Note: I’m stuck on the John Neal project, partly because, as Bill Barry told me, his story keeps unfolding like a magic Chinese box, and partly because I got invited by the folks at Three of Strong Spirits to collaborate on a project about the history of rum in Portland. We should be dropping the first in a series of short videos soon. If you prefer to read about it, here’s the text. Cheers!

Discussed in this Post

• The first European settlement at what is now Portland

• An early reference to rum in literature

• The properties and potency of early rum

• Some popular early rum cocktail names

The first settlement by Europeans at what is now Portland was a trading post and village called Casco located on the shore at Clay Cove approximately here (Fore and India) in 1632.  The founders, George Cleeve and Richard Tucker, undoubtedly brewed beer, and may well have distilled alcohol.  If they had any rum, it would have arrived in a ship.  Their contemporary, mariner John Josselyn notes “kill-devil rhum, ‘a strong water distilled from sugar canes’ enjoyed as a toast and as a medicine applied to wounds that wouldn’t heal” at the Richmond Island fish camp.  It’s possible that when Casco was destroyed in King Philip’s War in 1676, and again in King William’s War in 1690, some rum and/or a still were captured or destroyed.

That rum has little more than the raw material in common with today’s. Distilled from cane sugar juice (not yet from molasses), it was a raw, clear overproof spirit of as much as 75% alcohol.  It earned names like Screech, Kill-devil, Rumbullion, and Demon Rum.  It might have looked like Acadian, or, after several months in a barrel at sea, Oaked Acadian, but it surely didn’t taste--or smell-- like it; Wayne Curtis writes “Colonial rum, made with a crude pot still and seat-of-the-pants technology, would have been laden with impurities, and could have been whiffed a block away.”

 However, this was the era when the idea of “one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak” took hold and really strong rum fortified drinks with names like stone-fence, rattle-skull, flip, and calibogus.

What would the actual recipe proportions be since today we’re substituting 40% alcohol for 75%?  Five of strong, two of weak? I can’t do that math, but I wonder if Rachel can mix me up a rattle-skull.