1739 Exact Prospect of Charle Town detail
Friday, June 03, 2022 Nic Butler, Ph.D.

Beer was an important ingredient in the commercial agenda of our colonial past. European nations seeking to expand into the New World deployed thousands of trans-Atlantic ships propelled by the wind, and the crewmen sailing those vessels were fueled by copious amounts of beer. Details of brewing activity in early Charleston are now exceedingly scarce, but archival evidence related to Captain George Anson’s tenure on the Carolina Station during the 1720s and 1730s provides a model for re-imaging both the volume and the ingredients used at South Carolina’s earliest-known commercial-scale brewery.

Beer was not a luxury or recreational beverage in colonial-era Charleston. On land, water drawn from wells and rivers in the Lowcountry of South Carolina often tasted bad and contained harmful impurities. At sea, water stored in wooden barrels quickly turned green and spoiled. Before the advent of rudimentary water purification systems, people of all ages and social classes drank fermented or distilled beverages on a regular basis. Most consumers drank alcoholic beverages just to survive, not to get drunk. On land, people drank weak beer commonly called “table beer” or “small beer” that was either purchased or brewed at home. If beer was not available, they could mix fresh water with alcoholic spirits. For mariners at sea, where supplies of potable water were always limited, beer was the officially-designated beverage of choice.[1]

 

 

The regular consumption of beer by seamen in the British Navy was a long-established fact of life at sea during the age of sail. Mariners of old knew that strong beer, with a higher alcohol content than table beer, can last for months and is well-suited to long oceanic voyages. The nutritional value of beer also contributed to the high-calorie diet afforded to hard-working seamen of distant centuries. England’s Royal Navy began prescribing the daily and weekly diet of sailors for contractual purposes in 1677, at which time each sailor was to receive one gallon of beer (“wine measure”) every day of the week. Ships embarking on “foreign voyages” (that is, to the distant colonies) were allowed to substitute this beer ration with a pint of wine or a half pint of brandy, rum, or arrack when a sufficient volume of beer was not available. Following the example set by the Royal Navy, privately-owned merchant vessels served beer to their crewmen in the same proportion as the king’s ships, and likewise substituted wine or rum whenever beer was not available.[2]

Despite the importance of beer in maritime business, little is known about brewing in early Charleston, the principal port and capital of colonial South Carolina. For a variety of reasons, the production of beer on a commercial scale in Charleston lagged behind that in other port communities in North America. The subtropical climate of the South Carolina Lowcountry is suited to the cultivation of a variety of crops, but the labor of the earliest settlers and enslaved Africans focused on a different sort of harvest. Beginning in the 1670s, the colony’s first industry was supplying wood products to West Indian plantations, including timber for houses and sugarcane-crushing windmills, and barrel staves to create containers for transporting sugar products. A secondary industry commencing in the late seventeenth century was the large-scale raising of beef cattle and hogs, the flesh of which was salted, packed in barrels, and shipped to other colonies. Such exports to the English Caribbean fueled reciprocal imports of copious quantities of sugar, rum, and treacle (molasses) into colonial-era Charleston.

Early South Carolinians raised provision crops for their own consumption, but did not enlarge their labors and acreage into the realm of commercial-scale agriculture until the 1690s. Rather than compete with Northern farmers who were already producing large volumes of traditional grains like barley and wheat, Lowcountry planters elected to pursue crops like rice and, later, indigo and cotton that enjoyed far less competition within British markets. Consequently, early South Carolinians were obliged to import wheat for baking bread and barley for brewing beer, but the volume, regularity of supply, and uses of such imports remain unclear. In 1711, for example, a poor woman residing in Charleston reported to her family in England that she often drank foul water because “we cannot afford wine . . . and there [is] no beer but what is made of treacle.”[3] Mariners visiting the port of Charleston in the decades after the founding of South Carolina must have drunk Madeira wine, or watered-down rum, or beer imported from elsewhere. As the town matured and ship traffic through the port increased during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, however, local entrepreneurs began investing in the creation of brewing facilities to supply the growing market. That incentive increased in 1720, when the British Admiralty established a permanent post in Charleston for a warship assigned to guard the coastline of South Carolina.

After receiving numerous complaints about piratical vessels disturbing the ship traffic flowing in and out of the port of Charleston in 1718, the Lords of the Admiralty commissioned HMS Flamborough in 1719 to proceed to South Carolina.[4] The twenty-gun, sixth-rate frigate arrived in Charleston in May 1720 and became the first in a long succession of British warships assigned to what became known as the “Carolina Station.” The Flamborough’s complement of 130 sailors certainly increased the local population of thirsty mariners, but the ship also introduced to Charleston the Royal Navy’s contracting bureaucracy that guaranteed the local purchase of approximately 46,000 gallons of beer each year. If the town did not host a resident brewer capable of producing that volume of beer before 1720, market forces likely inspired someone to invest in the necessarily facilities soon after the arrival of the Flamborough.

Whether the men aboard HMS Flamborough drank wine, rum, or malted beer produced locally or imported from beyond South Carolina is a question not answered by the paucity of surviving records of the early 1720s. A small clue to this mystery appears in the logbook of Daniel Montill, the sailing master of HMS Blandford, which arrived in the summer of 1721 to relieve the Flamborough. The following summer, the Blandford returned from a brief cruise along the coastline and moored in Charleston harbor abreast Craven Bastion (the site of the present U.S. Customs House). On 23 July 1722, Montill recorded that he “sent ashore a sail to make a tent for to brew beer.” This phrase suggests that the town still lacked the brewing infrastructure to produce the requisite volume—a defect that compelled thirsty sailors to brew their own supply in a temporary facility using whatever ingredients were at hand.[5]

Under the command of Captain George Anson (1697–1762), HMS Scarborough departed from London in the spring of 1724 with a total of 130 men and a modest supply of English beer.[6] The twenty-gun warship paused briefly at the island of Madeira that May to purchase a large volume of fortified wine, per orders from the Lords of the Admiralty, and began serving it to the sailors in lieu of beer before reaching South Carolina in mid-July. An indeterminate quantity of “some beer” came aboard immediately after the Scarborough anchored in Charleston harbor, but the seamen apparently continued to drink Madeira wine for several more months. At the same time, the Blandford received an unspecified quantity of beer before departing from Charleston and sailing home to England in September.[7] Beginning in late November 1724 and continuing on a roughly quarterly schedule over the next several years, the Scarborough periodically received large volumes of beer from unknown suppliers in Charleston. Between 28 November and 5 December 1724, for example, the ship received forty-five large wooden containers called “tuns” (each containing 252 gallons) and two smaller “hogsheads” (each containing 63 gallons), comprising a total of 11,466 wine-gallons of beer. That volume was apparently sufficient to supply the ship with the required daily ration for one quarter of a year.[8] Similar volumes came aboard in subsequent quarters and continued to do so for the duration of Anson’s nine-year tenure on the Carolina Station (July 1724 to June 1730; June 1732 to May 1735), during which time he commanded three warships in succession. Aboard HMS Squirrel in 1732–33, for example, he received several quarterly supplies of 90 butts (each containing 126 gallons) comprising the same total volume of 11,466 wine-gallons of beer for 130 men. After the ship’s complement was increased to 140 men in 1734–35, however, the quarterly supply increased to 99 butts (12,474 wine gallons).[9]

 

From where did Captain Anson get this large and very specific volume of beer—approximately 46,000 gallons each year—during his tenure in Charleston? Unfortunately, the historical paper trail leading to the source of this beer has been obscured by the nature of the procurement system in use during the captain’s era. To supply various “species” of comestibles (beer, bread, beef, etc.) to his Majesty’s ships around the world, the Victualing Commissioners of the British Navy negotiated contracts with a number of commercial agents based in London. Those London agents, in turn, communicated with subcontracting merchants in distant ports like Charleston, who then negotiated with a number of local suppliers to deliver the required victuals for the local station ship(s). Robust financial records of these several levels of subcontracting do not survive, which fact frustrates modern efforts to determine the source of the beer aboard Anson’s ships.[10]

 It is possible that the beer consumed aboard Captain Anson’s ships was produced by agents in his employment at a brewery located on his own property. In late March 1727, Anson purchased a suburban plantation called the Bowling Green (now Ansonborough) from former ship captain Thomas Gadsden (1688–1741), who in 1722 became Collector of His Majesty's Customs in South Carolina.[11] By the early 1730s, that property, located a stone’s throw north of colonial Charles Town, included two beer-related enterprises—a public house or tavern called the Bowling Green House, which once stood at or near the northeast corner of modern Society and King Streets, and a brewery on a half-acre lot at what is now the southeast corner of Society and Anson Streets.[12] The date of the brewery’s construction is unclear, but a newspaper report of an attempted burglary at the site in June 1735—three weeks after Anson’s departure—demonstrates that the brewery was operating under the care of an unidentified resident brewer during and after the captain’s tenure in South Carolina.[13] The facility might have commenced production many years earlier under the auspices of Thomas Gadsden, who purchased the property in 1720, or his predecessor at the site, the prosperous Huguenot merchant Isaac Mazyck (1661–1736).[14] While Commodore Anson was sailing the Pacific Ocean in the summer of 1742, for example, one of his agents in Charleston advertised the sale of “two large copper vessels fit for brewing, and lately used at Commodore Anson’s old brew house.”[15] Alternatively, the facility might have commenced production around the year 1723, after David Montill’s experience of brewing beer under a tent in 1722 and before the large delivery of beer to the Scarborough in 1724.

The later dissolution of Anson’s brewery provides additional evidence of its commercial character. In August 1745, the trans-Atlantic merchant partnership of Thomas and Richard Shubrick acquired Anson’s half-acre brewery and the following year joined it to an adjacent half-acre residential lot known as “Petit Versailles.” The Shubrick brothers identified this combined property in later deeds as “the Brewery” or “the Brew House,” but they did not advertise the sale of beer in local newspapers.[16] Like the beer produced under the ownership of George Anson, the Shubricks probably sold their product to local mariners, most likely to the resident warship assigned to the Carolina Station. A 1755 sale advertisement for this aging one-acre facility noted the presence of a “dwelling house, brew house . . . and one large store house thereon, as also two large coppers set in brickwork in the brew house, with coolers, vats, &c. for carrying on the brewery.”[17] The size of these copper vats is unknown, but they might have resembled the 150-gallon copper boiler advertised in contemporary newspapers.[18] With such equipment in continuous operation, the proprietors certainly could have produced a commercial volume of beer.

 

Thomas Gadsden, who worked closely with George Anson during his years on the Carolina Station and who occasionally supplied materials to the Royal Navy, might have erected the brewery on Bowling Green plantation before he sold the property to Anson in 1727.[19] Documentary evidence of such activity has not been found, however, nor is there any other known documentary evidence of commercial brewing in Charleston before 1732. Beginning in that year, surviving issues of Charleston’s first weekly newspaper indicate that the town hosted at least two commercial breweries operated by Daniel Bourget and William Morgan. Neither George Anson nor his agents ever advertised the sale of beer in the South Carolina Gazette, but Bourget, Morgan, and their successors did. Their advertisements demonstrate that local brewers, like their colleagues elsewhere, sold a graduated variety of products. In his first published notice, for example, Morgan advertised “stout pale beer,” “strong brown beer, and “table beer,” which were intended “either for sea or land, by wholesail [sic] or retail.”[20] A subsequent advertisement in 1733 specified only “strong and table beer, both for sea and land, by wholesale.” Similarly, Daniel Bourget advertised in 1735 the sale of “strong, middling, and small beer, as usually.”[21] Such phrases, of course, reflect the Royal Navy’s preference for strong beer at sea.

These newspaper notices also suggest that the beer brewed commercially in Charleston during the middle decades of the eighteenth century included traditional ingredients. Following the death of brewer William Morgan, for example, the 1734 sale of his “brew house” on the north side of Tradd Street included “a parcel of malt.”[22] Samuel Holmes, Morgan’s successor, advertised the sale of both “fine pale beer” and hops at his brewery.[23] Similarly, Daniel Bourget advertised in 1735 that he had received “fresh malt” from an unidentified source.[24] A later English brewer, Nathaniel Scott, pledged in 1752 to use only Carolina-grown barley and hops, “entirely free from any adulterations whatever (which are too common, and very pernicious),” but his operation apparently failed for want of sufficient supplies.[25] Likewise, the Charleston brewing partnership of Edmund Egan and John Calvert struggled during the late 1760s and early 1770s because of supply-chain issues. Although the volume of ship traffic from northern ports like Philadelphia then exceeded that of earlier generations, the inconsistent and insufficient flow of traditional grains retarded the growth of commercial-scale brewing in Charleston.[26] The political disturbances preceding the American Revolution halted the flow of imported barley into the Palmetto City in 1774. In that year, an Englishman residing in Charleston reported to his colleagues at home that “they make no beer of malt in Carolina, but they make some of molasses and also of percymon [sic] both which are much inferior to good English beer, and as it won’t keep is only made and expended in the winter season but Charles Town is very well supplied with porter from England at 9 shillings per dozen bottles, which is commonly drank by most people of property at meals or else weak grog or rum punch.”[27]

George Anson (or agents in his employment utilizing enslaved labor) might have cultivated barley at his Bowling Green plantation in the 1720s and 1730s, but no records of such activity have survived. The property in question included nearly sixty-four acres of high ground and approximately forty acres of marshland adjacent to the Cooper River. A plat created in 1745 for the initial subdivision of Anson’s plantation into the residential neighborhood called Ansonborough demonstrates that the property included several distinct zones of agricultural activity. Most of the thirty-nine acres of dry land bounded by modern King, Calhoun, Anson, and Society Streets had been used for pasturage, while a grove of fruit-bearing Seville (sour) orange trees occupied a strip of land along both sides of Society Street between modern East Bay and Anson Streets. The remaining high land, encompassing approximately sixteen acres bounded by modern Calhoun, East Bay, Society, and Anson Streets, is labeled “the farm” in the 1745 plat, and was not subdivided for another decade.[28] Surviving records do not specify how this “farm” was used during Anson’s tenure, but it was probably used to cultivate agricultural products rather than horticultural ornaments. If Anson sowed his sixteen acres with barley for use at his brewery, for example, the farm might have produced approximately one-half of the volume of beer required annually for the ship under his command.[29] To produce a larger volume of beer, the captain would have had to purchase additional barley from other sources or turn to an alternative grain like rice.

The sale of South Carolina’s forest products and salted meat to the British West Indies continued beyond the colonial-era, but the volume of that trade was overshadowed by the export of rice during the early years of the eighteenth century. The export of commercial volumes of rice from the port of Charleston commenced in the late 1690s and by mid-1720s surpassed the value of all exports from South Carolina. The dramatic increase of rice cultivation during the 1720s and 1730s, facilitated by the importation of larger numbers of enslaved Africans, transformed the landscape and character of South Carolina.[30] That phenomenon also inspired local drinkers to experiment with using the cereal grain to brew alcoholic beverages. In the summer of 1722, for example, members of the South Carolina legislature sampled a “spirit” distilled from “rough rice” and resolved to offer a bounty to anyone who could produce it on a commercial scale.[31] No one claimed the bounty, unfortunately, but it seems likely that at least some Carolinians produced rice liquor for their own consumption during the eighteenth century.

Inhabitants of both town and country in South Carolina probably experimented with using rice to brew beer in the early eighteenth century, but little documentary evidence of such endeavors can now be found. While their efforts might have been limited to small batches brewed for use at home, the ubiquity of rice consumption among all social classes of colonial South Carolina might have rendered its use in beer production so common that it did not merit commentary. I have found just one advertisement for the commercial sale of rice beer in local sources: In February 1744, one Carolus Folcher of unknown origin advertised in the Charleston newspaper for the sale of “good Rice Beer, either middling or small,” at the house of a Swedish immigrant named Daniel Welshuysen.[32] Whether Folcher’s brew represented an anomaly in the local beer-market, or a staple of Charleston taps is a matter for further investigation.

We can distill all of the abovementioned evidence down to five conclusions about the beer produced at George Anson’s brewery during the second quarter of the eighteenth century. If Captain Anson’s goal was to provide the beer required by naval regulations for the crew of his warship, his brewery might have produced a volume in the neighborhood of 46,000 gallons per year. Because of the warm climate in the Charleston area, the resulting beverage would have been a top-fermented ale that matured in a relatively short period of time. It probably included some malted barley, but the precise proportion is unknown. Considering the volume of rice grown in this area during the eighteenth century, and that grain’s suitability for beer production, we can speculate that the recipe included a sizeable proportion of rice. The captain’s brewery also stood next to a fruitful orange grove, a fact that might have encouraged the brewer to add a dash of sour orange to give Anson’s ale a tangy citrus flavor.

The “old brew house” in Ansonborough in long gone, but the archival evidence related to its existence provides a valuable window into the role of beer in the culture and economy of colonial-era Charleston. If we consider that Captain Anson’s brewery might have been operating during the late 1720s, after he purchased Thomas Gadsden’s plantation, then he was the proprietor of the earliest-known commercial-scale brewing operation in South Carolina. Craft breweries have become a familiar part of the Lowcountry landscape in the twenty-first century, and their tasty products are steeped in a rich tradition stretching back to Charleston’s maritime roots.[33]

 

 

[1] The consumption of beer and other alcoholic beverages by enslaved people in early South Carolina is a topic worthy of further investigation. Local laws enacted before and after the American Revolution to govern enslaved people frequently included measures to curb drunkenness, suggesting that access to alcohol was common.

[2] Great Britain. Privy Council, Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea (London: s.p., 1731), 60, 63–64; J. R. Tanner, Samuel Pepys and the Royal Navy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 61; Daniel Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 375–77.

[3] St. Julien R. Childs, ed., “A Letter Written in 1711 by Mary Stafford to Her Kinswoman in England,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 81 (January 1980), 3–4. Treacle beer was not a traditional brew in England before the eighteenth century, but its presence increased in the late seventeenth century after planters in Barbados and other English colonies in the West Indies began focusing on the cultivation of sugar cane. Like rum, treacle was a by-product of the sugar refining process that Caribbean planters marketed as a separate commodity. Treacle beer never achieved mainstream commercial success as a popular beverage.

[4] Minutes of the Board of Admiralty, 25 February 1718/9, ADM 3/31, National Archives of the United Kingdom (hereafter NAUK).

[5] Master’s logbook, HMS Blandford, ADM 52/348, NAUK.

[6] For an overview of Anson’s career and his most celebrated exploits, see Glyn Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans: The Dramatic True Story of Commodore Anson’s Voyage Round the World and How He Seized the Spanish Treasure Galleon (New York: Viking Penguin, 2000).

[7] See 19 August 1724 in Master’s logbook, HMS Blandford, ADM 52/348, NAUK.

[8] The total volume of 11,466 gallons of beer provided one gallon to 126 men for 91 days, or roughly one quarter of a year. The Scarborough’s complement was 130 individuals, but the crew, like that other sixth-rate ships of that era, included approximately one dozen young teenage servants to the commission and warrant officers (five or six for the captain, one each to the lieutenant, master, boatswain, carpenter, gunner, surgeon, and cook). Each of these non-seaman youths probably consumed a fractional ration of beer and perhaps other comestibles. In addition, the captain maintained a private stock of Madeira wine for his own consumption and might have consumed a fractional ration of beer.

[9] See Captain’s logbook, HMS Squirrel, ADM 51/4353, NAUK. During the early 1730s, Captain Anson and his subordinate officers recorded the supply of beer with greater regularity and precision than they did in the 1720s. According to the paybook for HMS Squirrel, ADM 33/339, NAUK, the ship’s initial complement on 25 January 1731/2 was 120 men, which was increased to 130 on 1 April 1732, and then increased to 140 on 20 May 1734 and continued at that number until the ship’s crew was paid off on 18 July 1735.

[10] The merchants holding the contract for provisioning the Carolina Station changed periodically, but in 1725 “Messrs. [Samuel] Wragg & Lloyd” of London were identified as the contractors for supplying provisions for his Majesty’s ships in South Carolina; see Minutes of the Navy Board’s Victualling Office, ADM 111/20, 7 July 1725. In his log entry for 15 December 1725, George Sclater in Charleston harbor noted receipt of “some provisions from Mr. Jos[eph]. Wragg, agent”; see Captain’s log, HMS Shark, ADM 51/892.

[11] Thomas Gadsden to Captain George Anson, lease and release for £300 sterling, 23–24 March 1726/7, Charleston County Register of Deeds Office, F: 89–99.

[12] A detailed discussion of the landscape of Anson’s plantation will appear in a forthcoming book by Nic Butler about the captain’s tenure on the Carolina Station.

[13] South Carolina Gazette (hereafter SCG), 14–21 June 1735, pages 2–3. This source described the premises as “the brewhouse of Captain Windham,” but the property actually belonged to George Anson. He had apparently rented it to Captain Charles Windham of HMS Rose, who arrived in Charleston in late April to replace Anson and HMS Squirrel on the Carolina Station.

[14] Isaac Mazyck to Thomas Gadsden, lease and release, 28–29 October 1720, Charleston County Register of Deeds Office, I3: 63–72.

[15] SCG, 21–28 June 1742, page 3. Emphasis added. Henry Laurens (1724–1792) purchased in 1762 a tract in Ansonborough containing part of the orange grove to the north of Anson’s brewery (now bounded by Anson, Laurens, East Bay, and Society Streets). In a 1768 letter to an old acquaintance, Henry Laurens described his new home as being “in the middle of a garden of four acres pleasantly situated upon the [Cooper] river near to the Old Brew House”; see Laurens to Benjamin Addison, 26 May 1768, in George C. Rogers Jr., et al., eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens, Volume 5 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), 702.

[16] According to accounts forwarded by Benjamin Whitaker to George Anson, now part of the Records of the Anson Family of Shugborough, Earls of Lichfield, held at the Staffordshire Record Office in the United Kingdom, D615/PS/4/4/7, 8, 11, 12, Richard and Thomas Shubrick purchased lots Y and Z (the brewery) in the initial subdivision of Ansonborough on 14 August 1745, but this conveyance was not recorded in South Carolina. Similarly, Christopher Gadsden sold the adjacent property known as Petit Versailles to Richard Shubrick on 22–23 July 1746, but the transaction was not recorded in South Carolina; that conveyance was described, however, in Richard Shubrick of London, merchant, to Thomas Shubrick of Charleston, merchant, power of attorney, 11 August 1759, recorded in Charleston County Register of Deeds Office, VV: 510–12. This combined property was also described as “the Brew-House” in local news printed in SCG, 21 April 1759, page 1.

[17] SCG, 6–13 November 1755, page 3. Thomas Shubrick sold lots X, Y, and Z of the initial subdivision of Ansonborough, and the property “formerly called Petit-Versailles but now the Brewery,” to the South Carolina Society by lease and release dated 11–12 May 1759, recorded in Charleston County Register of Deeds Office, VV: 503–12. After this transaction, Centurion Street—part of the initial subdivision of Ansonborough—became known as Society Street.

[18] See Charles Pinckney’s advertisement in SCG, 12 February 1753, page 3.

[19] See, for example, Thomas Gadsden to the Commissioners of the Navy Board, 19 October 1725, ADM 106/770/81, NAUK.

[20] SCG, 12–19 February 1731/2, page 4.

[21] SCG, 15–22 February 1734/5, page 3.

[22] SCG, 2–9 February 1733/4, page 4.

[23] SCG, 24–31 January 1735/6, page 3; SCG, 6–13 November 1736, page 3.

[24] SCG, 15–22 February 1734/5, page 3.

[25] SCG, 22 February 1752, page 2.

[26] For more information about Egan and Calvert, see Timmons Pettigrew, Charleston Beer: A High-Gravity History of Lowcountry Brewing (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2011).

[27] H. Roy Merrens, ed., The Colonial South Carolina Scene: Contemporary Views, 1697–1774 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977), 284–85.

[28] Surveyor General George Hunter’s original plat of Ansonborough, created in early 1745, is not extant. A copy certified by Hunter on 7 May 1746 is held at the Charleston County Register of Deeds Office, but is now in very poor condition. A contemporary copy is held at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, State Plan books (S213212), volume 1, page 1.

[29] Anson’s “farm” encompassed approximately sixteen acres. If laborers working for Anson harvested an average of fifty bushels of barley per acre, and barley is known to weigh forty-eight pounds per bushel, then Anson gained approximately 38,400 pounds of barley from sixteen acres. If his brewer used approximately 3.3 pounds of malted barley per gallon of beer, then one crop from Anson’s “farm” would produce approximately 11,636 gallons, or one quarter of his annual requirement. A second annual crop would raise the yield to one-half of the ship’s annual requirement.

[30] For more information about the growth of rice cultivation in colonial-era South Carolina, see Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974); James M. Clifton, “The Rice Industry in Colonial America,” Agricultural History 55 (July 1981): 266–83; Henry C. Dethloff, “The Colonial Rice Trade,” Agricultural History 56 (January 1982): 231–43; Hayden R. Smith, Carolina’s Golden Fields: Inland Rice Cultivation in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

[31] See the manuscript journal of the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly, 1722–1724 (Mr. Green’s copy), page 44, at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.

[32] SCG, 13 February 1744, page 2.

[33] My thanks to Brian Alberts (@ Good Beer Hunting), Chris Brown (@ Holy City Brewing), Cyrus Buffum (@ Seaborn), Chef B. J. Dennis, Jamaal Lemon (@ The Wafarer Study), and Peter Carr Jones and Michael Stein (@ Lost Lagers), who read a draft of this essay and provided valuable feedback for its improvement.

 

NEXT: Navigating the Bar of Charleston Harbor: Gateway to the Atlantic 
PREVIOUSLY: Oqui Adair: First Chinese Resident of South Carolina, Part 2
See more from Charleston Time Machine