The Etymology of the word Rum. 
By N. Darnell Davis, 
UM was wholly unknown to Englishmen until 
its manufacture was established, if not dis- 
covered, in Barbados. In the latter part of the 
seventeenth century it had not only become well known, 
but was, indeed, a fashionable drink, and it is recorded 
that the ill-fated Duke of MONMOUTH, when he was being 
taken as a prisoner to London in 1685, after the fatal 
field of Sedgemoor, took at Romsey, while remaining in 
the saddle, a hot glassful of rum and eggs, apparently 
on account of a cold from which he was at the time suf- 
fering.* It is of the word Rum, however, rather than 
of the use of the spirit so called, that this paper will 
treat. 
When the planters of Barbados, somewhere between 
1640 and 1645, learned to distil spirit from the juice of 
the sugar-cane, they called the new liquor i( KILL- 
DEVIL."! The French who, according to the Abbe 
RAYNAL, learned the art of making sugar from the 
English, % adopted the name in the corrupt form of 
Guildive } % a word of which the derivation has hitherto 
puzzled the philologists of France, and amongst them 
the learned LlTTRE himself who, in his famous Di6tion- 
* Roberts' " History of the Southern Counties," p. 466. 
f Ligon's " History of Barbados," p. 27. 
% " History of the East and West Indies" — English translation, Lon- 
don, 1777 — book xiv, vol. iv, p. 307. 
$ Labat's " West Indies," 1724, vol. 11, pp. 135, 321 and 322. 
