Commons when Pitt and his friend Dundas came staggering in, and Pitt says: "I can not see the Speaker, Dick; can you?" "Not see the Speaker? Hang it, I see two." And all through the regency and well on through the next reign until the accession of the young Queen, there prevailed what to us would seem unpardonable license.
But it must not be inferred from this that drinking was much more prevalent in England than in other parts of the world at the same periods. Indeed, the records of Germany and Holland show quite as startling pictures. And in our own country we have not much to boast of.
The North American Indians were, on the whole, unaccustomed to alcoholic beverages before the arrival of the white man. Tobacco they had, and used it freely. In some stray localities we read of drinks made from maize; and from the reports of Captains Amadas and Barlow to Sir Walter Raleigh about the expedition to Virginia in 1584, we find that the Indians along the coast of Chesapeake Bay and the Carolinas had learned the art of making wine from grapes. But when the Puritans landed in Massachusetts in 1620 they found, to their disgust, that beer and wine were both lacking, and we find Governor Bradford complaining bitterly of the hardship of drinking water.
Nor was water a more favored beverage among the settlers of Massachusetts Bay eight or ten years later. The first list of necessities sent back to the home company, in 1629, is headed, as our New England friends have so frequently reminded us, by an appeal for "ministers," and for a "patent under scale." We do not hear so often of their request, only a line or two further down, for "vyne planters." They ask for wheat, rye, barley, and other grains, and also for "hop rootes."
The records are still kept of the equipment of the vessel sent out in answer to this appeal. It was provisioned for one hundred passengers and thirty-five sailors for three months, each sailor counting as much as two passengers. They provided for the voyage "forty-five tuns beere, at four and six shillings per tun; two caskes Mallega and Canarie at sixteen shillings; twenty gallons aqua vitæ," and—for drinking, cooking, and all, only six tuns of water!
Higginson, the well-known first minister, went out in 1628. The next year he wrote home a glowing account of the country. Among other things, the air was so fine that his health was greatly benefited. "And whereas my stomache could only digest and did require such drinke as was both strong and stale, now I can and doe oftentimes drinke New England water verie well."
This really remarkable fact we find explained a few years after by Wood, in his New England's Prospect. He says that the
