Irony intensified as Mr. Yellin and I made our way up the well-heeled west coast, past Sandy Lane, home to an upscale hotel and Barbados’s unofficial tourist attraction: Rihanna’s gazillion-dollar mansion. Through flocks of children in smart school uniforms, we reached the rural north and landed in the colonial Caribbean — St. Nicholas Abbey, 400 acres of cane fields, mahogany forests, mango trees and a Jacobean mansion built in 1658. From drawing room to dining room, slave records to family tree — one owner, John Yeamans, bears the ignoble legacy of having introduced slavery to the Carolinas — the place was hauntingly immaculate. So was its namesake rum, produced on-site in a mini-distillery. I tasted three varieties and decided the pepper rum, for seasoning, was quite the treat. Mildly tipsy, I walked the grounds. Cane reached clouds; the sun set crimson. It all seemed like a movie set: old sugar mill, sapphire sky, eerie calm. This beauty confounded me: How to juxtapose it with the dastardly deed at its core?

Such is the reality of Barbados’s past. It’s said that 17th-century Bridgetown boasted one “tippling house” per 20 residents; nowadays the number of rum shops dotting the island is disputable, but all agree on one answer: many. Between swim stops at spectacular beaches, I drove through countryside populated by small chattel houses, testing bar stools from one end of the island to the other. My haunts bore names like De Nest Bar and Hide Away, Survival Bar and Marshall’s — the latter owned, naturally, by Marshall, brother to a cricket player whose photo adorns the bar. One had a sign reading, “abusive language not allowed”; another had room for just a single stool; all were populated by motley regulars, debating elections and cricket in the same breath. On the Atlantic side I relished Bathsheba, where the views become cliffside dramatic. There I drank Mount Gay and coconut water with an eye on the frothy sea. Next thing I knew I was dancing to soca music in a rum shop just past the barber shop, to the left of the roundabout; then I was dancing while devouring something heavenly called “pickled seacat,” which is actually a ceviche of octopus.

Just when I thought I had a handle on rum, I discovered rhum. Enter Martinique, elegant French island, home to cane and banana fields, a hikable volcano, black-sand beaches — and a nationalistic, revisionary rum legacy.

I was schooled during a tour of La Favorite, near the island’s capital, Fort-de-France. There are 11 distilleries on the island, seven still producing rum. La Favorite, one of two family-owned ones, exhibits a 1905 steam engine, still powering the whole shebang, in a humble factory that looks, from the visitor’s trail above, like the inside of a grand old clock. A defining feature of all Martinican distilleries stands nearby: a distillation column, cap made of copper, as per regulation. Regulation? Indeed: from the French government, which granted Martinican rum the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, or AOC: a designation given to fine agricultural products like cognac and cheese. This means that La Favorite is governed by exacting protocols about such things as permitted cane (only 12 varieties, to be cut and crushed on the same day) and aging process: white rum ages at least eight weeks in metal vats; dark rum, 12 to 18 months in oak barrels; rhum vieux, old rum, a minimum of three years.

I explained to my guide that I was familiar with the production process, having just come from Jamaica and Barbados. Grand faux pas.

“Madame,” Emmanuelle said. “They make rhum industriel in those islands. Only the French make our rum — the rhum agricole.”