I can’t believe that it’s been nearly a month since I last wrote a blog post! My only excuse is that a week on holiday at the end of July has upset my rhythm.

It’s been nice to have a few people ask me ‘what’s going on with the blog posts?’, and to have a little rest from it. Anyway, from now on I hope to be back to a steady one-a-week posting schedule, or simply whenever there’s something interesting to write about. I can’t help but feel that despite all of the instant messaging joy Twitter has brought us, it has also killed off the impulsive blog post on something random and interesting at the time. Maybe a good thing, maybe not.

Back on track. I’ve been doing a lot of rum training recently and as usual my sessions seem to focus mostly on the history side of things. Most bartenders are geeks to the flavours of their favourite spirits, if they have some juicy history to go alongside this, all the better.

Rum has by far and away the richest history of any liquor, in fact it’s history is probably as rich as all the other spirits put together. In both the sense that there is a massive wealth of stories involving rum, but also that many of these stories had huge historical impact. Take a look at my rum timeline, which desperately needs an update (weird how you can look back on a bit of work that you were proud of once, but in hindsight realise it needs some attention!), it displays a few of the historical conquests of rum and how it forged the new world.

I just want to concentrate on one aspect of the rum story in this post and a very specific part of that aspect in itself. The reason that this came about is that I was looking for rum pictures relating to the slave trading triangle that operated between the West coast of Africa, the Caribbean and the New England colonies.

In the simplest possible terms, slaves would be purchased in West Africa using rum, then they would be shipped to the Caribbean islands and traded for molases and sugar, which would in turn be taken to the New England coast and traded for rum, then back to Africa and so on.

One of the interesting things about this triangle is the fact that there was no money involved. Like a primitive stock exchange, slaves had a exchange rate against rum, which had an exchange rate against mollases, which had an exchange rate against  slaves. It just so happened that this market rate was always grossly in the favour of the trader traveling the triangle clockwise.

This was further solidified when I came across the documents from ‘The Slave Ship Sally’. Sally commenced an 18 month voyage in 1764, trading (amongst other things) rum, slaves and sugar. You can see more details about the voyage on the website, but here are some of my favourite documents charting the astonishing trading that took place.

There are over eighty original documents on the website divulging all manner of trading and commerce. The Sally returned to the Caribbean nine months after hitting the African coast, during it’s time there it purchased nearly two-hundred slaves. Around twenty were sold before embarking for the West Indies, over one-hundred had died before the ship arrived. All in all the voyage was a failure, with sickly slaves fetching a poor price at market. The Sally returned to Providence with a cargo of salt (rather than sugar) in late December 1765.

This collection of documents is a stark reminder of how little we valued human life in the face of new found lucrative global trading. Rum fueled this culture in more ways than just it’s market value, and that unfortunately is not it’s only sin! More to come…

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