From slavery and indentured servitude, the families of Antigua’s exploited rum workers finally took over production, as Joseph Piercy explains

The Caribbean island of Antigua is renowned for its white sandy beaches, 365 of them in total, providing the neat tourist-board slogan “a beach for every day of the year”. Antigua is the Spanish word for “ancient”, and it was most likely named by Christopher Columbus, the first European to survey the island during his expedition of 1493, in honour of the Church of Santa Maria de la Antigua in Seville, which by a curious quirk of fate is where Columbus’s remains are interred (despite the explorer’s dying wish to be buried in the Caribbean).

Nobody took much interest in Antigua until the British colonised it in the 17th century and set up tobacco and sugar plantations. It is a common historical fact that where there is sugar production there are molasses, and where there are molasses there is rum. Such is the case with Antigua, however it’s taken a while for the quality of Antiguan rum to be recognised alongside its fellow Caribbean island nations.

Colonel Christopher Codrington, the British-appointed Captain-General of the Leeward Islands, arrived in Antigua in 1674 and set up a sugar plantation named Betty’s Hope. Codrington was a successful businessman, having sugar production holdings on Barbados and St Kitts, and his influence and expertise led to a huge explosion in sugar production on Antigua. By the 1750s over half the arable land on the island was given over to sugar and the island boasted around 150 sugar mills, most of which had their own distilleries.

It is also a common historical fact that where there was sugar production there was slavery, and Antigua had a particularly high number of imported slaves from Africa – Betty’s Hope alone relied on the forced labour of over 400 slaves at the height of its production.

Following the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, sugar production in Antigua declined throughout the 19th century. However, the slaves themselves were not exactly set free or compensated, with many being coerced into indentured servitude schemes. These schemes, although providing former slaves with some basic rights and wages, were often harsh and exploitative, with draconian punishments for breaking the terms of employment. To make up for the shortfall in cheap labour, the plantations attempted to attract impoverished European workers to the colonies, enticing them with the chance of a new life in paradise. Although this plan met with limited success, Antigua did manage to attract indentured servants from the Portuguese island of Madeira, who brought with them not only centuries of experience of sugar production but more importantly, knowledge and finesse in the fine art of booze production.

As the sugar mills and distilleries wound down and closed, Antiguan/Madeiran rum producers began blending cheap imported rum from other British colonies, mixing them with their own produce, then repackaging, rebottling and reselling the hooch under various colourful names such as Black Cock and Silver Hoof. This powerhouse blending operation gave rise to rum shops popping up across the island, many of which were set up by the families of former Portuguese indentured servants.

In 1932 four such families of Madeiran heritage – namely Farara, DeFreitas, Diaz and Fernandez – pooled resources and set up the Antiguan Distillery Limited (ADL) and installed a traditional French copper Savalle style column still as the centrepiece of their factory. The local authorities were unhappy about having a distillery in downtown St John’s (the capital of Antigua) so offered a space on a peninsula to the north of the town known locally as Rat Island, the site of a former leper colony.

Despite its inauspicious nickname, Rat Island has proved over time not only to provide terroir-like eco conditions for fermentation and aging high-quality rum, but fortuitous commercial access via the aptly named Deep Water Harbour that was dredged to accommodate the endless parade of gruesome cruise ships patrolling the Caribbean Sea.

Originally ADL produced their rums using only molasses and muscovado sugar produced on Antigua. When the last sugar factory shut down in the early 1970s, ADL switched to using imported black strap molasses from St Kitts and other parts of the Caribbean. Today the molasses arrive by boat from Guyana and are pumped directly from the Deep Water Harbour straight into the distillery – one of the unforeseen advantages of building a factory on a former leper colony.

One of the most famous rum shacks on Antigua is Papa Zouk’s in St John’s. For the last 45 years the owner has been a German ex-pat named Bert Kirchner – a restauranteur and rum aficionado. Bert reputedly once had the greatest collection of rums known to humankind in his cellar. Tragically the original Papa Zouk’s burnt down in 2009, destroying a large part of his collection. The rums Bert was able to salvage were badly fire damaged but he was somehow able to blend them into a vat that stands behind the bar of the rebuilt rum shack / restaurant and for a nominal donation to the Antiguan Fire Service, customers can sample a small sip of “Bert’s Fire Blend” – a charred mix of some of the finest rums in history.

ADL’s signature marque is their English Harbour range, named after the natural harbour that was used by the Royal Navy in the 18th century known colloquially as Nelson’s Dockyard because the then Captain Horatio Nelson was stationed at the base for three years in the 1780s. Nelson seems less than impressed by Antigua – referring to the island in letters as “an infernal hell hole” populated by people who were “worse than the Americans”.

What differentiates Antiguan rum from heavier Caribbean rums from Jamaican and Barbados is its lighter colour and flavour profile. This is largely down to the use of a unique completely copper column still – adapted from the original Savalle still from 1932 and containing many of the original parts. English Harbour Five Year Aged is the flag bearer – a smoky rum aged in bourbon barrels that has hints of honey and cinnamon. ADL, with a nod to their Portuguese heritage, have recently started to produce small-batch special-edition rums finished in sherry and port casks.

Antiguan rum was reborn thanks to the efforts of Madeiran indentured servants and is starting to flourish, with many relatives of the original four families involved in ADL today. The company has recently changed distributor in the UK and Europe, with English Harbour rum available online from secretbottleshop.co.uk.

This article is from Idler #108.

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