Americans excelled at fermenting and distilling molasses to make millions of gallons of rum, which American-built slave ships, often called “rum vessels,” brought to West Africa, among other places, to trade for African captives.35 Aside from being an essential “naval ration” in the Age of Sail, rum was “an essential part of the cargo of the slave ship, particularly the colonial American slave ship,” writes the historian Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery. “It was profitable to spread a taste for liquor on the coast. The Negro dealers were plied with it, were induced to drink till they
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