Fermentation, Rot, and Power in the Early Modern Atlantic

Fermentation—the chemical breakdown of a substance by microorganisms—made the violence of the Caribbean plantation system both profitable and possible. After all, there was no pure white sugar moving across the early modern Atlantic without the controlled fermentation of sugarcane. But the volatile biochemical process also posed a constant threat to the plantation system’s political, economic, and scientific order. Fermentation gone too far in the form of rot, decay, spoilage, and inversion could destroy planters’ profits, merchants’ ships, and naturalists’ specimens. Consequently, control of chemical volatility was a defining aspiration in the early modern Atlantic world.

Fermentation and rot were threats to colonial profit, power, and social formations also because of the ways enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples worked with fermentation and rot to empower themselves. In sugar colonies like Antigua, plantation owners forced enslaved Africans to build and manage fires that heated vats of boiling sugarcane. As they monitored the vats, they became experts with knowledge about the metabolic process of heat and microscopic life that transformed raw sugarcane into a commodity. In turn, planters monitored their slaves and coveted the knowledge they had of this mysterious process. Wishing to supplant the “secret methods” of African sugar artisans, eighteenth-century Cuban haciendados sent mestizo workers to France to learn new chemistry techniques. Fermentation and rot are dynamics that help us think together the politics and social worlds embedded in plantation commodity production, transatlantic voyaging, natural history knowledge production, and race-making.

Fermentation and Preservation

From the perspective of plantation owners, merchants, colonists and all those who profited from chattel slavery, the transatlantic ships that made colonial conquest and African slavery possible had to be kept from decaying. Timber ships were regularly being repaired or retired after they were declared too decayed for use, and ships returning from the Indies were of special concern. In the archives of the British navy, captains and admirals have left letters in which they write of ships returning from the Indies that need to be quarantined or washed and so be purged of disease or ruinous agents that would hasten the ship’s decay.

Spoiled ships threatened transatlantic enterprise, so various combative efforts sprang forward. Throughout the 1800s, chemists worked to imbue porous quick-to-ruin woods with lasting durability to make them more valuable. In January 1695, Charles Ardesoif sent a petition to the Lord Commissioner of the Admiralty requesting permission to begin experiments on British ships for determining the best method “to preserve and secure ships” from rot, spoilage, and lifeforms like worms that hastened the decay of wood. In January 1697, the West Indies-bound ship, the Sheerness, was painted with Ardesoife’s “composition… to secure the bottoms of ships from the Worm.” Worms were a form of life mixed up in early modern spoilage, and inventors advised admirals who directed ship builders to paint planks with pastes, formulas, and sticky white substances to prevent sea ships from rotting too quickly. Sugarcane’s biochemical ruin had to be carefully controlled on the sugar plantation, but on the transatlantic sea ship it had to be halted. 

Similar dynamics concerning the social and scientific management of fermentation and rot occurred at the site of natural history specimens. As Caribbean plantations grew and enslaved thousands, they began to function as sites that could reproduce the lives and livelihoods of plantation-adjacent workers like physicians, cartographers, and natural historians. Famous naturalists like Hans Sloane—whose collection of specimens, coins, minerals, and more birthed the British Museum—lived on Caribbean plantations, using their time there to collect and describe the plants, insects, animals, and minerals around them in their “new” environment. The plantation is the literal site that facilitated and fomented much early-American natural history collecting.

And after collecting came preserving. If one was to legibly document a new species of nature for the societies of mostly male naturalists building taxonomies in the early modern period, one had to enter their “discovery” into Europe or at least into the transatlantic network trading in nature’s various forms across colonial metropoles and peripheries. One’s discovery could arrive in different forms, but there were rules governing those forms. A living specimen planted in soil was good. An animal dunked in alcohol “preserved morphological features necessary for the identification of specimens, but some collectors found the results less visually appealing than specimens that had been dried or embalmed.” If it was a drawing it should conform to specific conventions and aesthetic norms. Desperate naturalists could flatten a plant between paper or tuck and pin something rare in a felt hat. But a natural history specimen should not decay or alter as it moved through scientific networks. A rotten specimen did not relay the “correct” sort of information. 

Consequently, and as we have seen for the colonial plantation and the transatlantic sea-ship, numerous efforts were made to assist the proper management of fermentation so that it did not slip into rot. In a 1748 issue of Philosophical Transactions, M. De Reaumur contributed “Divers Means for Preserving from Corruption Dead Birds, Intended to Be Sent to Remote Countries, So That They May Arrive There in a Good Condition,” and in 1773, John Ellis authored “Some additional observations on the method of preserving seeds from foreign parts: for the benefit of our American colonies.”

In 1787, Thomas Jefferson’s companion John Sullivan went to great trouble and expense (45 pounds sterling or approximately £3,874.70 today) trying to preserve a giant Vermont moose and ship it to France so that Jefferson could use it as evidence to disprove American degeneracy, a theory held by the French naturalist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. “Every engine,” Sullivan wrote to Jefferson, “was set at work to preserve the bones and cleanse them from the remaining flesh and to preserve the skins with hair on, with the hoofs on and bones of legs and thighs in skin without putrefaction.” A naturalist’s mastery over rot had epistemological consequences. As  Christopher M.Parsons and Kathleen S. Murphy write, “The material practices of preservation promoted by European naturalists attempted to regain control over this critical stage in the production of knowledge.” 

Does Rot Produce or Trouble Knowledge?

Although for naturalists, preservation techniques might reveal an anxious desire to contain the natural threat of decay through scientific means, others in and around plantations took up preservation as part of strategies of dissent or as knowledge making practices within different cosmologies. Hans Sloane records in A Voyage to . . . Jamaica (1707) that “servants and the poorer sort” in Jamaica practice a “common experiment” in which they place one animal liver in brandy and another in rum. “Servants and the poorer sort” is a vague term that may have included some collection of plantation workers, enslaved Africans, and mixed-race creole people. Whoever these “servants and the poorer sort” were, the finding of their experiment, according to Sloane, was that an animal liver put into a bottle of rum is observed turning soft while another liver put into a bottle of brandy does not do so.

Sloane writes that this was an experiment for testing the dynamics of rot and preservation, but what insight did Sloane have into the experimental inquiries of “servants and the poorer sort”? If this “experiment” was an act by the dispossessed to acknowledge, mock, or appropriate the knowledge-making practices of colonial scientists, then it is doubtful that Sloane fully grasped this mimicry of colonial scientific practice occurring in front of him. Whatever the purpose of the activity with brandy and rum, it does at least indicate that human investigations into biochemical processes central to the profits on sugar plantations, the maintenance of transatlantic sea-ships, and the production of natural history specimens did not remain contained in European plantation laboratories.   

Sylvia Wynter has famously demonstrated that race-making was one of the dominant legacies of the early modern plantation. Fermentation and its unruly sister, rot, were operations through which race was imbued with meaning. As the literary critic Monique Allewaert demonstrates, nineteenth-century works of American literature like Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859-1862) and Obi; or, The History of Threefingered Jack (1800) characterize enslaved people and fugitive slaves in close proximity to rotting things and decaying environments.

In Martin Delany’s Blake (1860), when Henry, the fugitive enslaved protagonist, takes refuge amongst conjurers, the setting is described as a “mystical, antiquated, and almost fabulous Dismal Swamp.” Amongst the conjurers there is a “different atmosphere, an entirely new element” and the conjurer’s goombah—the source of his power—is described as a site of rotting matter mixed with ontologically unstable things: woolen yarn, onion skins, oyster-shells, finger and toenails, eggshells, serpent scales that might be fish scales, and broken glass that might be a precious stone. In William Earle’s Obi (1800), a story about slave rebellion in Jamaica, Earle’s narrator describe the Obi-man Bashra as “wrinkled and deformed” with “snails [drawing] their slimy train upon his shriveled feet and lizards and vipers [filling] the air of his hut with foul uncleanliness.” Moreover, after Bashra instructs Jack in the ways of obi, Jack’s cave dwelling is transformed into a place that exists outside “every spot where a human being could inhabit” as it becomes “noisome, dark and dismal [with] a stifling vapor proceeded[ing] from the earth.”  

While nineteenth-century constructions of Blackness rely on representations of altered, fouled, putrefying environments, it is worth noting that post-colonial authors have also taken up this language of rot and decay to furnish their critiques of colonialism. Aimé Cesaire, Jamaica Kincaid, and Ann Stoler are just three post-colonial writers and critics who meditate on rot and decay in order to advance historical arguments about the corruption of cultural colonialism, the arrogance of colonial science, and the overlooked “tangibilities of empire” in colonial archives. As Caliban says to Prospero after the latter insists on a proper greeting in Cesaire’s Une Tempête, “make that as froggy, waspish, pustular and dung-filled a ‘hello’ as possible. May today hasten by a decade the day when all the birds in the sky and beasts of the earth will feast upon your corpse!”

Outside of literary constructions of Blackness affixed to chemical volatility, Daniel Rood has demonstrated that on nineteenth-century Cuban sugar plantations “whiteness” was a category that determined the mutual value of sugar and human life, and fermentation/rot was a process that troubled the whiteness of both. As he writes in the opening passage of The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery,

Rooted in new biological sciences, the mid-nineteenth-century notion of inversion–the idea that particularly in the tropics, invisible creatures could suddenly turn upside down the color, taste, value, or even the essential identity of a substance–had multiple valances. The bloody result of slave rebels’ inversion of the social order in Haiti had engendered an Atlantic-wide understanding of the precarity of plantation capitalism, worsened by another series of slave uprisings in Cuba in the early 1840s. Sugar’s inversion also threatened to convert the wealthiest class in Spain’s most treasured colony into a mere supplier of cheap raw materials. Imagining themselves awash in a sea of brown molasses and black rebels… planters anxiously pursuing whiteness in the sugar mill attempted to reinvent racial orders, production techniques, and Cuba’s position in the Atlantic economy.

Tiffany Lethabo King, similarly, has looked to fermentation on the colonial plantation for its role in commodity production and race-making, though she makes what we might call a reparative reading of the social space of plantation labor. In “The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly),” King describes the process by which enslaved people in South Carolina handled the making of indigo from heated and fermented indica plants. Enslaved people with discerning, scientific eyes were responsible for measuring, weighing, and packing sellable units of indigo amongst foul putrefying vats of oxidizing and fermenting indica infested with insects. According to King, enslaved black people acted at the “molecular level” in “noxious zones” of the plantation, but King argue that the noxious zone of fermentation may have functioned at times as  a “heterotopic space where the possibility for other kinds of life exists . . . [as a] counter-site marked by new possibilities for (more than) humanness.” Because the indigo processing space was noxious and abject, enslaved people spent time there beyond the master’s surveillance. King asks, “Given this relative seclusion, is it possible that this area of the plantation could also function as a space of Black solitude, if not pleasure and freedom?” Sugar plantations were a horrifically violent place where enslaved workers lost limbs working dangerous machines or collapsed from extreme heat and overwork, but King’s reading of the indigo plantation suggests there is potential for reading them also as heterotopic spaces, other zones where knowledge and interaction with fermentation produced something other than exploitative early-capitalist commodities. 

Early modern human interactions with chemical volatility in the form of fermentation and rot shared certain premises, especially at the level of scale. The sugar plantation required industrial fermentation on an unprecedented scale. The preservation of transatlantic sea ships required ramped up efforts, new experiments, and the introduction of the American Indies as a biochemical problem. Natural history specimens circulated in Europe for generations before the discovery of the “New World,” but naturalist projects in the Americas required specimens to travel greater distances across larger bodies of water.

Whether or not the many historical actors described in this essay understood themselves to be interacting with the same biochemical process—as they controlled sugar and indigo fermentation; as they struggled against the rotting of specimens; as they attempted to preserve sea-ships from decay; as they experimented with animal livers in brandy and rum; as they defined Blackness in relation to decayed environments—fermentation and its attendant processes are central dynamics through which early modern value was conceived, attributed, and troubled. Fermentation and rot had to be mastered by colonists desiring to produce ideal commodities, ideal nature, and ideal human bodies. Fermentation and rot, then, are productive keywords and key processes for understanding power, knowledge-making, and human interaction with nature in the early modern Atlantic world. 

Featured Image: A Sugar Cane Boiling Pot in White Springs, Florida. Photo by Andrea Graham, 1984.

Justin Abraham Linds is a Ph.D. candidate at NYU in American Studies. His dissertation is a post-colonial history of science that examines the social and political dynamics of fermentation and rot in the early modern transatlantic world. Contact. Twitter.