Once More and Then...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau
My dead friends really do follow me around this town. Last night I ran into one of them on State Street, and we had a drink together.
My momentary companion was Offin Boardman, a well-dressed, stout gentleman of 54, dead since 1811. Or, rather, on the first evening that felt like winter was coming, I remembered a vignette I once wrote, based on details in Boardman’s diary and Marine Society records, a moment captured in detail that revealed a world to me. I was researching this remarkable man, who was one of Newburyport’s first Revolutionary privateers, captured two British ships in one day, and was in turn captured and imprisoned three separate times by the British. He escaped all three times, returning home to eat and drink as much as possible for the remainder of his life. But that is a story for another time.
What I remember about this scene is that it was the first time in my life as a writer, researcher and historian, that I was able to recreate a moment in full (as much as one can), based on fact, or at least on documentary evidence. I know roughly what he was wearing, as he mentions clothes recently purchased in his diary. I know the weather, the names of his comrades, the location of the Marine Society. I know what he was drinking. The picture came together so completely, so beautifully, it took my breath away.
Remember it with me…it is a dark night in February. It is 1802 and Boardman is on his way to the Marine Society, where he has been a member since 1793, for a regular Thursday meeting. The snow is thick on the ground, but it is a clear night, viciously cold. Boardman is wearing a long brown beaver coat with a broad collar and has taken his sleigh to town from his 300-acre (now 230) country estate in Newbury, presently the Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm.
He purchased the estate in 1797 from Mary Lee Tracy, the widow of renowned Newburyport merchant and ship owner, Nathaniel Tracy, for $12,800. He is heavily laden with “a pipe of gin and puncheon rum,” a powerful spirit aged in huge wooden casks known as puncheons. Commonly produced in Trinidad and Tobago, this rum was intended to be used in punch. It would have been lethal straight. Boardman imported and sold rum from his wharf, advertising in the Newburyport Herald and Country Gazette in 1799 that he had “Excellent St. Croix and St. Vincent Rum – cheap for cash.”
Boardman was known for his rum punch, and like all his friends, he made it with a standard five ingredients – rum, spices, sugar, water and fruit.
Whether his fruit was more exotic or his rum more liberal is lost to the ages, but the excavation of his privy, a time capsule of items thrown away while he lived at the farm, revealed thirty punch bowls, broken, one imagines, as a direct consequence of the paint-stripper strength of the spirit within.
That’s thirty, and in 15 years. That’s two broken punch bowls a year, which, I suppose, seems about right. In addition, there were 37 bottles of varying types and 51 glasses.
Rum punch has an interesting history of its own, surpassed only, perhaps, by the gentleman carrying it that night and the awesome vessel it was served in.
Rum punch became popular in the 17th century, and because of its exotic ingredients, citrus and spices, it was associated with travel, trade and social standing. It loosely followed the social trajectory of chocolate from the Americas, coffee from Arabia and tea from China, beginning as rare exotics and becoming widespread, with their corresponding accessories.
There are a million recipes for punch, some hot, some with milk and even eggs, but all have the same basic five elements, and all were served in bowls. Some punches were made with brandy, some with gin, but the most popular spirit by far was rum. It was cheap, potent and flavorful. Punch was made at the table in one-, two- and three-quart bowls, and ladled into cups of all descriptions with a strainer over the glass.
The garnish that has become so present in the modern cocktail was used to advertise the freshness of the fruit in one’s punch. When fresh fruit was not available, preserves, wine and even vinegar were used to add a sour element. Many punch bowls were lined with concentric circles to be used as measures for mixing punch at the table, and they were also often decorated with toasts or ribald sayings, particularly with images of a fish and the words “keep me swimming,” or another popular line, “once more and then….”
Jonathan Greenleaf, a Newbury shipbuilder, was presented with this English Delft punch bowl in 1752 by a merchant from Edinburgh, Scotland, for whom Greenleaf built the ship pictured. Newburyport shipbuilders constructed vessels for sale abroad as well as for New England shipmasters and merchants. On loan to the museum from Edmund G. and Francie P. Noyes. Courtesy image.
Punch bowls were also often decorated with ship and maritime scenes and given as gifts when a ship was launched or a voyage completed, and taverns frequented by sailors were called “punch houses,” one assumes for the beverage served, and not the pugnacious behavior of the drinkers.
The punch bowl continues to be part of popular culture, as when former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin referred to himself as “the man who takes the punch bowl away just when the party gets going.”
Offin Boardman (1748-1811). Courtesy image from Old Town and the Waterside, Peter Benes. From the collections of the Museum of Old Newbury.
