called rum, kill the devil and the like". A short time later in May 1657, the General Court of Massachusetts also decided to make illegal the sale of strong liquor "whether knowne by the name of rumme, strong water, wine, brandy, etc". In current usage, the name used for a rum is often based on its place of origin. For rums from places mostly in Latin America where Spanish is spoken, the word ron is used. A ron añejo ("aged rum") is a premium spirit. Rhum is the term that typically distinguishes rum made from fresh sugar cane juice from rum made from molasses in French-speaking locales like Martinique. A rhum vieux ("old rum") is an aged French rum that meets several other requirements. Some of the many other names for rum are Nelson's blood, kill-devil, demon water, pirate's drink, navy neater, and Barbados water. A version of rum from Newfoundland is referred to by the name screech, while some low-grade West Indies rums are called tafia. History Precursors and origins A liquid identified as rum has been found in a tin bottle found on the Swedish warship Vasa, which sank in 1628. An early rum-like drink is brum, which has been produced by the Malay people for thousands of years. Marco Polo recorded a 14th-century account of a "very good wine of sugar(cane)" that was offered to him in the area that became modern-day Iran. Maria Dembinska states that King Peter I of Cyprus, also called Pierre I de Lusignan (9 October 1328 – 17 January 1369), brought rum with him as a gift for the other royal dignitaries at the Congress of Kraków, held in 1364. This is plausible given the position of Cyprus as a significant producer of sugar in the Middle Ages, although the alcoholic sugar drink named rum by Dembinska may not have resembled modern distilled rums very closely. Dembinska also suggests Cyprus rum was often drunk mixed with an almond milk drink, also produced in Cyprus, called soumada. Rum production has been recorded in Brazil in the 1520s. Shidhu, a drink produced by fermentation and distillation of sugarcane juice, is mentioned in Sanskrit texts. Many historians now believe that rum-making found its way to the Caribbean islands along with sugarcane and its cultivation methods from Brazil. The traditional history of modern-style rum tells of its invention in the Caribbean, in the 17th century, by