Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/399

Rh country is well watered, and with different water from that of England; "not so sharpe, of a fatty substance, and of a more jetty colour. It is thought that there can be no better water in the world; yet dare I not preferre it to good Beere as some have done. Those that drinke it be as healthful, fresh, and lustie as they that drinke beere."

By 1631 they had passed a law for putting drunkards in the stocks; other laws followed concerning adulterations, sale to savages, etc. In 1634 the price of an "ale quart of beere" was set at a penny, and brew houses were soon in every village, in some places attached to every farm. The manufacture of other drinks followed rapidly, and in Judge Sewall's diary, some forty or fifty years later, we find mention of ale, beer, mead, metheglin, cider, wine, sillabub, claret, sack, canary, punch, sack posset, and black cherry brandy. The commonest of all these was "cyder," which was produced in enormous quantities and drunk very freely. Sack was passing out of date, excepting in posset, a delectable mixture of wine, ale, eggs, cream, and spices, boiled together. Metheglin and mead were brewed from one part of honey and two or two and a half parts of water and spices, fermented with yeast, and very heady liquors they were. The least excess, as they used to say, would bring back the humming of the bees in the ears. Governor Bradford early issued one of his orders against some "Merrymount scamps" on board the bark Friendship, who took two barrels of metheglin from Boston to Plymouth, and "dranke up, under the name leakage, all but six gallons."

But none of these, nor the "beveridge" and "swizzle" made from molasses and water, the perry, peachy, spruce and birch beer, and the rest, did half as much execution as rum. This was introduced from Barbadoes about 1650, and from then on became practically the national drink of the country. A great trade was set up with the West Indies, the ships exporting corn and pork and lumber for the plantations, and returning with cargoes of raw sugar and molasses, which last was almost valueless where it was made, but, diluted and fermented, furnished a ready source of alcohol.

Every little Now England town and village had its distillery—the seaport towns had scores of them—and the rum bullion, rumbooze, or, as it was universally known, killdivil, was sold freely for two shillings a gallon, and was shipped largely to the African coast in exchange for slaves. It was to this profitable trade that Newport and other New England coast towns owed their prosperity, and the interference with this trade by the English Commerce Acts was one of the main causes of the Revolution.