On 1 July 1914, the United States Navy went dry. General Order 99, issued by Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, banned alcohol aboard every US naval vessel and shore station. It has never been repealed.
Which means that every American sailor since — my father among them — served in a navy where the spirit ration was already a matter of history.
Before the order
The US Navy had issued spirits since its founding, largely copying British practice: a daily ration, watered, issued at fixed times. Congress abolished the enlisted ration in 1862, during the Civil War, replacing it with five cents a day. Officers kept their wine messes for another fifty years.
General Order 99 closed that last door. The wardroom wine mess went with everything else.
Why it happened
Daniels was a temperance man, and 1914 was the high tide of American temperance — Prohibition arrived five years later. But the argument that carried the order was practical rather than moral. Ships were becoming complicated. Steam plant, electrical systems, gunnery direction, wireless. A navy that ran on machinery needed men who were reliably sober at four in the morning.
Sailors did not take it well. There is a persistent story that coffee became known as a "cup of joe" because Josephus Daniels left them nothing stronger to drink. Etymologists are sceptical and the timing does not quite work — but the fact that sailors have told the story for a century says something about how the order landed.
The one exception
A US Navy ship may still break out spirits in one circumstance: the medicinal ration, issued at a commanding officer's discretion after extraordinary hardship — survivors pulled from the water, crews who have endured something genuinely brutal. It is rare, and it is deliberate. The Royal Navy has a phrase for the equivalent order: splice the mainbrace.
What this has to do with us
My father served in the United States Navy. He came home, raised a family, and lived to be almost 102.
For thirty-nine of those years we shared rum together — bottles I carried back from every trip I ever took through the Caribbean and Latin America. A bottle, a story, and a man who had crossed those same waters in uniform decades before I ever saw them.
He never drank a drop of it at sea. The Navy he served in had seen to that. He drank it ashore, at a kitchen table, with his son, which is a better way to drink rum anyway.
Bombarda exists because of him. Every rum we make carries the name of a gun that decided the age of sail, because he taught me that history is worth knowing.
Victori Spolia.
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