In the summer of 1710 the people of the island fell sick in numbers and sent to Governor Roberts every day asking for brandy, and the store gave it out at 8s per gallon; in the single month to 25 June 1710 the inhabitants bought 732 gallons of brandy, worth £293, far above any ordinary month's drink, the spirit taken as much for a remedy as for pleasure.^[25]

London saw the same rise and named it plainly. Writing to the island in these years, the directors complained that the excessive drinking of arrack and other strong liquors had grown upon all the people strangely of late years and tended to beggary or at least poverty, and they pressed Governor Pyke's Council to check it. Their own auditing gave the measure: the island would take 70 leaguers of arrack a year though the inhabitants had fallen to few more than 70 families, where in times past, when the people were more numerous, they had not spent a quarter so much. The Court ordered the Coast and Bay to send less arrack and more rice and sugar, and shipped 25 pipes of Madeira wine as a more wholesome drink, but the thirst for spirit ran ahead of every order.^[26]

By 1716 the island's own indent put a round figure on the want. Seventy-eight leaguers of arrack a year, the Council wrote, was the usual consumption of the place, a quantity that always cleared in a year when no arrack was sold but from the directors' stores. The store accounts bear the figure out: in the two months from late May to late July 1715 the inhabitants and the Company's own tables took 827 gallons of arrack at 7s 6d per gallon, worth over £310. For an island of seventy-odd families, the thirst was prodigious, and the duty laid that same year, a shilling on every gallon landed, was the Company's answer to a trade it could measure but not master.^[27]

The monthly accounts of 1717 show how steady and how heavy the draught had become. Through the spring and summer of that year the store sold arrack at a settled 6s 3d per gallon, 426 gallons in the month to late January, 390 to late March, 530 to late June, a year's run of monthly figures that together come to thousands of gallons. Arrack so dominated the islanders' spending that in one two-month account it stood at over two fifths of the whole of what the inhabitants owed the store, the single largest charge in their running debt. The liquor the Company sold to its people was, by the end of this period, the chief engine of the very indebtedness the directors so often deplored.^[28]

Into the 1720s the balance tilted toward wine, and the fort's own table led the way. The directors, auditing the accounts from London, were dismayed to find wine, arrack and other particulars worth over £385 delivered to the fort in a single month under the newly arrived Governor Smith, the steward expending eighty-six bottles of Galicia wine, some Mountain and ale, and 175 gallons of arrack. A 1722 account charged 61 gallons of arrack against 407 gallons of Madeira wine for diet expenses alone, and the monthly liquor charges, the Court complained, did not fall by half however often it pressed for frugality. The island's consumption had grown not only in quantity but in costliness, the cheaper spirit giving ground to the dearer wine at the Company's own board.^[29]

The island did not merely drink heavily; it defended its drinking. Pressed by London to encourage temperance, the Council answered in 1718 with a frank case for the spirit it consumed. The heat and cold on St Helena were both great and the change between them sudden, often less than an hour from sultry heat to cold, so that the most temperate people, the Council held, needed more strong liquor there than in gentler climates. The ship surgeons, the only physicians the island had after its medical establishment fell to a single man, held that spirits were necessary to people whose only bread was the watery yam. The Council owned that, while it would encourage sobriety by example and precept, it was vain to dissuade the use of arrack among people who preferred it before the choicest wines. Here, rarely, the record lets the islanders speak for themselves, and what they said was that on such a rock, with such a diet, strong liquor was less a vice than a necessity of life.^[30]

The quarterly accounts of 1717 and 1718 put figures to the scale. In a single quarter the store sold the inhabitants and the Company's own tables some 1,300 gallons of arrack at 6s 3d per gallon and, beside it, 975 gallons of wine at 4s, with brandy at 9s; another quarter took nearly 1,200 gallons of arrack alone. Converted, a single three-month account could run past five thousand litres of arrack and nearly four thousand of wine, for a settlement still numbered in dozens of families. The wine that London had pressed on the island as the wholesome alternative was now drunk by the hundred gallons alongside, rather than instead of, the spirit it was meant to replace.^[31]

The quantities climbed higher still as the decade closed. In the quarter from June to September 1719, under Governor Johnson, the store delivered the inhabitants, fort and plantation 1,587 gallons of arrack, the largest single-quarter figure in the whole record, worth nearly £500, and with it more than 330 gallons of beer, a lighter drink now appearing in quantity beside the spirit. Six thousand litres of arrack in three months, for a place of seventy-odd families, marks the high tide of the island's recorded thirst, and it came in the very years the directors were pressing hardest for frugality and the council was barring the ships from selling drink to the soldiers.^[32]

By the early 1720s the wine the directors had pressed as the wholesome alternative was itself being drunk faster than it could be used. Under Governor Smith the store drew off more than 300 gallons of Madeira in a single February to supply the Governor's table; much of it stood in bottles until it turned sour, and the Council had to take it up and sell it off for vinegar, while elsewhere it drew the souring wine into a stronger spirit rather than waste it. The Council had come to share London's view that punch was harmful to health, and asked for Madeira in its place, but the island drank both, and what it could not drink it distilled or sold as vinegar. The wholesome alternative had become one more thing the island had too much of and turned to spirit.^[33]

The local still and the destruction of the trees

Against this imported drink stood the spirit distilled on the island itself, and it was this local still, far more than any imported cask, that alarmed the authorities. The reason was not drunkenness but fuel. Distilling burned wood, and wood on St Helena was scarce and slow to grow, so that the still and the forest were set directly against one another in the record. Distilling appeared early in the council's business: arrack and spirits were recorded among the settlement's goods in 1678, and the distilling of brandy and spirits again in 1687, each time noted against the use of the island's wood.^[34]

The danger was stated plainly in the letter of 5 December 1698, which reported that excessive waste was being done through the distilling of arrack from roots and fruits, said to be rapidly consuming the island's wood. It was therefore ordered that no one distil arrack without authority, that those permitted pay 12d the hundredweight for the Company's wood used, and that a duty be paid on the first running of the distilled liquor for the Company's use.^[35] The consolidated laws of 23 May 1707 set the charge more exactly still: no one was to distil without a written agreement to pay 12d the hundredweight for wood, and 4d per gallon on the low wines of the first distillation, while retailing liquor or tobacco cost £4 a year, paid quarterly.^[36]

The scarcity of wood drew a further rule that bore on every trade, the sale of alcohol among them. No one was to fell any timber tree on the Company's waste lands on pain of 20s for each tree cut, a protection of the same wood the still consumed.^[37] Yet the means to distil were kept up regardless. A new copper still was shipped to the island among the cargo of the Benjamin in 1689, plain evidence that distilling continued on the island even as its fuel was guarded.^[38] That the still was a fixture of plantation life shows in the deeds themselves: in 1703 Gabriel Powell sold James Greentree twenty acres in Sandy Bay together with a plantation, a slave and a half-share in a still, with half its worm and half its tubs, for £86, the apparatus of distilling owned and traded in shares like any other plantation asset.^[39] The same fear of the wood underlay the great rule of 1707, when a liquor trade reported worth £10,000 was said to threaten the island's trees, so that no ship was to be supplied with wood, boards or fresh provisions without leave.^[40]

By the early 1690s the Company had gone into distilling on its own account. Liquor distilled by the Company at its plantation was being sold from its stores, and in October 1692 a licensed retailer, Richard Gutling, was prosecuted for selling arrack he had distilled himself from potatoes at a time when the Company's own distilled liquor was available, as well as for selling punch on the Sabbath.^[41] The island's spirit was by now drawn largely from potatoes, the same potato arrack blamed for the dry belly ache, and the Company's entry into distilling set its own still directly against the private stills it licensed and taxed.^[42]

The quality of the local spirit could be dangerous as well as disliked. In July 1693 the planter Wills complained that he had bought three quarts of potato arrack distilled by Grace Coulsen and that those who drank it, made into punch, fell sick; Richard Parrum, John Colgrave and others swore the punch had made them ill, and Coulsen admitted she could not prove her arrack good. The case shows the potato spirit reaching the cup in punch, and the courts treating bad drink as a fault a buyer might challenge.^[43]

By the turn of the century the Company resolved to end the local still altogether. Instructions of December 1698 required that distilling be stopped, and around 1700 the Governor and Council moved to enforce them, though not without resistance. The inhabitants petitioned to continue, pleading the labour they had spent on crops already planted and the damage done to the coconut trees, and were granted a stay: those who subscribed might distil until New Year's Day on binding themselves to stop thereafter, on pain of forfeiting £10, with Thomas Booker appointed to watch the stills and report the true quantity.^[44] When the term expired and some distilled on regardless, the Council set graduated fines, £10 for a first offence, £6 for a second and severe punishment for a third, the same for any who helped, the order reaching every form of distilled liquor including rum and aimed at once to spare the wood and to reduce the drunkenness the spirit bred.^[45]

For all the orders to stop, the Company's own plantation went on distilling in quantity. Its accounts for a single period around 1703 entered 460 gallons of arrack at 4s per gallon and a further 686 gallons of potato arrack, over a thousand gallons of spirit drawn from the Company's own stills even as it pressed the private distillers to give theirs up.^[46]

The ambition to supply the island's alcohol from its own ground outlasted the campaign against the stills. Writing home around 1708, the council held that once the fortifications were finished it would be no hard matter to make sugar, rum, wine and brandy enough in five or six years to maintain the island and have some to spare, a hundredweight of sugar already pressed from the canes in the lower garden. The vineyard was kept up at yearly cost, and the council lamented that had the great wood about Governor Poirier's plantation been enclosed in time, the trees that once grew too thick to walk through would still be standing.^[47]

The vineyard at Plantation House was guarded as the grapes ripened. In 1709, the fruit having too often been robbed, the council declared that any person convicted of stealing grapes or plants from the Company's vineyard would, if white, pay £5 and work the fortifications unpaid for six months, and if black, take nine lashes and labour at the General's pleasure, the vines protected by a graduated penalty like the stills before them.^[48]

By 1711 the ambition had hardened into a detailed scheme. Governor Roberts reckoned that a hundred acres of sugar cane might yield a hundred tons of sugar worth £1,500 besides the rum, and that vineyards could be set on the hillsides west of Foggy as widely as wanted to ensure a regular vintage; canes ripe in Sandy Bay were ordered cut and brought to the castle to make sugar and rum. The means were on hand: a copper still and worm stood in the inventory of the Company's plantation house, the apparatus of distilling kept as standing plant even as the island leaned on imported liquor and was, more than once in these years, left wholly in want of liquor.^[49]

For all the schemes, the vineyards themselves were failing by 1715. The Council told London that the vines then standing were worn out and spent, and asked that the Madeira ship bring out fresh vine stocks to plant; the wine the directors did send arrived poor and badly leaked, only 21 of 25 pipes holding what came ashore. The island's own vintage, so often projected, never replaced the spirit it drank, and the grapes were valued in the end more for the health of the fruit than for any wine they might make.^[50]

By 1716 the Council looked back on the local distilling and named the price the island had paid for it. The inhabitants in times past, it told the Court, had not spent a quarter so much arrack as the seventy leaguers a year then usual, but the miserable devastation they had made by distilling arrack from potatoes was now too plainly felt by everyone on St Helena. The waste of wood had been so great that, had the people not been hindered from distilling, the island would have been entirely barren before that time. The Council gave its instance: the mountainous parts were subject to hard gusts of wind and rain, so that wherever the wood was cut off the weather broke and washed the soil away till the naked rocks appeared, and the fruit that once flourished under the shade of the trees was blasted and destroyed. When the mountains at the head of the fort valley had been wooded, the valley itself had abounded with fruit; stripped of their trees for the stills, the hills had taken the valley's fertility down with them. It was the plainest statement in all the records that the island's thirst for its own spirit had cost it its forest and its soil.^[51]

The Company's answer to that ruin can be read in the land registers of the following years. The leases granted in the 1720s bound their holders to raise young gumwood on the parcels they took, replacing the timber that distilling and building had stripped from the hills. The still that had helped strip the wood and the lease that sought to restore it were two halves of a single reckoning, the island trying by the deed to repair what the cask had cost it, though the gumwood grew slowly and the loss was never wholly made good.^[52]

Licensing, duties and the regulation of drink

The Company governed drink by taxing its landing and licensing its sale, and the rules grew steadily firmer across the period. The retailing of strong drink was placed under licence from the earliest laws. From 1683 no one was to sell rack, brandy, rum, wine or other strong liquor by retail without a licence under the Governor's hand and seal, no licence to run beyond a year, each licensee paying 10s a year to the Company.^[53] The rule was confirmed in the duties letter of 14 March 1701, which forbade the selling or retailing of arrack, punch, beer, wine or other liquors, or tobacco, without the Governor's licence.^[54] The Company pressed the point further around 1686, noting the considerable revenue the Dutch drew from such licensing and ordering a rent on every seller of liquor and tobacco.^[55] The licence was sealed with the Governor's household seal, in the manner used at Madras, and renewed yearly only as the holder proved sober and kept an orderly house; the fine taken for it was set at the Governor's discretion, not to exceed 20s a year for any one person.^[56]

The penalty for unlicensed selling could be severe. A ledger was to be kept of all spirits, leases and customs, and any person convicted a third time of selling strong liquor by retail without a licence was to wear an iron collar fastened about the neck for a whole year, the harshest mark the licensing laws set against the unlicensed trade.^[57]

The cost of the licence itself was fixed in the island's tariff of fees. In the schedule set down around 1683 a licence to retail liquor was charged at £2, listed among the fees of the judge, the sheriff and the jurymen, the right to sell alcohol priced like any other instrument of the law.^[58]

By the late 1680s the punch houses had become named, licensed establishments, and the courts policed their conditions closely. Richard Gurling, John Taylor, Colegrave and Prudence Shorwin all kept houses selling punch under licence, and all came before the court: Gurling and Taylor for buying their sugar from a ship rather than the Company stores as their licences required, Shorwin for retailing punch made from three gallons of arrack left with her by another, and Colegrave for refusing the island's currency.^[59] The line between licensed wholesale and unlicensed retail was now drawn precisely. A renewed proclamation set a £2 penalty for selling arrack, brandy, wine, punch or other strong liquor, sugar or tobacco without licence, half to the informer and the rest to the poor and the Company, and fixed the wholesale quantity, which might be sold freely, at three gallons of strong liquor.^[60] The threshold was tested at once: a planter charged with unlicensed selling pleaded that he had sold no less than three gallons, and so wholesale, though a soldier testified he had paid for three gallons of arrack and received instead bowls of punch and a single gallon mixed with sugar.^[61]

Unlicensed punch-selling went on regardless, and the courts kept catching it. In 1696 a soldier sent to fetch another for guard duty was found to have stopped at John Fuller's house and drunk bowls of punch made for payment by Fuller's wife, though Fuller held no licence, the soldier preferring a shilling's worth of punch to a free dram offered him.^[62]

The Company also reached past the retail counter to the first point of trade, the price at which ships sold arrack to the island. In April 1703 the free planters petitioned that buyers had gone aboard a ship newly in the road and engrossed the arrack at 9s per gallon, a price seldom paid, one man buying at 9s and reselling at 11s 6d in what they called prodigious gain and extortion. The Council heard them, and by advertisement fixed a maximum of 6s per gallon for arrack bought from any ship, by purchase or barter, on pain of £10, half to the informer, declaring 6s the current price and profit enough for the seller.^[63]

The landing of drink was taxed by the cask. The duty schedule of 1683 charged 50s for each hogshead of arrack and 50s for each hogshead of wine landed, alongside the duties on cattle, sugar, calico and silk.^[64] By 1707 the rate on landing had fallen to 10s per hogshead of arrack, brandy and wine alike, set down in both the consolidated laws and the island constitution.^[65] In 1715 the duty changed its very basis. Governor Pyke and the bench laid a charge of 1s per gallon on all arrack, brandy and strong liquors imported, to be paid by the buyer, a per-gallon duty in place of the old per-cask one. Pyke reasoned that smuggling could not be wholly prevented but could be contained, since large casks could be landed only at the crane in James Valley and any great quantity would betray itself; a per-gallon charge on what came ashore there was the simplest to reckon and to collect. The following year the same shilling-a-gallon duty was turned on the private sellers: the Council laid it on the warehouses or understorehouses that dealt in arrack and brandy, of which there were four or five but two of note, the parson's wife's and Mr Powell's, to cure their selling of strong liquor, Pyke holding it better to let all the island sell arrack than the parson, and resolving never to connive at tippling houses to encourage the consumption. The directors in London confirmed the charge and tightened it: the duty on all arrack landed was to be 12d per gallon and 5 per cent on all other goods without exception, extended even to whatever the ship captains claimed as necessaries to spend ashore. When they found that Governor Pyke had once let a parcel of dungarees go custom free because a captain paid him a compliment, they called it a notorious breach of their orders and said that, were he still on the place, they would have made him afraid of a second instance.^[66] The soldiers and officers of the garrison faced a further bar of their own: they were strictly forbidden to bring in wines, strong waters or other goods privately during their service, except such items as the council allowed, and the Governor was to seek out any who had done so.^[67]

The regulation reached the ships themselves at the close of the decade. In 1719, after several of the garrison fell dangerously sick from pricked Cape wine sold to them aboard, the council resolved that no ship should sell liquor ashore by retail, that is by the gallon pot, among the soldiers, and that any private householder who secretly sold arrack or wine in small quantities should pay the same penalty as an unlicensed tippling house. The order closed the last avenue by which the trade might run ashore outside the licensed houses, and it carried into the governorship of Edward Johnson, who succeeded Isaac Pyke that same year and presided over the council from the August consultations onward.^[68]

The Company also moved to limit the sheer volume coming in. As early as 24 March 1680 it ordered that the importation of brandy be restricted to what was necessary, and all other abuses reformed, an early attempt to curb the inflow of spirit at its source.^[69]

The drinking houses by name

The records name a good many of the island's drinking houses, and naming them shows how the trade grew. For most of the period a house is known only by its keeper and a loose place, John Fuller's in the country, Thomas Ashley's, Clavering's at the fort, where soldiers and planters drank punch and sometimes paid in counterfeit coin. A cluster of cases in 1708 names seven such houses at Fort James in a single breath, those of Repim Wills, John Clavering, John Robinson, Thomas Foster, William Marsh, William Hartwell and Sutton Isaac junior, all places where men drank and paid for punch.^[70]

By 1715 the houses can be placed exactly, for the licences of that year give the sign over the door and the street it stood in. The council licensed Lewis Latour to keep a victualling house at the sign of the Welsh Harp in Southwark Street, and William Beale to keep the Ship in the same street, both in James Valley below the castle. Each licence fixed the same terms: a three-pint bowl of punch was to hold one pint of arrack and sell for no more than 2s, no tippling was to be suffered in time of divine service, the keeper was to buy his arrack from the Company's stores, and he was to entertain no slaves. A third keeper, John Orchard, lost his licence that same year for taking goods that slaves had stolen and brought to his punch house.^[71]

By 1714 the houses had grown numerous enough that the Council counted them and moved to thin them out. Writing to London under Governor Pyke, the Council reckoned 50 dwellings in James Valley, eight of them disorderly punch houses whose study was to debauch the young men and prey on poor sailors, running up a reckoning of 40s for a dinner and arresting a man for the money as he tried to leave. Governor Pyke resolved to reduce the licensed retailers of strong liquor to three, or at most four, when the standing licences expired, the first time the records give both a round number for the houses and a settled policy to cut them down.^[72]

The Company's audit of drink spending

As the island's drink bill grew, the Company in London turned an increasingly sharp eye on what its servants paid for wine, brandy and arrack. The recurring complaint was that the island bought its alcohol dear and accounted for it loosely. In December 1703 the Company was dissatisfied with the account of wine, sugar and cheese bought from ship captains, no clear figure being given for quantity, profit, or what was drunk at its own table; new bills had come from Captain Tollet for £239, Captain Hosier for £361, and Captain Cook for three hundred and fifty-£2, totalling nine hundred and fifty-£2, nearly all for wine and brandy.^[73] Particular charges were challenged line by line: Captain Tollett was held to have charged £61 for 120 gallons of French brandy, some 20s more than was justified.^[74]

The price of arrack drew the fiercest dispute. By the consultations of March and April 1713, Goa arrack from the Catherine had been ordered sold at 5s per gallon and Batavia arrack at seven, prices the Company thought ruinously low, since former Governors had paid captains between 9s and 12s a gallon and the same goods would fetch nearly double in England.^[75] The strain told on supply as well as price: by May 1706 no sugar, arrack or other liquor remained in the stores, forcing large and costly purchases from Captain Rovies and Captain Cooke, some of the liquor proving so musty in the cask as to be unfit, though sold by a good sample.^[76] Behind the audit lay a simple fear, that alcohol was draining the Company's purse as surely as it drained the island's order, and that without a strict account of every gallon the loss could not be checked.

Drunkenness, debt and the discipline of the garrison

Drink ran through the colony's troubles from the first year of the record to the last, and the authorities treated it as a standing danger to order. The island's own laws abhorred intemperance and drunkenness as destructive to body and soul: a first offence of drunkenness was to be met with admonition, and a repeated offence with a fine at the Governor's discretion of up to 5s, persons of higher rank being fined more heavily than those below them, in recognition of their influence as examples.^[77] The same character of the island, as a place of frequent drinking, was used to justify the rule forbidding any inhabitant who was not an officer or soldier to wear a sword, since it was unsafe to carry one where men drank so freely, except when on duty. The two transcriptions of this London letter disagree on its date, one giving 5 December 1698 and the other 5 December 1688, a discrepancy noted here rather than resolved.^[78]

The concern was there from the founding of Governor Blackmore's government in 1678, whose first instructions required that intemperance and drunkenness be checked among the inhabitants alongside the keeping of the Lord's Day.^[79] The danger was made vivid by recent memory. In November 1678 the Company, troubled by disorder among the Council and inhabitants, urged Blackmore to keep them sober, recalling that at the Dutch surrender of the island the intemperance of the inhabitants had worked against them, with many found drunk on guard duty.^[80] The planters were thought especially prone. In March 1680 the Court under Sir Josiah Child noted their great proneness to excess in drinking, directing the Council to counsel them when sober and to make examples of those who offended, since people in all plantations were apt to drunkenness unless kept under restraint.^[81]

Among the soldiers the danger took its sharpest form, set down in the articles of war. Under those articles a sentinel found asleep, drunk or quitting his post before being relieved was to suffer death without mercy; a drunken officer was to lose his position, and a drunken soldier to be punished as the court martial saw fit.^[82] An officer who came drunk to his guard, or who let a soldier leave his post for drink, faced removal or death in his turn.^[83] The remedy the Company favoured was confinement: soldiers were to be kept constantly in barracks and forbidden, under severe penalty, to linger among the plantations or in the places where large gatherings and drinking occurred.^[84]

The particular ruin of the soldier was debt at the punch house. In the letter of 20 December 1706 the Company complained that soldiers were permitted to run up substantial debts at the punch houses, recorded against them at the storehouse, so that men later wanting their necessary clothing had already drunk away their pay, and desertion followed.^[85] The punch houses recur in the disciplinary record through the following years, set among the deaths, discharges and desertions of the muster accounts.^[86] The Company also marked the wider disorder of alcohol, noting complaints of quarrels and drunken disorder among the young men coming ashore from the ships, to be judged and fined according to their circumstances.^[87]

The court records show the disorder in the particular, and alcohol lay at the heart of the gravest cases. On a Saturday afternoon in February 1681 William Fox junior followed Sergeant Jonathan Powell up Putty Hill and beat him so severely about the head, back and chest that Powell was bedridden nearly three weeks and passed blood; questioned, Fox admitted the attack but claimed he had been too drunk to remember it, while the witnesses Edward Brayne and the soldier John Nicholls described him beating the sergeant with a heavy cane after he was already down.^[88] On 15 June 1683 Lieutenant Michael Morris, a member of the council itself, was found guilty of excessive drinking, suspended from his duties and removed from his place on the council until further order, alcohol costing a man his office at the very top of the island's order.^[89]

Twice in the 1680s drink ended in a killing. On the evening of Monday 8 April 1685 a party of soldiers drank bowls of punch and a bottle of brandy at Cannady's house, where Sergeant Honeywood and Sergeant Hunt fell to quarrelling, in part over who should pay for the drink; in the affray that followed Hunt was run through and killed, and at the inquest the witnesses, one of whom admitted he could remember little for having been drinking himself, left the jury to weigh whether Hunt, being drunk, had rushed forward upon Honeywood's sword.^[90] Two years later, on 21 June 1687, the soldier John Miller, refused a dram and victuals while already in drink, threatened a man's life and followed another into Grapes Valley, where a second fatal affray began; he was tried before Governor John Blackmore on 29 June.^[91]

Drink was named among the vices the Crown itself moved to suppress. A royal proclamation of King William and Queen Mary against vice and irreligion, received and published on the island in 1694, directed the magistrates to enforce the laws against blasphemy, profane swearing, drunkenness and Sabbath-breaking, the island's own concern with alcohol now backed by royal command.^[92] The proclamation had teeth in the particular case. In August 1695 the soldier Benjamin Seale, being partly drunk during divine service, cried out against the minister as he administered baptism and was imprisoned, his drunkenness aggravating the offence against the Sabbath.^[93]

The watch on drink was given to the churchwardens as well as the courts. The wardens appointed for 1702 were charged to note all notorious drunkards along with the swearers and Sabbath-breakers, to reprove them, and to lay formal information at the quarter sessions if they persisted.^[94] Drink respected no cloth. In February 1703 the chaplain John Kerr was reported to have drunk bowl after bowl of punch at the sessions house and, growing loose-tongued, to have abused Governor Poirier as a proud French slave and a drunk rogue, the minister's own drinking turned to slander in the very building where justice was done.^[95]

Charges of drinking could be a weapon in the island's quarrels as much as a matter of discipline. Defending himself to the directors around 1713, Governor Benjamin Boucher protested that whatever the cost of the arrack and other ingredients of punch in his time, none was on his own account, that no informer could truly say he had seen him drink a gallon of punch since his arrival, and that to affirm he went drunk to bed every night was a plain falsehood, the accusation of intemperance levelled and denied at the very head of the island's government.^[96]

Drink reached the council bench itself. In 1716 Antipas Tovey, fourth in council, having sat drinking wine with a friend named Wrangham, fell into a quarrel and drew his sword, wounding the very man for whom he professed a friendship of five years. Examined afterwards, Tovey could offer no account of the matter but that he had been very drunk when it was done and remembered no quarrel at all, his elaborate plea of provocation collapsing into a confession of mere drunkenness, and a councillor of the island answering for a wound given in his cups.^[97]

At the other end of the scale, the punch houses kept their steady toll of ordinary men. In 1717 Nicholas Sherriffe spent his time in the valley debauching himself among the punch houses, where he kept himself drunk from day to day; he was set in the stocks twice and committed to prison three or four times until he was sober, and at last, in one of his drunken fits, called out after Governor Pyke in the street. All the government's threatening had proved useless against a man the drink had taken hold of, and the punch houses that kept him supplied were the same disorderly houses the Council had been trying for years to reduce.^[98]

The gravest case the records hold showed how far the harm could run. In 1718 a man named Holliwell, after long and immoderate drinking, fell into a raving madness, believing himself pursued and crying that men meant to shoot him, until at last, his reason wholly lost, he died by his own hand. The coroner's jury found plainly that it was his drinking that had taken away his senses. Governor Pyke, who had been sent for while the man raved, said afterwards that he thought it proper to consider some method to prevent such inordinate drinking, the case standing in the record as the starkest measure of what alcohol could do to a life on the island.^[99]

The watch itself was a frequent casualty of alcohol. In July 1687 the sentinels John Cannady and William Collins left their posts at Fort James to drink: tempted by a bottle of arrack and sugar, they obtained leave from the storehouse for a gallon of arrack, mixed it into punch at a planter's house and drank for two hours, until Cannady, grown quarrelsome, raised a midnight alarm by discharging his musket and was committed to prison.^[100] Drink loosed disorder in the town as readily as on the walls. One night in January 1684 the gunner's mate William Wells led a newly arrived soldier over the fort wall after taptoe, and the pair went house to house waking the inhabitants for drink, breaking tiles on the market house and setting a fire as they went.^[101]

Below these killings ran a steady current of lesser cases in which alcohol figured plainly. In September 1678 the soldier Lewis Jones was given twenty-one stripes at the flagstaff for stealing two gallons of rack and a bottle of sack from a freeman's chest.^[102] In October 1682 a jealous quarrel at Cannady's house turned on a bottle of arrack that Richard Alexander brought to the company after a gun was fired nearby.^[103] And the disorder of the fleet's visits left its own mark, Gabriel Bowdel being bound to good behaviour for striking a Dutch gentleman during a visit of the Dutch fleet.^[104]

How much was drunk: rations and consumption

Firm figures for how much was drunk are few, because the records counted what passed through the Company's stores and accounts rather than what reached the cup, but several survive and bear directly on consumption. The issue of brandy to soldiers was capped from 1679, when, to stop men drawing excessive brandy from the stores, no more than one portion was to be issued to any soldier at a time, with a proportionate allowance to the non-commissioned officers by rank.^[105] The monthly draw of arrack from the stores was likewise capped at thirty pints, and in the 1680s each householder's purchase of brandy was limited by the same impulse to ration the liquor by price and measure together.^[106]

Drink also formed part of the island's official provision, measured out by rank. On his marriage in 1681 the minister, Mr Joseph Church, had his monthly allowance from the stores set at fifteen pounds of bread and one quart of beer.^[107] Senior officers were granted a proportion of such liquors as the Company's ships might supply or as arrived from England, liquor reckoned a due part of a leading man's maintenance.^[108]

By 1690 these allowances were reckoned exactly, and brandy was issued by per gallon. The French commander Captain Persons was granted 1.5 gallons of brandy a month from April 1690, the Deputy Governor Joshua Johnson 2 gallons, and Richard Keeling 2 gallons a month from April 1691, each with sugar, bread and flour, the brandy ration marking a man's standing in the Company's service.^[109]

The drink was not always a free allowance. In the accounts of the early 1690s the brandy and wine distributed to the garrison were charged as debts against each man's personal account, some thirty soldiers, sergeants and corporals named in a single order, their allowance set against their wages rather than given outright.^[110]

In one rare case the quantities themselves were counted, in the Company's audit of the liquor sent to its eastern factories. The accounts for Fort St George recorded four hundred and ninety-five gallons of Madeira brandy between October 1705 and June 1706, one thousand two hundred and fifty-three gallons of Madeira wine across the year 1706, two hundred and thirty-four gallons of French brandy to May 1707, and three hundred and fifty-four gallons of Bengal arrack in 1705 and 1706, a very large expenditure that the Company marked with concern.^[111] The drinking of the Governor's own official table was reckoned no less closely. The household of the Governor and his establishment, forty-five in all, with twenty-seven servants at the upper table and eighteen at the lower, was said to consume four jars, or four gallons, of arrack a day when no ship lay in the road; Nicholls judged this extravagant and unapproved, allowing only that the Governor of the day might give occasional arrack to those at work, by way of encouragement and under careful account.^[112]

The one passage that speaks to the trend records a steep rise. In the constitution of 31 March 1715 it was reported that consumption had reached more than four times its former level, even though the population had once been larger, and that more wine had lately been sent from Madeira than before, seldom done in the past when the commanders had avoided landfall during the two recent wars with France. The inhabitants were judged to have fallen into excessive drinking, held a principal cause of their poverty and debt, while the island had grown less healthful and more subject to disease; arrack might thereafter be bought when good at 4s per gallon or less.^[113] The same years saw the council provide a storehouse divided into four parts, the first set aside for arrack and all liquid goods, a measure of the bulk the trade had reached.^[114]

Wine as the wholesome alternative

Against the spirit, both imported and distilled, the Company set its hope on wine, and the turn to the vine had a named beginning decades before its best-known statement. Around 1687 the cultivation of vines and the making of wine and brandy on the island were judged a feasible undertaking, provided they were carried on by trained hands. Terms were accordingly made with Captain Bomier, described as an honest man who had formerly lived in considerable prosperity in France, where he had made between two and three hundred hogsheads of wine and brandy a year, until the persecution of the Protestants drove him from his possessions; his vine-dressers were likewise French Protestants, to be kept under strict discipline.^[115] Governor Roberts, or in his absence Captain Poole, was to visit the plantation regularly to see the work properly done.^[116]

The grape returned in the instructions of the following years. The council was directed to improve the grape vines so that, if possible, wine might be made on the island, or else the grapes sold for refreshment.^[117] The fullest statement of the policy came on 14 October 1714, when vineyards were strongly encouraged to make wine for the inhabitants, the grape judged more wholesome than arrack distilled from potatoes or the like. Such potato spirit was reported to cause serious illness, the dry belly ache, and many deaths, and the spirits distilled at St Helena were expected to be no better; even if the winemaking failed, it was held, the grapes would still refresh the inhabitants.^[118] That instruction reached the island aboard the Rochester, the same ship from which, by a consultation of 27 July 1714, Governor Boucher was authorised to buy wine and European liquors, though to the Company's annoyance he entered no record of what he bought or at what price.^[119]

The policy had a practical arm in the shipping of wine to compete with the spirit. The Cardonell was ordered to take on twenty-five pipes of wine for the island, the wine again judged more wholesome than arrack and to be sold at a suitable advance, while the quantity of arrack sent from the Coast and the Bay was to be cut and rice and sugar increased in its place.^[120]

Drink as personal property

The wills of the islanders open a different window on alcohol, not as cargo or contraband but as private property, owned, valued and passed on at death. Drink and the vessels for drinking it appear among the goods that men and women thought worth naming in their last bequests. In 1684 the soldier Hugh Syms left his brother a chest whose contents included a case of twelve bottles, with a further six case bottles kept at a neighbour's house, the bottles reckoned among the modest estate of a serving man.^[121] In 1699 the planter Richard Potter left his executor, John Goodwin, all his apparel together with whatever arrack, wine and sugar remained at his death, and any other eatables and drinkables in his possession, the drink in his store passing like any other asset to his heir.^[122]

The vessels could be as cherished as the drink. In 1711 the aged widow Mary Jewster, dividing her few possessions, kept back from her main bequest only the bed on which she lay and a small silver dram cup, the little cup for measuring out spirits singled out among her treasures.^[123] At the other end of the social scale the principle was the same. When Governor Benjamin Boucher made his will in 1713, his island estate of goods, plate, arms, cattle and liquors was directed to be sold at public auction as soon as possible after his death, the balance remitted to London by bills of exchange, so that even a governor's drink ended under the auctioneer's hammer.^[124]

Drink among the enslaved

From the later 1690s the records open a further window, on alcohol in the lives of the island's enslaved people, and it is a window the earlier documents had kept almost shut. Drink reached the slaves by several routes, and the courts treated each differently. Sometimes it was given: at Easter Captain Poirier distributed liquor among the slaves, one bottle to every five, and the slave Hanna described bowls of rum punch made and shared at a slave's house, one man offering 18d and sugar for the making of a bowl.^[125] More often, in the record, it was taken. In one case the slaves Garrot, Antony and Franc broke open a planter's house and carried off a large flask of rum and a bag of sugar, and from a second house a bottle of spirits, the drink consumed up the country before they were caught and whipped.^[126]

The largest such gathering the records describe met at Level Wood in August 1698, where slaves belonging to many masters came together with arrack stolen from one of their owners and drank heavily until a quarrel broke into a fight, a pint of the spirit later found hidden among their belongings.^[127] The authorities held the masters partly to blame. Levi Morris was fined 5s towards the church for giving arrack to his own slaves and drinking it with them and the slaves of a neighbour, the supplying of alcohol to the enslaved treated as an offence in the master as much as a theft in the slave.^[128] Whether the drink was a tool of control, a small Easter indulgence, or a thing seized against the master's will, the records show it running through the island's enslaved community as surely as through the garrison.

What the records cannot tell us

The limits of this evidence must be stated as carefully as its content, because the database was built from administrative and legal documents that recorded alcohol only as it passed through the Company's hands, and the shape of what survived was set by the purposes for which it was written. Several things a history of alcohol on the island would want were therefore thin or absent, and no close reading could supply them from within the corpus.

The most consistent silence was on quantity. The records fixed prices, duties and rations, and named the casks by the pipe, the tun and the hogshead, but they never set a total of drink imported or distilled against the number of people on the island, so that a figure for consumption per head cannot be struck from the documents alone. The single statement that consumption had risen above four times its former level was a comparison the Company made without the numbers behind it, and it has been reported as such.

The local still is known chiefly through the rules made against it. That distilling consumed the island's wood was stated repeatedly, but no record gives the wood burned for each gallon distilled, nor settles whether the still or the building and fuel of the settlement was the greater drain on the trees. Nor does any surviving passage record the unlicensed still directly, its number or its scale, so that the illicit trade the licences were meant to curb is visible only in the shadow of the law that pursued it.

The enslaved, who formed the largest body of people on the island, are almost wholly silent on alcohol. The records show them barred from weapons and little trusted, which fits a general limiting of their freedoms, but they do not record whether alcohol was issued to them, sold to them, or denied them, and any rule particular to them has yet to appear. Beer, too, is faint: it is named among the licensed and taxed drinks, but the records do not say whether it was brewed on the island or only imported, in what quantity, or by whom it was drunk.

Finally, the meaning that alcohol carried for those who drank it, the place of the punch house in the soldier's week, the courtesy of the shared toast, the social weight of a man's drunkenness against his rank, was recorded only obliquely, in the grading of fines and the occasional vivid case, and never explained. The records showed that such distinctions were made and enforced; they did not state what alcohol meant to those who lived by it, and the report does not supply a meaning the sources withhold.

The place of alcohol in the island's life

Drawn together, the threads traced through this report show that alcohol was not a marginal indulgence on St Helena but one of the central facts of the settlement's economy and society. Three things stand out. First, alcohol was a staple of trade and a chief source of the Company's revenue on the island: it was taxed at landing, licensed at retail, and sold from the Company's own stores at a steady markup, so that by 1717 arrack alone stood at over two fifths of everything the inhabitants owed the store. The drink the Company sold was, in plain terms, one of the main ways it drew money from the people it governed.

Indeed, in a colony where coin was always scarce, arrack served as money itself. The clearest statement comes from the Council under Governor Smith around 1722: arrack, it wrote, was the chief means of trust on the island. The poorer sort, whose credit would not furnish them at the stores, and the handicraft trades, the barber and the shoemaker among them, were paid in arrack rather than coin; petty debts were settled the same way. Spirit thus passed from hand to hand as a currency, and a man paid in arrack who could not eat it would carry it to some obscure place in the valley and drink it there for days, or, the Council said, a week or two together. That a settlement should pay its tradesmen in the very spirit that ruined them is the sharpest single image the records give of how deeply alcohol was woven into the island's economy.^[129]

Second, alcohol was the engine of the island's chronic indebtedness and the disorder that flowed from it. The same accounts that show arrack dominating the store debts show why London called the inhabitants poor: the soldiers drank away their pay at the punch houses until desertion or the gallows followed, the planters mortgaged their provision-grounds against their reckonings, and the council watched eight disorderly punch houses prey on sailors with forty-shilling dinners. The rising consumption, traced from a single butt in 1678 to seventy-eight leaguers a year by 1716, was not a record of festivity but of a dependence the authorities named again and again as ruin.

Third, alcohol reshaped the island's very ground. The local distilling of arrack from potatoes, pursued in the teeth of every order to stop it, stripped the hillsides of the wood that held the soil, until the council could write that, had the people not been hindered, the island would have been entirely barren. No other single appetite recorded in these papers left so deep a mark on the place itself. The history of alcohol on St Helena is therefore, in small, a history of the colony: its trade and its taxes, its poverty and its disorder, and the slow ruin of its forest, all run back to the cask and the still.

Conclusion

The records described an island supplied with alcohol from two directions at once and governed, with growing strictness, against the disorder that followed. The imported stream of brandy, wine and arrack, carried by the pipe and the tun on the Company's ships and increasingly drawn from Madeira, met a local still that distilled arrack from the island's own roots and fruit. The Company taxed both, licensing the retail of strong drink under the Governor at 10s a year and charging the landing of every hogshead, while fearing the local still above all not for the drunkenness it caused but for the wood it burned.

To the question of what alcohol did to the settlement the records gave a consistent answer, if never a measured one. It was named a principal cause of the inhabitants' poverty and debt and of the worsening health of the island, and it was the standing ruin of the garrison, whose soldiers drank away their pay at the punch houses until desertion followed and whose articles of war sent a drunken sentinel to his death. The Company's remedies ran from the fine and the licence to the confinement of soldiers in barracks and the hope, vested in Captain Bomier and his French vine-dressers and pressed again in 1714, that the inhabitants might be turned from the potato spirit that killed them to the wholesome grape.

What the database established, in sum, was a small garrison colony in which alcohol was at once a source of revenue, a charge on the wood, and a constant threat to order, supplied from the sea and from the still alike and never brought fully under the rules made to govern it. What the records could not give, the true quantity drunk, the scale of the unlicensed still, the alcohol consumed by the enslaved, and the meaning the inhabitants attached to it, lies beyond what the manuscripts preserve, and has been left unclaimed rather than supplied from outside them. The account offered here is therefore complete as to what the records hold, and candid as to where they end.

Drink and other terms named in this report

The following lists the drinks, casks and period terms named in this report, with a short explanation of the less familiar ones. The spellings are the modern standard forms; the manuscripts often spelled them otherwise. Terms are listed alphabetically.

Key to the file codes cited

Every document cited in this report, decoded to its official title, the date range it covers and its British Library Endangered Archives Programme identifier where recorded. All were read in full from their transcriptions. A further run of documents, reaching to roughly 1899, awaits mining into the same record.