Eat the City(43)

It must have been a relief to dock in the freewheeling and boisterous international port of New Amsterdam. Records remain of testimony of a fight at the home of a Dutch wheelwright after an Englishman’s wife, “notwithstanding her husband’s presence, fumbled at the front of the breeches of most of all of those who were present.” A woman who found her husband in a tap room asked in court, “what he was doing with another man’s wife … touching her breasts and putting his mouth on them.”

Licentiousness and abandon were furthered by another product of the cane plant: its distilled liquid form, rum. The Dutch built the first distillery in the North American colonies in 1664 on Staten Island. This distillery likely made the first local rum from West Indies molasses, the sticky brown liquid that oozed out of the bottom of a mold of drying sugar. The newly renamed city of New York increased molasses imports year after year, and by 1770 the city supported seventeen rum distilleries. Rum was served at home, in doctors’ offices, and on board ships. In taverns, you could get a rum shrub (a pale pink, effervescent drink of rum mixed with a syrup of fruit boiled in vinegar and sugar), a flip (hot rum with beer, sugar, or dried pumpkin, topped with a “flip” of cream, egg, and sugar), a mimbo (rum with loaf sugar), a black-strap (rum and molasses with herbs). You could also drink a calibogus, a sling, a bombo, a syllabub, a punch, a bellowstop, a Sampson, or a stonewall. Strangers were well regarded if they were “bumper men” and “good toapers”—that is, drinkers—and alcohol consumption for white men added up to seven shots of rum per day.

In the rough port city, “bloods” lurked in the small, crooked streets to harass young ladies: “Dam’d fine girl, by G—d!” they would call. “Where do you lodge, my dear?” New York became a pirate haven, where there was a blurry line between businessman and buccaneer, as local merchants financed pirate voyages to capture goods they needed, including sugar and slaves. Captain Kidd lived at what is today 7 Hanover Square until he was contracted to go to sea to hunt pirates—and somewhere out on the deep blue, between Madagascar and the West Indies, he became one himself. Pirate ships would fire salutes as they set out to sea, and return to openly unload and sell their booty.

“White gold,” sugar was called in the eighteenth century, when it became the world’s leading commodity, to its era what steel and oil were for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It made no sense to plant tropical islands with anything else, the thinking went. By about 1720, half the ships passing through the port of New York were traveling to or from the sugar islands. To feed the booming Caribbean, New York farmers planted exportable crops such as barley, oats, and corn, but especially the blond wheat grown up along the Hudson River. Brewers and fishermen, trappers and foresters, millers and distillers, all ratcheted up production to send south. In return, the port of New York took in minor tropical products—cotton, indigo, limes, salt, cocoa, pimento, ginger—and, most profitably for everyone involved, rum, molasses, and sugar. A growing shipbuilding industry provided vessels for the journey—requiring lumber, iron, tar, turpentine, pitch, and rope, and accelerating the local manufacture of each.

One in every four men was a sailor, and the New York seaport began to follow Caribbean seasonal rhythms. From November to January, the port bustled as captains and crew set off southward to off-load their products and claim fresh sugar; the pace slackened in the dead of winter, with everyone away trading on the islands; and it picked up again from April to June as ships returned ahead of the hurricanes and disease of the tropical summer. Profits from the West Indies trade supported new luxury businesses such as silversmiths, wig makers, and bespoke tailors. Yet for the most part, New York’s sugar business was not sugar itself—chronicles mention only one sugarhouse in that early period, on Liberty Street. Instead, the port city supplied food and fuel to the distant, hungry sugar islands.

That changed. After a few years of operating a small sugarhouse, in 1730, Nicholas Bayard placed a “PUBLICK NOTICE” in the city’s newspaper to announce that he had “erected a Refining House for Refining all sorts of Sugar and Sugar-candy,” and had “procured from Europe an experienced artist in that Mystery.” The chemistry of obtaining pure white sugar from brown was poorly understood, but it clearly involved elaborate ritual—boiling, brewing, cooling, heating, mixing, pouring—that seemed like magic or alchemy. Sugar was an exotic luxury whose many everyday uses had not yet been imagined; the wealthy would often simply break off clumps to hold between their teeth while drinking tea.

In the mills of the West Indies, the sap of the cane plant was extracted, reduced in massive cauldrons, and then dried, the minimal preparation to make unrefined sugar. Soon the arts of sugar refining were practiced in various sugarhouses in New York, where Muscovado, or unrefined, sugar was wetted, heated, and filtered, and eventually poured into conical molds. After the liquid drained, the top of the mold gave the whitest, driest sugar, the middle section was golden and moist, the bottom was brown and stickily wet, and a gooey ooze dripped out—denoting a gradated system of value: Single Sugar, Midling Sugar, Bastard Sugar, and Molasses; some of which could be refined again to produce Doubeld Sugar, or further treated to become Powder. The stuff could be sold in casks and hogsheads and as small lumps, lumps, and sugar candy. But most people bought blue-paper-wrapped conical loaves for the house, and they would use sugar nippers—strong, sharp-bladed iron pliers—to break off clumps to eat, and sugar hammers to pound out smaller portions. As well as the Bayards, other old families such as the Livingstons, the Cuylers, the Roosevelts, the Stewarts, the Van Cortlandts, and the Stuyvesants found themselves in the business of sugar refining.