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Rum Before Breakfast? How a Tropical Spirit Took Hold of New Brunswick

Maritime colonies ran on liquor revenues, and booze helped water down workers’ wages

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the colonies that would later become Canada were awash in a sea of rum. Millions of litres of that sugar-based liquor were imported every year to supply its comparatively small population of colonists and Indigenous people, while thousands of additional litres flowed from colonial distilleries.

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Why rum, and why so much of it? The simple answer is that it was cheap and plentiful in eighteenth-century North America. Thought to be good for the health, at least when imbibed in moderation, readily available liquor was generally seen as a good thing at the time. Rum was considered especially beneficial for people working outdoors in cold and wet conditions because of the way it supposedly radiated tropical warmth through the body.

According to Statistics Canada, the average Canadian in 2019 ingested 2.2 litres of alcohol in the form of rum, whisky, vodka, gin, and so forth, and 9.9 litres of beverages of all sorts. Adults in Newfoundland in 1770 consumed 34.6 litres of alcohol in rum alone, while the figure for New Brunswick in 1821 is almost as high.

Amazingly, historians have scarcely noticed rum’s empire over early Canada. This is in spite of its intimate connection with two of the major foci of scholarly activity: the imperial wars of the eighteenth century and the staples trades (fish and furs in the first instance, as well as timber and grain—resource extraction industries that drove the colonial economies). No one will be surprised to learn that the fishermen, voyageurs, trappers, and lumberjacks of the period were heavy drinkers, as were soldiers and sailors who formed a substantial part of the population in that war-torn century. Less well known is the fact that military personnel and workers in the extractive industries drank rum and little else (New France excepted because of the predominance of brandy there before 1759). Since it was distilled from fermented molasses, that specific liquor served to link the northern staples trades to a tropical staple product, sugar, and to the slave plantation complex that produced it.

New Brunswick, which began as a colony for United Empire Loyalists in 1784, was a major consumer of rum. Since it was founded in the wake of the American Revolution, when the British Empire was attempting to reorganize its commercial networks to exclude the new republic, New England rum was never officially welcome here, as it had been earlier in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Quebec. However, the state of Maine was a near neighbour, and cross-border smuggling flourished, notwithstanding the colonial government’s efforts to curb contraband and encourage imports from the British Caribbean.

West Indian interests demanded protection from American competition, and they even objected to the establishment of distilleries in British North America that would reduce the demand for imported spirits. Thus, whereas Quebec City and Halifax boasted rum distilleries that had been founded before the revolution, New Brunswick’s counter-revolutionary regime opposed any such local initiative. Governor Thomas Carleton, sensitive to pressure from the West India lobby, first slapped down Benedict Arnold’s plan to establish a distillery in the province and then went on to propose a complete ban on distilling across British North America.

His idea was not taken up in the other colonies, but Loyalist New Brunswick would have to slake its thirst entirely on imported alcohol—mainly Jamaican rum supplemented with contraband American liquor.

In New Brunswick, as in the other Maritime colonies, rum was the source of the bulk of government revenues in this period. Here, duties on imports, together with fees for retail liquor licences, financed local poor relief; in Nova Scotia, they paid for road construction. This presented governors and legislatures with a moral dilemma in that they aimed to limit alcohol consumption and drunkenness, and yet they depended on liquor revenues to fund the colonial state. Acting governor Gabriel Ludlow expressed his concern in a speech to the New Brunswick legislature in 1807. He asked members to consider “how far the increasing consumption of Rum, which threatens to enervate the present and rising generation, may be safely checked.” The word safely is the escape hatch here, implying a preoccupation with revenues (as well as a fear of encouraging smuggling) that mitigates the temperance thrust of the sentence.

New Brunswick consumed a lot of rum in the eighteenth century and even more in the early nineteenth. Official import figures show a steep increase from 330,158 litres in 1792 to 539,204 in 1807–09, and 1,503,046 in 1819. Combining rum imports with census population for 1821 produced the amazing consumption of 31.2 litres of rum per adult. This is certainly an underestimate because we know that, in addition to the imports recorded in the tariff records, large amounts of liquor were smuggled in from the United States.

The jump in imports after 1800 reflects the rise of the forest industry, which quickly became the main pillar of the province’s economy. During the Napoleonic Wars, Great Britain was cut off from European supplies of timber and so turned to its North American colonies. With lumber shanties lining the tributaries of the St. Croix, Miramichi, and Saint John river systems, New Brunswick became “Great Britain’s Woodyard.” The timber boom provoked a surge in rum imports.

Lumberjacks drank “great quantities of rum, which they scarcely ever dilute,” wrote John MacGregor, adding that they rose before dawn, and “each takes his ‘morning,’ or the indispensable dram of raw rum, immediately before breakfast.” A resident of St. Stephen testified that, along the St. Croix River, “more prominence was given to rum as a necessary part of the supplies than to any other articles. In all our movements, from the stump in the swamp to the ship’s hold, it was Rum! Rum!” A Prince Edward Island folk song expressed the view of an islander who had gone to work in the shanties of New Brunswick: “The lumbermen’s life ’t is of short duration, / It’s mingled with sorrow, hard work, and bad rum.” After a winter labouring in the woods, loggers would emerge from the lumber camps in the spring and descend on riverine port towns where, to the terror of local burghers, they would engage in drunken mayhem. Little wonder that New Brunswick emerged as a leading centre of the nineteenth-century temperance movement.

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Through the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth, rum drenched the Atlantic region and conditioned labour relations in its extractive industries. The cod fishery, the primordial economic activity, especially in Newfoundland, set the pattern. Imported rum helped to transform the Newfoundland fishery, facilitating the rise of the settler fishery by virtue of its ability to hook fishermen, secure them in place, and suppress their take-home wages.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, small-scale fishing entrepreneurs were increasingly caught in the toils of what became known as the truck system, an arrangement under which a merchant advanced them the salt, tackle, sails, and provisions needed at the beginning of each season and, in return, required masters to turn over all their salt cod in payment at the end of the season. Hopelessly indebted, these small-scale fishing entrepreneurs were forced to cut corners: paying their waged workers or servants’ salaries in full was out of the question.

So, the fishing masters engaged in the same sort of truck system as the merchants inflicted on them, acting as both supplier and employer to their crews. There were never enough qualified fishermen to crew all the planters’ boats, and since fishing is a seasonal occupation, there was a desperate rush every spring to sign up crewmen. Getting, retaining, and paying a crew in such a labour market strained the very limited resources of fishing masters to the breaking point. Enter rum.

When planters acted as both employers and suppliers, they could offer relatively high nominal wages and then claw them back by selling goods to their men at inflated prices. The penniless fishermen had few options since no one but an employer would advance them credit. They had to turn to the latter for boots, food, and tobacco, but only so many of these goods would be needed in a given season, whereas the demand for alcoholic beverages was marvellously elastic, in some cases virtually limitless. The more the men drank, the less their labour cost the planter.

Colonial fisheries developed later in French Île Royale and in the British colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, and the rum-based system of exploitation took hold there as well. As other economic activities emerged in the Maritimes, most notably the timber staple trade, the labour market continued to be marked by strong seasonal fluctuations, peaking in the spring when employers had to compete for workers by offering high nominal wages.

And then, since their operations were so marginal and undercapitalized, they needed to find a way to avoid payment in full at the end of the season; in every case, rum was crucial to their strategy. Surely those sozzled Newfoundland fishermen, as well as the lumberjacks, carpenters, and boat builders of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, must have posed a danger to themselves and others; moreover, they would hardly have been the most efficient and productive workers.

Yet employers tolerated drinking on the job—indeed they almost required it—because they saw no other way to secure a reliable workforce at an affordable price. These early extractive industries, enriching though they were to those at the apex of the commercial system, ensured the impoverishment of those who toiled to extract cod from the sea and timber from the forest.

Excerpted from Canada in the Age of Rum by Allan Greer. Copyright © 2026 Allan Greer. Published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

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I’m Brett, a contributing writer with The Walrus. This winter, I reported from Nuuk, Greenland, the quiet capital transformed by the threat of an American invasion into an unlikely stage for a global showdown.

What struck me was how deeply the threats had unsettled residents. People were on edge. But I was also struck by their willingness to share their stories.

The Walrus knows you need to hear from people who live in these places, and from reporters who are actually there. When you support The Walrus, you’re supporting real journalism.

The Walrus is investing in on-the-ground reporting while other newsrooms are getting slashed by corporate owners. We need your help to send writers where they should be.

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