Two Brands of Johnnie Walker: One Famous, One Not

Two Brands of Johnnie Walker: One Famous, One Not

by Bill Russo

in Adventures in Type and Space

You’ve undoubtedly heard of Johnnie Walker. The whiskey business he founded in Scotland in the early 1800s spread round the world and is now the leading brand on the planet with over 200 million bottles sold every year.

‘Brand’ is the operative word here and it relates not only to the Johnnie Walker of distillery fame but to another Johnnie Walker who lived in the same time period.  One who was born right here in the United States - to be exact, Harwich on Cape Cod.

Our John Walker and his brand does not make a happy story, filled with pleasant evenings of cigars, overstuffed chairs, and cocktails of Johnnie Walker Red and Ginger Ale.  Our Johnnie’s brand had little of merriment to it. And as for fame, our John had lots of it, if you put the word “in” in front of it – as in ‘infamy’.

Though our Johnnie’s brand became associated with hate, fire, death and destruction, the fault was none of his own making.  He was simply born at the wrong time.  Had he lived a century later, he would most likely have a holiday named after him, as do the U.S. Presidents as well as individuals like Martin Luther King and Christoforo Columbo of Italy, (Known as ‘Columbus’ in the U.S.)

So what was this terrible brand of Harwich Johnnie’s?  Before I draw back the theater curtains and reveal him on center stage, let’s look at his early life.  He was born on Cape Cod,   a horse-shoe shaped peninsula of Massachusetts that crawls 64 miles out, into the deep Atlantic Ocean.  Until it morphed into a tourist destination in the 20^th century, it was a land of salt farms, cranberry bogs and fishermen. 

Harwich Johnnie was born just as the 1700s turned the page and became the 1800s. He was an able student but left school at fourteen, and for a few years he plied all the trades available to young Cape Codders. 

Wading knee deep in flooded cranberry bogs he teased stubborn, straggling berries until they let go of the vines binding them and floated up to the surface, joining the majority of the fruits which departed of their own accord.  Like a rodeo cowboy, he cast a large lasso onto the water and corralled thousands of berries; forming a big circle on the water with the rope, guiding them to shore for packing and sale. For two seasons John Walker labored in the cranberry bogs, and found it somewhat interesting, but decided it was not for him. 

The Salt Works were even less exciting.  During the late 1700s and early 1800s Cape Cod was a leading producer of salt.  In those days before refrigeration, salt was one of the most important commodities in the United States.

It was used to preserve much of the food consumed in the country as well as to preserve most of the catch by the thousands of Cape Cod fishermen.  Cod Fish caught on the Cape were salted, boxed and sent all over the world.

Getting the salt was the hard part.  Large companies spent boatloads of money on giant furnaces and pots.  They filled their containers with seawater and boiled away the liquid to obtain pure salt.  It was a costly process and even though the end product was expensive the profits gained by the companies were fairly small.

In the late 1700s a man everybody laughingly called “Sleepy”, changed everything when he came up with a new way to harvest salt, which would become known as ‘White Gold’. The process was so simple it’s a wonder it wasn’t thought of long before “Sleepy” John Sears came up with it. 

 John lived in Dennis, a town on the Harwich border. He was called “Sleepy” because of his habit of falling asleep anytime, anywhere.  It made him a poor fisherman, but gave him plenty of time to dream.  One day, while napping, he had the outrageous dream of digging a large but shallow hole in his yard and filling it with sea water. 

When he woke up, he stayed awake for a long time – long enough to dig out a huge rectangular space, enclosed by logs and flooded with water from the ocean which was barely 30 yards from his house.

While John sat in the sun in front of his square pond, nature did the work for him – evaporating all the water and leaving him with about one cup of pure salt for each gallon of water evaporated.  “Sleepy” John Sears soon refined his system and became a wealthy man and the founder of a revitalized, important industry.

John Walker however, labored in the salt works for only a few weeks before deciding he had enough.  As a very young man he signed on with a fishing vessel and knew as soon as the vessel cast off its shore line that the ocean life was meant for him. 

The sea was good to Harwich John.  From deck hand he rose to Mate and finally to Captain of a fine fishing vessel. For more than two decades he sailed the waters from Cape Cod all the way to Florida and on to the Caribbean Sea.

Over time John became increasingly angered at the way people of darker skin color were treated.  In Cape Cod he saw few people of color and no racial strife but in the broader United States and in the world grim battles over slavery were looming.

In the 1830s slavery was abolished in the British West Indies, but the United States was still suffering under its evil grip.  Many of John’s crewmen were people of color and he came to be horrified at their treatment. 

Becoming increasing vocal in his dislike for slavery, John took action in 1844.  At the time, he was in Florida, the Southern-most outpost of what in two decades would become the Confederated States of America.  Disgusted at the way the slaves were being treated as well as by their squalid living conditions, he acquired a ship, actually just a tiny open boat, and set off for the British West Indies with seven slaves who would be free if the journey ended well.

It didn’t.

Captain John Walker became ill midway to the Indies.  With Walker delirious, the slaves who had no boating or navigational skills had no idea of what to do of where to go. The open boat drifted aimlessly for days. Supplies as well as hope were running low.  Captain Walker was alive, but still only semi conscious. Facing imminent death by starvation if they didn’t capsize and drown first, they were rescued by a passing sloop which deposited them in Key West.

The slaves were sent back to slavery while John Walker was put in irons aboard a warship and transported to a prison in Pensacola where he was chained to the floor of a bare cell and given a minimum of health care and sparse bits of food.

Put on trial for his crimes of assisting coloreds to escape their lawful slavery he was forced to serve one year in the bare cell, not only chained to the floor, but also deprived of light.  In addition he was forced to undergo a unique form of torture.

During his incarceration, a small group of abolitionists in Boston were working feverishly to get him freed.  Finally after the group paid a large fine, Johnnie Walker of Harwich was freed.  He lived another 40 years afterward, passing away in 1878, just shy of four score in years.

He lived long enough to see a horrible conflict among a nation split in two and then re-united after a devastating civil war in which almost a million soldiers died, out of a total national population of only 31 million!  He took some comfort in knowing that the bloodshed freed four million souls from slavery.

But what about the “Brand” of Johnnie Walker?  The Scottish Johnnie Walker’s brand is his name on a bottle of whiskey.  Harwich Johnnie’s “Brand” was a real brand.  In addition to all the torture and deprivation of more than 12 months in jail he was sentenced to be branded on the hand with the letters ‘S S’: – Slave Stealer.

Over the years an increasingly large group of people of all colors said that the ‘S S’ meant Slave Savior.

Here’s an actual photo of his hand.  You may not see the marks clearly in the engraving, but many Americans did see them in their minds and in 1878 a statue of John was erected in Michigan where he lived In later life and a plaque in Harwich where he was born.  One of America’s greatest poets, John Greenleaf Whittier praised him in his poem “The Branded Hand”.

                                     Here's a photo of John's hand from an engraving.  

Johnnie Walker's hand, from an engraving.  I'm not sure why the letters are reversed in the picture.

Here's a portion of Whittier's poem

"Then lift that manly right-hand, bold ploughman of the wave!
Its branded palm shall prophesy, "Salvation to the Slave!"
Hold up its fire-wrought language, that who so reads may feel
His heart swell strong within him, his sinews change to steel.

Hold it up before our sunshine, up against our Northern air;
Ho! men of Massachusetts, for the love of God, look there!"

Johnathan Walker,

Born Harwich, Cape Cod 1799

Died 1878, Norton Shores, Michigan

The End