Ginger and Blenheim’s Ginger Ale

When the Carolina Expedition set out in 1670 to settle the South Carolina colony, its leader Captain Joseph West, received instructions on what to plant, both trade crops and provision crops. West stopped in Bermuda en route to pick up “Cotton seed, Indigo Seed, ginger roots which roots you are to carry planted in a tubb of earth” (1856)—none of these were provision crops, plants that could feed colonists—they were what the Lords Proprietors of the colonies envisioned as the materials that would support trade. While cotton and indigo would in the course of time prove valuable commodities, what of ginger? Why were such hopes being placed on that pungent Asian root?