SO, HOW DO YOU FEED thousands of men when they are afloat in ships which may not touch land for months at a time, where cooking facilities are very basic, where there are no refrigeration systems and where food can be preserved only by salting, pickling or drying?
The answer, of course, is that you base the rations on foodstuffs which will tolerate those preservation methods and remain edible for many months: salted meat, salted or dried fish, dried pease or beans and items made from cereal grains. This is not just a nautical solution; until canning became generally accepted and affordable in the middle of the nineteenth century it was the principal solution to preserving food through the winter in northern lands, when plants stopped growing and when farming methods could not support large herds of livestock through the cold months. So at sea, they ate throughout the year what landsmen ate during the winter. By long tradition, the seaman’s diet was based on salt meat, dried pease and hard-baked biscuit; on 31 December 1677, Samuel Pepys drew up a victualling contract which set the ration for each man at one pound of biscuit and one gallon of beer each day, with a weekly ration of eight pounds of beef, or four pounds of beef and two of bacon or pork with two pints of pease. The meat was served on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday; on the other three days they had fish (either fresh cod, or wind-dried or salt cod or hake) with two ounces of butter and four ounces of Suffolk cheese (or two-thirds that amount of Cheddar).1
By 1733, when the British Admiralty published its first formal set of Regulations and Instructions relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea2 (hereafter ‘the Regulations’), the fish had disappeared to be replaced by oatmeal and sugar and the ration entitlement had evolved into the table below:
Table of ‘…daily Proportion of Provisions [to be] allowed to every Man serving in His Majesty’s Ships’3
This basic ration had not changed when Nelson joined the Royal Navy in 1770, did not change throughout his lifetime, and continued, more or less unchanged, until after 1847 when the Admiralty finally accepted the new technology of canning.4 This is not to say that these listed items were the only things issued to the navy; for occasions when the basic items were not available, or when the men deemed the quality unacceptable and refused them, there were official substitutes (see Appendix 2). It should be noted, however, that the officially-listed substitutes were the only ones for which the Admiralty, through the Victualling Board, would pay. Woe betide the captain or purser who bought anything else without a written order from the commander-in-chief, unless stuck in a place where the official items were not available at all.
This standard ration gives an average daily intake of almost 5000 calories. (This figure is usually given as 4500, but having traced this oft-quoted figure back to its origin, it transpires that the calculation is seriously flawed in several respects. For details of a more accurate calculation, see Appendix 3.) Such an average daily calorie intake seems excessive by modern standards, when an active man is thought to need between 2500 and 3000 calories a day; even the crews of modern sailing ships, doing more or less the same work, need no more than 3200 calories daily, but modern crews do not have to haul three-ton guns around and they do not have to expend calories on keeping warm. Georgian sailors did not have reliably waterproof clothing or warm, dry sleeping quarters; for the below-decks men other than those in the sickbay, there was rarely any source of heat other than the galley fire, which was normally extinguished after dinner was served at midday. In really bad weather it was too dangerous to light that fire at all and they did not even have the comfort of a hot meal or drink.
It is interesting to compare this ration with that of contemporary soldiers: they had slightly more meat (one pound per day rather than six pounds per week), another pint of pease, only one-third of the amount of oatmeal, and either butter or cheese, not both. They received the same daily pound of bread or biscuit, or flour in lieu (which conjures up a picture of boy scouts cooking flour and water ‘dampers’ moulded round a stick over a camp fire). Alcohol seems to have been issued as and when it was available; in the West Indies and North America during the American War of Independence, what had started as an issue of rum as a reward for hard duties became a normal ration of one-third of a pint per day, justified as being necessary to purify the water.5 In Wellingtons Peninsula campaign, wine was drunk when available. Beer, unless found in towns en route, was not a practical drink for armies on the move; it would not tolerate long-distance land transportation over bad roads and armies rarely had the transport facilities to spare for bulky liquids. Unfortunately they also rarely had adequate transport facilities for the official food ration and in many campaigns the troops went short of food unless they could forage it along the way. This is one advantage of being a sailor: you may stand a risk of drowning but you do carry your provisions with you on the ship rather than having them trail far behind on an ox-cart or pack mule.
We should also consider the diet of the land-bound civilian worker in Georgian England. This is rather poorly documented, but social historians have tended to believe it was somewhat restricted, stating that ‘the unskilled labourer in the towns and the agricultural labourer in the country lived chiefly on bread, cheese, small beer, with meat, perhaps, once a week’.6 This statement should, however, be taken with some scepticism; such labourers, like seamen, expended a lot of physical effort in their work and needed calories to do it. Their intake may have been restricted in variety, but it could not have been skimpy. Nor does the fact that they earned low wages and lacked cooking facilities at home mean they did not eat meat. Meat comes in many cheaper forms than slabs of skeletal muscle: sausages made of blood and oatmeal (black pudding) or tripe and chitterlings (white pudding), cows’ heels or pigs’ feet, haslet or brawn, can all be eaten cold and are just as nutritious as a slice off the joint.
Before we look at the naval foodstuffs in detail, it is worth emphasising that what we are discussing here is the official diet of the Royal Navy, not that of merchant seamen. There is often some confusion among lay people about the status of what has come to be known as ‘the merchant navy’; this term gives the impression that there is a separate merchant service run by some government organisation akin to the Admiralty, but this is not the case. No such organisation exists or has ever existed, which means that there was nothing to ensure that merchant seamen were properly fed or watered until 1844 when legislation on victuals began, firstly relating to drinking water, then to the provision of antiscorbutics, then, in 1867, making recommendations (not legal requirements) on the quality and quantity of food. But even then, without trade unions to help, there was little a merchant seaman could do, short of the impracticable method of taking the owners to court. Their employers were, for the most part, small shipowners operating on small budgets; some of these owners, or the masters they employed, chose to save money by skimping on the seamen’s food. It was not universally bad: some seamen ate very well – one merchant master wrote to his owners about a seaman who was proving expensive to feed because he would eat several pounds of meat at a sitting, which implies that the meat was always there on the table to be eaten.7 On the other hand there are many reports of small portions, the best cuts of meat going to the master and mates, casks full of rubbish and so on. It was probably the merchant service which produced most of the stories of bad food. Many of the others came from very long early voyages, such as that reported by Antonio Pigafetta who sailed round the world with Magellan in 1520, or from the fertile imaginations of novelists such as Smollett, which were then repeated by naïve writers such as John Masefield, who was in his early twenties when he wrote Sea Life in Nelson’s Time. Many of the stories he repeats in this book smack of an ancient mariner getting more and more outrageous as the grog went down, and of course they nicely reinforced the late Victorian sense of superiority over their forebears.
Such stories may make good blood-curdling reading, but they are not a true representation of the facts. As we shall see later, by the mid-1790s, the Admiralty, through the Victualling Board, had systems in place to ensure that the food provided for naval seamen was both good and plentiful, and that it was issued with scrupulous fairness.
It is at this point that the Spithead Mutiny of 1797 is often advanced as evidence that the food was not good and plentiful. This idea comes from one of the subsidiary requests from the mutineers ‘that our provisions be raised to the weight of sixteen ounces to the pound and of a better quality [and] there be a sufficient quantity of vegetables…’. Some writers suggest that the provisions were a major cause of the mutiny but this is not so; they were an additional thought on the lines of ‘while we’re about it, let’s get all our other grievances sorted out’.8 The real cause of the mutiny was the inadequacies of naval pay. This had not been increased since 1653 despite inflation and steady increases in the rates of pay for merchant seamen, and to further inflame the sailors’ sense of injustice, the army had been given a pay rise. The mutineers’ timing was immaculate: a high percentage of the Channel Fleet was at Spithead and joined the mutiny, this being at a time when fear of invasion from France was high. The mutiny continued for several weeks, after which the government was ready to accede to almost any demands to get the fleet back to sea; they increased the pay by some 23 per cent and instructed the pursers to issue the full amount of victuals. But as far as victuals were concerned, the only difference that can be directly attributed to the mutiny was the quantity issued. The Physician of the Fleet, Dr Thomas Trotter, had been campaigning for a general issue of vegetables for some time before the mutiny and they were already being sent out to the squadrons blockading Brest; indeed, they had also been provided for the fleets blockading Brest and Quiberon Bay between 1757 and 1762. As far as the quality was concerned, Charles Middleton (later Lord Barham), Comptroller of the Navy Board, had been working on improving the quality of victuals since 1781. He proposed that quality should be monitored by retaining random samples for inspection after twelve months. This not only put the onus on the contractors to provide good quality, but also freed those contractors of potential blame for deterioration due to poor storage or other problems caused after they had made their deliveries.9
The matter of provisions being ‘raised to the weight of sixteen ounces to the pound’ was due to the practice of pursers issuing rations at a rate of seven-eighths of the stated amounts, which gave rise to the expression ‘a pursers’ pound’, meaning fourteen ounces. This is often presented as a deliberate bit of chicanery by crooked pursers seeking to line their pockets at the expense of the long-suffering sailors, but it was nothing of the sort. As the Victualling Board knew full well, dispensing food from bulk and the various accidents that could happen on board was bound to lead to some wastage; the purser’s eighth was an officially-recognised buffer to allow him to balance his accounts. This is evidenced by their issuing a new set of weights two each purser, the old weights obviously having given short weight. As we shall see later when we look in depth at the pursers’ business, when the ration was ‘increased’ after the mutiny, the Victualling Board found another way to compensate the pursers for their wastage losses. Did pursers in general take advantage of the seamen by keeping them short of food? Some might have done, but given the situation of a ship full of dark nooks where aggrieved seamen could lurk with a belaying pin, it is unlikely to have been a general practice. Even without resorting to this sort of thing, the seamen had a mechanism for complaining about food, as for other complaints, and could take these complaints as far as their commander-in-chief if necessary.
Groups of men with little else to do will often complain about the food; it is only when other things are wrong that they do more than complain. Unfairness over food was one of the grievances on Bounty in 1788 but it took a lot more before they were ready to rebel on the grand scale.10 There has been a more recent case, known to the historians at the Admiralty Library as ‘the great mashed potato mutiny’. At Singapore in 1945 the crew of the landing ship Northway were served badly-prepared reconstituted mashed potato after some had spent the morning peeling real potatoes (it transpired that the cooks had managed to burn these). This was the trigger to down tools and refuse orders to fall in, but again this single incident was not the sole cause, having been preceded by some weeks of complaints about the food in general. A court martial followed and various members of the crew were found guilty, the ringleader receiving five years penal servitude and the others minor punishments, mostly suspended detentions.11
There have been other minor mutinies related to bad beer, but in general they are very rare. This indicates pretty strongly that although the men might have enjoyed chilling the marrow of gullible civilians with stories of awful food, the reality was rather different.