the meanest brands of whiskey can be bought, madeira, sherry, canary, malaga, muscadine, fayal, and other foreign wines were offered for sale. Had there been no popular demand for them, they would not have been imported. Descended from a race of hearty and liberal drinkers, the English, it would have been remarkable had the Virginians of the period shown no strong tendency to indulgence in liquor. It is highly probable that the comparative loneliness of plantation life and the absence of exciting amusements had a powerful influence in stimulating the love of spirits prevailing in the Colony from the earliest time. The authorities of the Company in England, writing in 1622 to the Governor and Council in Virginia, attributed the massacre by the Indians, which had recently taken place, to the anger of Providence, who thus sought to punish the inhabitants “for enormous excesses in apparel and drinking.”[1] In 1638, Governor Harvey declared in an official communication dispatched to England, that one-half of the principal commodity of the country, tobacco, was thrown away in a superfluity of wines and strong waters.[2] One of the most cogent reasons for requiring all shipmasters to keep the bulk of their cargoes unbroken until they arrived at Jamestown, a standing regulation for many decades, was to prevent a waste of the people’s substance in purchases of liquors, to the neglect of the necessary articles of life. Fitzhugh states that in malting bargains for the acquisition of the main crop of the planters, a certain percentage of expense had to be allowed by the trader for the spirits which would be consumed before the
- ↑ Neill’s Virginia Company of London, p. 322. See, however, the pathetic denial of this charge in a letter of the Governor and Council, dated Jan. 20, 1623, p. 367.
- ↑ Harvey and Council to Privy Council, British State Papers, Colonial, vol. X, No. 5; Winder Papers, vol. I, p. 145, Va. State Library.
