Stayed over for the Xmas parade and took IAN & Owain to Steamtown. All those years on British Rail and the iron horses are still magnetic!

A front view of the Long Pond Estate in Clark’s Town, Trelawny. The factory has a history of being the largest employer in the community and used to produce the famed Trelawny Gold Rum.

Mark Titus, Business Reporter

Hussey family, controlled Everglades Farms Limited is investing more than US$6 million (J$515 million) to modernise the Long Pond sugar estate that was shuttered after a disastrous start to its first year as a sugar manufacturer in the 2009-10 season.

Long Pond then churned 1,400 tonnes of sugar, easily the worst in the history of the plant.

Two years ago, Everglades acquired Long Pond in a package that includes the Hampden Estates, both located in Trelawny, but was forced to sit out the 2010-11 crop year after it was agreed that substantial work was needed in order to realise the potential capacity of the new assets.

“When we acquired the assets, it was in very bad condition, and we got no opportunity to see how it ran,” Outman Hussey, Everglade’s design and special projects manager, told Sunday Business in an interview on Wednesday.

“When we did take over, the first thing we saw that did not make sense was the oil usage,” said Hussey, a director of the company and professor of architecture at Howard University.

“You could not supply Bunker C oil by a tanker fast enough …”.

Hussey said Everglades relied on the evaluation of the engineers from SCJ Holdings to diagnose the problem and come up with the solution solution, but came to regret that decision.

“Records will show that we did everything that was recommended to be done and more, but when we started the factory the following season it was very apparent that it was not going to happen,” he said.

The Husseys, known mainly in tourism and horse-racing circles, brought in international experts and evaluators in the industry, and is now accepting bids for the engineering work to be done which will see Long Pond retrofitted to ensure that the factory can churn sugar cane throughout the season once commissioned.

The new crop year kicks off at around December.

“It is hard when you are used to doing business in a more private setting to come in a business that is constantly in the public domain, but we think we now have the right people in the right place to now do things the right way,” a more reserved Andrew Hussey, also a director, said.

This will include returning the boilers to the design specifications that they were made for, and eliminating the use of oil at the factory, relying totally on bagasse.

Everglades’ business plan goes beyond sugar production and calls for a diversified product: rum and tourism.

“In diversification, you have to look at what the region is, what the region has to offer, and what the resources are in terms of materials, lands, the people, and the skill level, and then you can determine the matrix,” Andrew said.

Tourism is a key part of the company’s plan, which details a tourism product that includes a rum museum for Hampden, a sugar cane museum for Clark’s Town, and tours of the great houses and sugar cane mills now being refurbished. Horses are also being bred on the properties.

The family said their entry into sugar was easy, as the senior Hussey, Laurie, had been a cane farmer years ago, supplying the Bernard Lodge factory in St Catherine.

“Our dad does not want to see land waste, and what that has done for us as the younger ones is help us to see empty land as not good,” said Andrew.

Everglades employs almost 40 persons on the estates’ farms where crops such as cabbage, lettuce, tomato, pak choi, sweet pepper, hot pepper, broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, Irish potato, string beans, carrot, sweet corn, pumpkin, sweet potato, pineapple, cantaloupe, water melon, thyme, escallion, and onion are planted for the hospitality industry in Western Jamaica.

“In this model, you come to Everglades and there will be a number of different job opportunities, whether it is in rum, horses, sugar, or tours,” said Outman.

“Sugar is very important in the mix of our diversified products because we will need sugar more now than before, especially good, organic sugar. And that is why the cane farmers must know that they are a very important part of our plans going forward. We will need their cane to complement ours to produce the quality sugar we intend for a proper return on our investment,” he said.

The entire plan will be rolled out over a five to 10-year period. For now, the Husseys say the next milestone is packaging and marketing their own branded sugar.

The family says its sales of bulk rum to Europe are up 30 per cent since 2009, and they will be developing a warehouse for rum storage. They were unwilling to speak to the details of the project, however.

Hampden has launched a new spirit, Rum Fire, in partnership with Red Stripe Jamaica as its distributor. The Husseys hope to capture 20 per cent of the Jamaican rum market over time. The market is dominated by Wray and Nephew.

Both Hampden and Long Pond figured prominently during the heyday of sugar production in western Jamaica, and at one time, were chief sources of income for residents of Clark’s Town and other Trelawny communities.

However, in the last two decades, sugar hit a steady decline and the estates and their equipment aged.

At the turn of this decade – the 2000-01 crop – the two factories produced a combined 20,000 tonnes of the sweetener, 5,000 tonnes of which came from the smaller estate, Hampden.

The tonnage, quoted by itself, tells little, but consider that just three years before, in 1997, Hampden alone, which had the capacity for 15,000 tonnes, was churning out 12,000 tonnes of sugar.

Despite the availability of some 1,284 hectares of land for planting cane, only 676 hectares were put into cultivation for the 2000-01 crop.

The estate, which was teetering on the brink of financial ruin and had been rescued by the Government in the 1990s under the bailout programme for the financial sector, would later be placed in receivership.

Before that time, the estate was controlled by the Farquharson family.

The records show that during the 1997-2002 period, Hampden sustained losses of more than J$45 million.

Long Pond and other sugar assets were last in private ownership under a deal in 1993 that gave 51 per cent control to a Wray and Nephew-led consortium, that included Cliff Cameron’sManufacturers Investment Limited and Booker Tate Limited of the United Kingdom.

Each private partner held 17 per cent, whereas the Jamaican Government retained a minority 49 per cent.

The state would eventually re-acquire the SCJ after the consortium failed to turn the company into a money-maker.

Under the deal with Everglades, the new owners must maintain 60 per cent of the leased lands for sugar-cane production or related products for 15 years.

The deal covers the two factories and surrounding 40 hectares of land, plus an additional 7,100 hectares, which are leased for US$40 per hectare per annum for the first 10 years of the agreement.

For 2010-11, the company has planted 5,000 hectares of new cane, and will plant an additional 1,408 hectares of cane over the four years to follow, which is projected to yield 280,000 tonnes of cane in the next five years.

“This means businesses in the communities will see an increase in trade, taxis will have more passengers to carry, and there will be additional opportunities for employment,” said Outman.

“So in essence, we are mixing green infrastructure with traditional, infrastructure, and in that way, we are conducting a business while preserving the heritage.”

mark.titus@gleanerjm.com

Scholar to Discuss Rum as a Symbol in Literature

Dr. Jennifer Nesbitt will share her research findings concerning rum as a symbol in literature.

Jennifer Nesbitt, Ph.D., associate professor of English at Penn State York, will give a lecture entitled “Rum Histories: Drinking in the Past Postcolonial Atlantic Literature and Culture,” on Thursday, March 31 at University Park. Nesbitt, an Institute of Arts and Humanities (IAH) Resident Scholar for 2010-11, will speak at noon in Sparks Building, room 124. This is the first time a faculty member from York has been named an IAH Resident Scholar since the program began in 2003-04.

The IAH Resident Scholar program is jointly sponsored with the College of Arts and Architecture, the College of the Liberal Arts, and the commonwealth campuses. The program provides up to nine faculty members per year with one semester of release time from teaching, a $1,000 mini-grant for research expenses and/or materials, and the use of an office in Ihlseng Cottage at University Park.

Nesbitt joined the Penn State faculty in 2003. She specializes in 20th Century British literature, postcolonial literature, and women’s literature. She earned an undergraduate degree in History and Literature in 1987 from Harvard University, Cambridge, Ma., and a doctorate in English with a certificate in women’s studies in 1999 from Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. She is originally from Winchester, Ma.

“This project has allowed me to look at the ways popular texts—everything from 1950s tour guides to cookbooks to the film “Pirates of the Caribbean”—inform the way rum works as a symbol in literature,” said Nesbitt. “Even the song “Rum and Coca-Cola” has a really interesting story behind it,” she said.

-Rumpundit

Rum and a reunion for sea dogs

SIMON WONG

SCOTT HAMMOND

UP SPIRITS: Navy sailors from the original HMNZS Canterbury gathered in Blenheim for a reunion. From left, Gary Huffadine, Mort Anderson, Bob McKenzie, Dale Hobbs, Rod Shoemark, Brett Iggulden (centre back), Peter Atkinson, Doug Carson, Terry Brennan and Tom Baker.

The men took part in what was a daily ritual for sailors called Tot Time, where work on the ship would stop at noon and the sailors would drink a gill of rum (four ounces) to fight off scurvy, and for Dutch courage.

A group of 10 sailors from the original HMNZS Canterbury honoured a naval tradition in Blenheim yesterday by swigging rum on the stroke of noon.

The men were all part of the 3L mess on the frigate when it was commissioned in 1971, and travelled from England, via the United States and Panama Canal, back to New Zealand.

They gathered for their annual reunion, the first held in the South Island, at the weekend.

The men took part in what was a daily ritual for sailors called Tot Time, where work on the ship would stop at noon and the sailors would drink a gill of rum (four ounces) to fight off scurvy, and for Dutch courage.

Bob McKenzie, of Wellington, was the president of the 21 men in 3L mess. He said the group formed a special bond from their time on the HMNZS Canterbury, and had become an extended family.

They drank from cups made from Bofor 40 millimetres L60 anti-aircraft shell cases, which had the men’s names engraved on them. One cup commemorated the three members who had died.

Mr McKenzie, formerly of Blenheim and a radio operator on the ship, said he had great memories of his year on the frigate in 1971, including the day Princess Anne commissioned the ship.

The members of 3L mess, who are now scattered throughout the country and in Australia, still meet regularly, he said.

Some of the men travelled to see the ship being sunk near Deep Water Cove in the Bay of Islands in 2007 after it was decommissioned in 2005.

The Spirit of a Privateer: Privateer International Opens Distillery

Posted on 03/10/11 at 11:00pm by webmaster

The Spirit of a Privateer: Privateer International Opens Distillery

Andrew Cabot opens rum distillery in Ipswich, MA

Ipswich, MA (Vocus/PRWEB) March 10, 2011

It was an economic instigator for the American Revolution. George Washington insisted on having it at his 1789 inauguration. Early in the history of the country, it was a ubiquitous campaigning tool. And prior to the Revolutionary War, the average American consumed three gallons of it per year.

Rum is the common thread running through these events in the early history of the American Republic. And the name Andrew Cabot (1750-1791) was associated with the manufacture of one of the earliest rums ever made on American shores. Cabot, along with his business partners, owned a rum distillery in Beverly Massachusetts, along the Atlantic Coast, just north of Boston. They smuggled their molasses into the country in defiance of British tariffs and laws. Once America declared independence from Britain, the economics of distilling rum changed, and Cabot divested his distillery to focus on increasing his interests in privateering.

Today, the namesake Andrew Cabot, six generations removed from the original, is carefully handcrafting fine American rum in Ipswich, MA.

Distilled from premium ingredients, in small batches, and with an obsessive attention to quality, Privateer Rum is a touchstone to an era when rum was America’s most prized spirit.

“There was an irresistibility and inevitability to this mission,” said Andrew. “And it quickly became clear to us that Privateer was positioned to fill an important gap in the ultra premium rum market.”

Bill Owens, President of the American Distilling Institute, concurs: “During the American Revolution, a war privateer and successful businessman from Massachusetts named Andrew Cabot was also busy distilling rum. Nearly three hundred years later, his descendant by the same name is using the original family approach to create his own craft-made rum. It is amazing to me that the great American spirit of ingenuity, freedom and independence can carry across so many generations, and nothing carries this tradition better than the art of distilling.”

Privateer’s award-winning master distiller Eric Watson said, “Privateer Rum will be like no other rum available in America today. Our proprietary approach combines the best of old and new world practices, resulting in levels of character and complexity that often are not found in ultra premium rums today.”

Privateer International, the name of the distillery, refers to the twenty-five privateer vessels that the original Cabot owned in whole or part during the American Revolution; these were fast and maneuverable vessels that hunted British merchant ships across the North Atlantic and from Canada to the Caribbean. Rum was the second entitlement of the sailors in this fleet, the first being their shares in the large prizes they captured from British merchants.

The rum that bears the Privateer label embodies the rebellious American spirit, and is currently available by the barrel at the Privateer Distillery, 28 Mitchell Road, Ipswich, MA.

For more information, visit http://www.privateerrum.com

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For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2011/3/prweb8197858.htm

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Mar 4th 2011 at 7:02PM

You don’t hear about liquor brands getting involved in archaeology too often but the team of archaeologists has recovered six cannons from the site where “infamous privateer” Captain Henry Morgan’s ships wrecked in the 1600s is being rewarded with rum. Morgan is the namesake of Captain Morgan spiced rum. The ships crashed into a reef while carrying Morgan and a group of his men to raid Castillo de San Lorenzo el Real de Chagres, a fort that guarded the capital of Panama City. Morgan and his men were sailing up the river when his flagship, the Satisfaction, and multiple other vessels crashed into a reef and sank.

The Captain Morgan Rum Company has offered each adult member of the expedition team a barrel of their very own blend of rum, and plans to immortalize the team by renaming a section of the Captain Morgan distillery in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands in their honor.

“We cannot thank these brave archaeologists enough for recovering Captain Morgan’s lost cannons and returning them to us, as we all feared they were lost to the seven seas forever,” said a spokesperson for the Captain Morgan Society for the Preservation of Life, Love & Loot.

The company believes that there may be bottles of Morgan’s spiced rum that were aboard the Satisfaction and his other ships off the coast of Panama remain on the ocean’s floor waiting to be recovered. It has offered a reward as well as a role in a future advertising campaign to whoever who recovers them with the proviso that they do so responsibly and without damaging anything natural to environment.

By DAVID ROMAN

MADRID—Spain’s Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in favor of Pernod Ricard SA in a long-running dispute with rival Bacardi Ltd. over the rights to the Cuban rum trademark Havana Club, setting a likely precedent for other cases involving property taken over by Cuba’s communist government.

The ruling by the country’s top legal court represents the third time that Spanish courts have rejected Bacardi’s challenge against Pernod’s and Cuba’s ownership of the famous brand, after two previous decisions by lower courts. It also marks a significant legal victory for France’s Pernod, the world’s second-largest distiller by sales after the U.K.’s Diageo PLC, and the Cuban government, which has secured the rights to the brand in most countries.

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ReutersA barman makes mojitos at the Bodeguita del Medio bar in Havana, Cuba. The Havana Club company produces the rum and is a joint venture between the Cuban government and Pernod Ricard.

Pernod sells three and a half million cases of rum in 124 countries each year under the Havana Club name, through a joint venture with the Cuban government. That arrangement, which began in 1993, prevents Pernod exporting to the U.S. because of Washington’s longstanding trade embargo against Cuba.

Pernod and Bacardi have been locked in legal battles in Spain and the U.S. since Bacardi claims it has the rights to the trademark for the U.S. after it bought them in 1994 from the Arechabala family, founders of the brand early in the last century. The Arechabala family was stripped of its properties by the Cuban government after the 1959 revolution there.

Bacardi claims that the move by the Cuban government was illegal, and it released its own Havana Club in the U.S. in 2006. Unlike the rum sold by Pernod, Bacardi’s rum is made in Puerto Rico. Spain and the U.S. are traditionally the top two markets for the Havana Club brand.

In its ruling, Spain’s Supreme Court declined to take a stance on the legality of the expropriation under Cuba’s Law 890 of 1960, which nationalized the country’s entire economy.

The court added that its decision against the plaintiffs, Bacardi and the Arechabala family, is based on the fact that the legal register of the Havana Club brand in Spain, under the Arechabalas’ ownership, expired in the 1960s, and was later lawfully renewed and taken over by the Cuban government.

Bacardi wasn’t immediately available to comment on the ruling.

Bacardi last year won a key ruling in the U.S., when District Judge Sue Robinson in Delaware denied Pernod’s request for an injunction to bar Bacardi’s U.S. arm from using the brand name.

From the musical 1776, Rum Molasses and Slaves, for the song move to 4’42″ and get the flavour of Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776

Eat like a real pirate? No thanks on the slop & flamingos, but oh, that rum

Last Friday the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the Whydah from Slave Ship to Pirate Ship opened. The exhibit tells the tale of the slave ship Whydah that was captured near the Bahamas by the dread pirate “Black Sam” Bellamy and his motley crew in 1717.

For two months the crew sailed the Whydah, plundering more than 50 ships, before setting sail for the captain’s Cape Cod home. Unfortunately, the ship met a violent storm, hit a sandbar and sank just miles off shore. Her plunder sunk to the bottom of the ocean as 102 pirate corpses floated on the waters, including Black Sam. Only two crew members survived.

Her wreckage was finally discovered by underwater explorer Barry Clifford in 1984 and it’s firmly established as the only authentic pirate shipwreck to date by the ship’s inscribed bell, and now the treasures have become a traveling museum blockbuster.

You really need to go.

There’s a lot of cool educational stuff and artifacts and some creepy Disney-esque pirate scenes like the one where a pirate’s leg is getting sawed off. Arrr, matey, it’s a great Halloween outing.

Oh, wait, this is a food column, right?

OK, so I’m looking at the stuff recovered from the wreckage and there are these pewter plates and big knives and I’m reading the text that says the pirates ate buckets of meat with ship’s biscuits “which might or might not be infected with weevils or maggots.” Ewwwww.

So all those old swashbuckling films where the captain is swilling rum and feasting on giant turkey legs at a table laden with food are fiction?

“There’s a lot of myth in what pirates ate,” says Merrianne Timko, a culinary historian who volunteers at the museum. Timko, a member of the Houston Society of Les Dames d’Escoffier, has been working with the museum staff to host Culinary Feasts since 2003. She’s currently working on Eat, Drink, and Plunder! A Pirate Feast, to be held October 31 on the tall ship Elissa docked at Galveston Island.

“For that, we’ll be doing some things a little more exotic, some Caribbean based foods,” she says. “I was going to do a traditional rum punch, there are still a few brands of rum that are like the 18th century ones, but they are very high proof. You know why? Because if the rum spilled on the gunpowder it would still ignite.

“But we don’t want guests driving back from Galveston under the influence of that.”

So the whole “yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum” thing is accurate?

“Yes, there was a lot of rum, you might say,” she admits.

Apparently rum, from Jamaica, kept longer than beer onboard ships. Pirates, many of whom deserted from the Royal Navy, were swayed by the abundance of pirate rum. It was the pirates, Timko says, that discovered scurvy early on, and added limes, as well as bitters, molasses, eggs and chocolate, to their daily rum. All for medicinal purposes, of course.

The longer they were at sea, as rations and fresh water ran out, they would even mix flour with rum and eat the paste. Not so yum.

“A lot of time they would go without food,” Timko explains. “They would even cut up leather shoes into strips and eat them.”

But surely, Johnny Depp’s Black Jack Sparrow didn’t dine on leather strips?

“I saw one of those movies,” Timko says. “I thought the taverns were a little Hollywood.”

Timko has a passion for art, history and food. She’s spent months researching what real pirates from the so-called Golden Age (1700-1730) really ate.

When they were in ports in the Caribbean, they stocked up on supplies: dried grapes, plantains, cabbage (good source of vitamin C to combat scurvy), rice, coconuts, flamingos (please tell me no one eats those pretty pink birds anymore) and iguanas and their eggs. They would get whole pigs and brine them in vinegar and salt.

Without refrigeration, meats had to be salted in order to last any length of time. The beef was so salted and so hard that it often had other purposes.

“They would use it to patch holes in the ship,” Timko says, “it was that tough.”

Apparently, pirates didn’t have a very glamorous diet.

“A lot of stews, soups, something easy to prepare,” Timko says. “Almost like a slop. And the hardtack, the ship’s biscuits, was so hard they used it like utensils to scoop up the slop. Sometimes they just made little dough balls and dropped them into the stew. Of course the ship’s rats had probably been nibbling on them.”

Um, really getting squeamish here.

But what about all that pewter dishes and flatware?

“All of that was taken from looted ships, and probably reserved for officers,” she says. “Most of the pirates just ate with a knife. Not the best table manners.”

So this Halloween, even if you can’t score a ticket the museum’s culinary feast in Galveston, you can dress like Black Jack Sparrow and hoist a pint of rum, preferably with some lime and bitters added, and thank your lucky stars that we live a culinary city and don’t have to eat shoe leather. Or poor pink flamingos.

Or maggot infested… never mind, just drink your rum.

• Houston Museum of Natural Science, pirates, pirate ship, rum, Whydah
• Johnny Depp, Merrianne Timko

which includes some fun details. I will also post later an essay written in Guyana in the 19th century which I am going to share with Liberman!

The Rum History of the Word “Rum”

By Anatoly Liberman
The idea of this post, as of several others before it, has been suggested by a query from a correspondent.  A detailed answer would have exceeded the space permitted for the entire set of monthly gleanings, so here comes an essay on the word rum, written on the first rather than the last Wednesday of October.  But before I get to the point, I would like to make a remark on the amnesia that afflicts students of word origins.  Etymology is perhaps the only completely anonymous branch of linguistics.  When people look up a word, they hardly ever ask who reconstructed its history.  Surround seems to be related to round, but it is not.  On the other hand, soot does not make us think of sit; yet the two are allied.  Obviously, neither conclusion is trivial.  Even specialists rarely know the names of the discoverers (for those are hard to trace).  Unlike Ohm’s Law or Newton’s laws, etymological knowledge easily becomes faceless common property, a plateau without a single hill to obstruct the view.  To be sure, we have great authorities, such as the OED and Skeat, but Murray, Bradley (the OED’s first great editors) and Skeat authored only some of the statements they made.  In many cases they depended on the findings of their predecessors.  What then was their input?  All is either forgotten or falsely ascribed to them.  Murray could defend his authorship very well.  Skeat, too, in countless letters to the editor, strove (strived: take your pick) for recognition and kept rubbing in the fact that he, rather than somebody else, had elucidated the derivation of this or that word.  Rarely, very rarely do dictionaries celebrate individual discovery.  Thus, pedigree (which French “lent” to English) means “foot of a crane,” from a three-line mark, like the broad arrow used in denoting succession in pedigrees.  This was explained by C. Sweet (no relative of Henry Sweet, the famous philologist and the prototype of Dr. Higgins; I could not find any information on him), and Skeat gave the exact reference to his publication.  Something similar, though less spectacular (because the conclusion is still debatable), happened when language historians began to research the history of the noun rum.
The most universal law of etymology is that we cannot explain the origin of a word unless we have a reasonably good idea of what the thing designated by the word means.  For quite some time people pointed to India as the land in which rum was first consumed and did not realize that in other European languages rum was a borrowing from English.  The misleading French spelling rhum suggested a connection with Greek rheum “stream, flow” (as in rheumatism).  According to other old conjectures, rum is derived from aroma or saccharum.  India led researchers to Sanskrit roma “water” as the word’s etymon, and this is what many otherwise solid 19th-century dictionaries said.  Webster gave the vague, even meaningless reference “American,” but on the whole, the choice appeared to be between East and West Indies.  Skeat, in the first edition of his dictionary (1882), suggested Malayan origins (from beram “alcoholic drink,” with the loss of the first syllable) and used his habitual eloquence to boost this hypothesis.
Then The Academy, a periodical that enjoyed well-deserved popularity throughout the forty years of its existence (1869-1910), published the following paragraph.  (The Imperial Dictionary [not A Universal Dictionary of the English Language, as Spitzer says] gives it in full, but I suspect that few of our readers have access to or ever use it and will therefore reproduce the paragraph.) The Academy, September 5, 1885, p. 155:  “Mr. N. Darnell Davis has put forth a derivation of the word rum, which gives the only probable history of it.  It came from Barbados, where the planters first distilled it, somewhere between 1640 and 1645.  A MS. ‘Description of Barbados’ in Trinity College, Dublin, written about 1651, says: ‘the chief fudling (sic) they make in the Island is Rumbullion, alias Kill-Divil (sic), and this is made of sugar-canes distilled, a hot, hellish, and terrible liquor.’  G. Warren’s description of Surinam, 1661, shows the word in its present short form: ‘Rum is a spirit extracted from the juice,…called Kill-Devil in New England!’  ‘Rumbullion’, is a Devonshire word meaning ‘a great tumult,’ and may have been adopted from some of the Devonshire settlers in Barbados; at any rate, little doubt can exist that it has given rise to our word rum, and the longer name rumbowling, which sailors give to their grog.”  Also in 1885, berummaged “confused” was recorded on Dartmoor, and still later it became clear that French guildive is a “corruption” of Engl. kill-devil.  According to Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, many of the settlers in Barbados, at the time when sugar making was being established there, came from Devonshire.  I have no way to check the reliability of this statement.
Skeat accepted Davis’s etymology unconditionally, and since that time it has become commonplace.  However, some dictionaries, including the OED, show caution, supply the explanation with a question mark, or even say that the origin or rum is “uncertain.”  The etymology of rumbullion will concern us here only in so far as it may be a combination of the adjective rum and French boullion “hot drink.”  That adjective has been rather convincingly traced to Romany rom “male” (= “Gypsy man, good man”), a once ubiquitous cant word.  Romeville (that is, Rumville) was London, and so on.  Hensleigh Wedgwood, the main etymologist of the pre-Skeat era, thought that rum is a curtailed form of rum booze “great drink.”  Indeed, in 1567 wine was called rum booze in Elizabethan slang.
In this context it will be proper to mention an article whose title promises nothing to word lovers but that contains numerous ingenious etymologies (John P. Hughes, “On ‘h’ for ‘r’ in English Proper Names”, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 53, 1954, 601-12).  A strong bond unites h and r in the history of all the Germanic languages. Alternations of the Hob ~ Rob type are the thin edge of a big, heavy wedge.  Hughes suggests that rum booze was taken for a plural (rumboes); then the new singular rumbo “strong punch” allegedly came up, from which rum would be a shortened form.  Rumbo was attested only in the middle of the 18th century, but slang words may exist for a long time before they make their way into print.  A curious thing is that hum “alcoholic drink” has been recorded too; in Hughes’s opinion, it is a stub of humbooze and a doublet of rumbooze or rum booze.
The way to rum from rum booze is shorter than from rumbullion (or rumbustion, also “tumult, hubbub, etc.”), but the fact remains that rum reached England from Barbados.  It is, however, not improbable that the phrase rum booze had existed in the speech of the English settlers on the Caribbean island and was taken overseas.  If so, rumbullion, from rum (adjective) and French boullion “hot drink,” was a verbal joke, a pun.  (In England, rum was known very little, if at all, before 1685, when after the battle of Sedgemoor the Duke of Monmouth tasted the drink.  It must have been one of the last pleasures the rebellious duke enjoyed before his execution.)  In any case, rum “a drink” and rum “odd” cannot be separated.  There was quite a fashion for rum- coinages in the 18th century: compare rumgumption, from which we have the abbreviated form gumption “common sense” (originally perhaps “rough common sense”), while rumbustious “boisterous, violent” sounds suspiciously like rambunctious “mischievous, self-asserting.”  Leo Spitzer believed that the French argot word rogomme “strong drink” goes back to Engl. rumgumption.  Some details remain hidden, but one thing is clear: excessive consumption of rum results in violent behavior.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”