Free Punch by David Wondrich

thoroughly to find a group to whom “vicious, debauch’d, and profane” better applied. They were rakes, roisterers and alcoholics—and, for that matter, duelists, bride-abductors, exhibitionists, atheists and poets (indeed, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, combined all of those things and more). What they were not, however, were Punch-drinkers, at least not at first. Being gentlemen, they drank wine. Being English, they also drank beer and ale. The latter was no doubt of a stronger and better grade than what their fellow countrymen who made up the London mob were drinking, but if those at the lower reaches of society were deprived of alcohol, it wasn’t for long. Before the decade was out, they would discover spirits.
    After the Second Anglo-Dutch War ended in 1667, as Daniel Defoe, a schoolboy at the time, would recall in 1727: “Suddenly . . . we began to abound in Strong Water-Shops. These were a sort of petty Distillers, who made up . . . Compound Waters from such mixt and confus’d Trash, as they could get to work from.” The trash was familiar: sour or salt-water-damaged wines, “Lees and Bottoms,” cider dregs, “damag’d sugars,” and so forth. The resulting aqua vitae was then flavored, cheaply, with aniseed or juniper and hawked from “bulks” (shop windows) and market stalls or “by street vendors crying ‘A dram of the bottle.’” v
    Whatever their quality, spirits sales in England soared: by 1684, they were topping half a million gallons a year. The causes for this increase could have been as complex as postrevolutionary disorientation and the rootlessness brought on by out-of-control urbanization w or as simple as the high excise taxes that Cromwell’s Parliament had imposed on beer and ale and Charles’s had retained and extended. But whatever they were, they didn’t just affect the urban rabble, the alehouse classes. Before long, the drinking life of the taverngoer would change as well.
    By the time Charles took the throne, Punch had spread far beyond its South Asian cradle. Its earliest appearance elsewhere comes in the often-cited account of the new English colony of Barbados written by Richard Ligon, who was there from 1647 to 1650. Whatever his good qualities, and I’m sure they are many, when it came to Punch, either he got his notes a little mixed up or those early Bajans had picked up the name but not the drink that came with it. x In any case, he described it as simply fermented sugar water—“very strong, and fit for labourers.” Between Ligon’s years in Barbados and the Restoration, the fortunes of Punch in the West are obscure. In early 1668, however, William Willoughby, the aristocratic governor of Barbados and the Leeward Islands, reporting to London on the typically unruly state of affairs in the English Caribbean, described his intention to place affairs in St. Kitts in the hands of one Colonel Lambert. With half the island being a French colony, they took some management. Fortunately, quoth Willoughby, Lambert “is a man of good reason, and at a bowl of punch I dare turn him loose to any Monsieur in the Indies.” If English colonels and French monsieurs could drink Punch together, one may assume that by then the drink was both well established and, to some degree, socially acceptable in the Caribbean colonies. By then, Punch-drinking had spread to the North American colonies as well, and not only among the servants.
    We know this from, among other things, the lengthy tab John Parker ran up between May 1670 and February 1671 at John Richardson’s Talbot County, Maryland, “ordinary.” y Scattered among all the charges for beer and mum and rum and brandy are entries for a total of thirteen and a half “Bowles of Punch,” at sixty or eighty pounds of tobacco—the local currency—each, depending on what it was made from. Clearly, Parker was no servant—any man who could afford to spend more than eight hundred pounds of tobacco on Punch was not, in that time and