AS WE HAVE SEEN, the navy had a laid-down scale of victualling, but that rather bald table does not tell even half the story. It is worth considering each item, or ‘species’ as they called it, to examine exactly what it was and where it came from. Things that could go wrong and how this was dealt with are discussed in Chapter 3, as are the logistics of loading, handling and stowing. The detail of issuing and cooking the food and how and when it was eaten are discussed in Chapters 4 and 5.
The staple item of the seaman’s diet was a daily pound of bread or biscuit. To a certain extent the two words were used to mean the same thing; when they meant bread in loaf form, they called it ‘soft bread’. For the general below-decks population, this was only available when in port, or (assuming there was someone on board capable of baking it) when they were in the sickbay. When Gibraltar was stationed in Naples harbour for long periods in 1803 and 1804, the master’s log shows that she received a daily delivery of 600 ‘soft’ loaves; when a delivery was missed (perhaps due to a Saint’s day) they had a double delivery on the day before or after. Since there were about 600 men on board, this suggests that each loaf weighed one pound; there is no indication of whether this bread was white or wholemeal.1
In England, bread production was subject to legislation which covered the weight of loaves, the type of flour used and how loaves were to be marked. Those made of ‘fine white’ flour (actually a pale cream colour) was the most expensive, as this flour had to be ‘bolted’ (sieved) through fine cloth and thus was more time-consuming and difficult to produce; loaves made from this flour had to be marked with a ‘W’ The next type was ‘standard wheaten’ bread, marked ‘SW’ which is more or less what we call wholemeal today, except that this meal could contain quite large pieces of grain. The cheapest and lowest quality bread, made with seconds flour, was called ‘household’ bread and was marked ‘H’. The most popular was the white loaf; this popularity lead to unscrupulous bakers adding alum, which improved the texture of a loaf made from inferior flour as well as improving the colour. The naval surgeon turned novelist Tobias Smollett was quick to join other alarmists in stating that chalk or bonemeal was used, but this is unlikely as these additives would have spoiled the texture of the loaves and reduced their size.
Other unofficial additions were flour from cheaper grains such as barley or rye, or pea flour, but all of these were dark and thus could only be used with the brown flours. They would also, since they contain less gluten than wheat, make for a poorly textured loaf. However, when bad harvests caused steep price rises, these and other things were added to wheat flour. The Board of Agriculture did conduct experiments with buckwheat, maize, oats, chestnuts, turnips and potatoes. More specifically, between 1793 and 1800 and in 1809 the Victualling Board experimented with mixtures of wheat, molasses and potato, or wheat, molasses and barley; of the two, the captains whose crews had eaten them reported that the first type was preferred but that it looked and tasted rather like gingerbread.2 The author has made the same experiments: buckwheat flour and cooked mashed potato do make quite good light bread if added to wheat flour in the proportion of three parts wheat to one part buckwheat/potato; the other items make a dense heavy bread which is tolerable when fresh but tends to go green and hairy after three or four days. Turnip or swede bread is acceptable on the day of baking but then takes on an unpleasant ‘cabbage water’ flavour. Bread made of good wheat flour alone will keep in a sealed container for up to ten days.
Given all of the above, it is not surprising that the Royal Navy preferred biscuit to bread. Biscuit would keep for many months, it came in handy pieces, and because it did not require any form of leaven it did not need any great skill to make and it could be made in large quantities more quickly than the equivalent weight of soft bread. And the ingredients were simplicity itself: flour, water, a minimal amount of salt. The method was equally simple: water was added to flour, it was mixed, kneaded until smooth, rolled, cut, stamped with the broad arrow (affectionately known as the ‘crow’s foot’) which marked it as Crown property, baked, cooled and packed.3 This process required no great degree of knowledge or careful temperature control, both of which were essential for the methods of bread-making used at the time. For bread the flour was put in a trough, a hollow was made in it, and leaven and some of the water was added. It then had to be left for an hour or more while it fermented, before the rest of the water was added and mixed in. It was then kneaded, left to rise for an hour or so, kneaded again, cut up and shaped, left to rise again and finally baked. This whole process meant more space, more time, and, because it was essential that the dough had to be in a certain condition at its various stages, it also required trained bakers who could recognise when the dough was ready to work with.
It should be explained that the forms of leaven available at that time were not as dependable as they are now. Some yeasts were available from the brewing industry but since, as we will see below, brewing was a seasonal activity, fresh yeast was not always on hand; dried forms of yeast were not developed until well into the nineteenth century.4 The alternative was what we now know as ‘sour-dough starters’; these are retained amounts of risen dough which are added to new flour and water and then work by feeding on the new flour. This process takes longer than using yeast, and requires an even more skilled eye than does yeast-raised dough.
Some of the biscuit was bought from outside contractors, some was made by the Victualling Board at its depots in Deptford, Portsmouth and Plymouth, and later in some of its victualling yards abroad.5 They were made of wholemeal, some of the surviving specimens containing quite large pieces of recognisable wheat grains. The contracts for outside bakers stated that the biscuits should ‘weigh not less than five to the pound’ (ie at least 3.2 ounces or 91 grams each) and that they should be packed in bags of a hundredweight. The shape was not specified and they could be square, round or octagonal, usually pricked with holes and with the broad arrow and a letter designating the bakery stamped in the middle. This compressed the dough, making the middle even harder than the rest; eaters tended to leave this hard piece until last, designating them ‘pursers’ nuts’.
It was almost impossible to bite into these biscuits without first soaking them. The normal technique was to break bits off on the edge of the table, or to use a hard object to crush them, having first wrapped them in a piece of cloth to avoid explosive dispersal. These pieces could be sucked and chewed, or added to soup or gravy. Despite their hardness, these biscuits were tasty enough. It was when they became damp that the taste deteriorated and the livestock moved in. The secret of keeping the biscuit dry and sweet was to pack it in airtight boxes; the Dutch knew this as early as the seventeenth century. American sailors knew it too, but somehow the message did not get through to the British Admiralty until well into the nineteenth century. Captain Basil Hall, writing of his experiences during the War of 1812, remarked on this: American biscuit, he said, was tasty and good quality and he attributed this to their practice of keeping it sealed up until needed, whereas the British practice was to ventilate the bread room in fine weather with the aid of wind-sails which funnelled air down from above. Unfortunately in warm weather this air was warm and moist while the cellar-like bread room was cold; the biscuit absorbed this damp air and the process of deterioration started.6
When the bread ran short, or had deteriorated beyond the eatable stage, the standard substitute was rice, issued on an equal-weight basis: one pound of uncooked rice was considered by the Victualling Board to be equal to one pound of biscuit. Since it was only ever referred to as ‘rice’, we do not know whether this rice was brown or the polished white version.
The meat ration, as shown in the table on page 10, seems straightforward: beef twice a week and pork twice a week, but the true situation was rather more complex. Far from land, both the beef and the pork would be salted, and as long as there were adequate stocks of both, the ration would be one pound of salt pork on two days and, theoretically, two pounds of salt beef on two days. However, the Regulations state: ‘For the better preservation of the health of the seamen, it is ordered, that one day in every week there shall be issued out to them a proportion of flour and suet in lieu of beef…’ and it goes on to say that they were also to be supplied with canvas for pudding bags.7 This seems to suggest that on one day a week dinner consisted of suet pudding and no meat, but this is unlikely. What probably happened was that half of each mess opted for flour and suet one day while the other half opted for beef, then the process was reversed on the other beef day, so each beef day consisted of one pound of beef with suet pudding for each man. The official substitution rate was four pounds of flour, or three pounds of flour and one pound of raisins, being equal to four pounds of beef, and half a pound of suet being equal to one pound of raisins. The normal ratio for suet puddings or dumplings is, to quote the pastry cooks mantra, ‘half fat to flour’. Fat, for either puddings or dumplings, does not have to be suet; beef dripping or the beef fat that rises to the top of the liquid when the meat is boiled will do as well. So although the issue of three pounds of flour and a half-pound of suet would in theory leave a spare two pounds of flour, there was scope for obtaining other fat for puddings as well as using the flour in other ways.
Pork, as far as the crew were concerned, usually meant salt pork. Officers might, and often did, keep pigs on board and there was theoretically no reason why some of the men should not, with the captain’s permission, have done the same, but the only record of this being allowed serves to demonstrate the problems attached. In 1780 Thomas Pasley in the Sibyl (28) was en route to the Cape of Good Hope to collect a convoy of Indiamen and he stopped at the Cape Verde islands for water. He found there was plenty of food to be bought and allowed his men to buy what they wanted; he remarked that few of the messes did not buy ‘three or four pigs, as many goats and half a dozen fowls’. Then a couple of days later they sailed and he commented that the ship was absolutely full of hogs and goats and resolved that he would have to order the hogs to be killed first, as the goats made much less mess. A little reflection allows one to calculate that a 28-gun frigate would have somewhere in the region of 30 messes and thus over 100 pigs and the same number of goats on board.8
As the table shows, pork was issued with pease and as far as the Victualling Board was concerned, it always was; the substitution of fresh meat was on the basis of three pounds of fresh meat being equivalent to ‘a two-pound piece of Salt Pork with Pease’.9 Pork of any sort is an unfashionable meat now among the anti-fat brigade and even those who are not fanatical about avoiding fat often express distaste at the idea of salt pork. This is strange: what are ham, gammon and bacon if not salted pork meat? And what of the popular French dish petit sale? Beef might also be salted and here again some modern people do not like the idea, but it is, in many forms, a classic dish: British boiled beef and carrots, New England boiled dinner, Jewish hot salt beef sandwiches, pastrami, and corned beef (so-called because it was preserved with large grains or ‘corns’ of salt). These are the modern equivalents of what Georgian sailors were eating.
Salt meat, classed with butter as ‘wet’ provisions (‘dry’ being cereals and pease), came either ready-packed from contractors or arrived on the hoof at the British victualling yards, to be slaughtered and salted-down there. A very high proportion of the pre-packed meat came from Ireland and most of that from ‘the ox-slaying city of Cork’, the ‘slaughter-house of Ireland’; the rest came from the adjacent cities of Limerick and Waterford. The wet provisioners of Cork were proud of their reputation for quality; in 1769 they had formed a committee and established a grading system to enable high standards to be set and maintained.10 In both Ireland and England, the cattle travelled long distances to the great autumn cattle fairs, modern estimates suggesting that somewhere in the region of 80,000 cattle changed hands each year at the London fairs alone. Some of the cattle sold at Barnet Fair (north of London) had started their journey in Anglesey, swimming the Menai Straits and walking on shod hooves along the drove roads to their destinations.11 You can still see evidence of these routes in parts of England, where the modern road has very wide grass verges.
The killing season began in the autumn and carried on through the winter, partly because meat killed and packed in cool weather keeps better than that prepared when it is warm and partly because the difficulty of feeding cattle through the winter months meant that farmers did not want to keep them. It was not until after the end of the Napoleonic Wars that the practice of growing turnips and other roots for winter feed was generally adopted. The temperature at killing time was even more critical for pigs, so that season started a good month later than for cattle. Pigs, like cattle, were driven to market but over much shorter distances; they lose weight quickly and, being rather more intelligent than cattle, are much more troublesome to control. Since pig-fattening was a more intensive activity than cattle-raising, some farmers tended to specialise on a large scale, especially those close to the big cities. These specialist pig-fatteners often fed the pigs on brewers’ grains, the barley which had been used in the brewing and distilling process. It was not long before some laterally-thinking brewers and distillers realised that they could make more money by fattening pigs than by selling the exhausted grain, and they set up fattening sheds next to the breweries. In 1740 there was some discussion between the Victualling Board and the Admiralty about the relative merits of this ‘town-fed’ pork and whether it reduced in weight when cooked more than the ‘country-fed’ version, which finally concluded that there was no difference between the two types. They thought that the ‘town-fed’ version ought to be cheaper and was therefore preferable for that reason.12
The Victualling Board had issued instructions on the cutting and salting of meat as early as 1716, and despite a steady stream of people offering to sell their ‘new, better and secret’ methods of doing this, reissued the same instructions at regular intervals. There is no great secret to salting meat, for the procedure is simple. First you cut the meat into suitable pieces: for the navy this was four pounds for beef, two pounds for pork (or sometimes double that weight, these being referred to as ‘double’ pieces). This task was done by ‘randers’ and ‘messers’ in a sort of production line. Some historians have erroneously changed what they thought was a spelling error, calling the first worker a ‘render’, presumably on the basis that he ‘rends’ the meat, but a rander is one who cuts meat into strips and a messer one who cuts it into smaller pieces. At this point you might wonder how they achieved accuracy, but of course if they did the job continuously they soon acquired the ability to judge weight by hand and eye. No-one expected each piece to weigh exactly the stated weight: the instructions for checking the weight of the contents of a cask say:
And to judge whether the flesh served to His Majesty’s ships holds out in just weight, the following rule is to be observed, viz. Every twenty-eight pieces of beef cut for four pound pieces, taken out of the cask as they rise, and the salt shaken off, are to weigh one hundred pounds avoirdupois, and every fifty-six pieces of pork, cut for two pound pieces, and taken out and shaken in the like manner, are to weigh one hundred and four pounds; and therefore, if, according to this standard, upon the weighing a whole cask of beef or pork, in the presence of two or more of the warrant officers of the ship, there shall be found a deficiency of weight, the captain may order the purser to issue to the seamen so much more beef or pork as shall make up the deficiency;…13
There is another example of the scrupulous fairness of the Victualling Board: being perfectly aware that there are different qualities of meat on a carcass, their master butchers were instructed to cut the prime pieces slightly small and the other pieces slightly large, thus dividing it ‘in the most equitable manner’.14
There must still have been some small pieces left over and one wonders what happened to them – perhaps they were packed into special casks and marked accordingly. Inevitably some of these small pieces went home in the workers’ pockets, a practice which was known and accepted, as long as the pieces were not too large. Small scraps were probably sold to the same people who bought the offal and other by-products such as heads, feet and bones. The contracts for outside suppliers and the instructions for packing meat in the Victualling Board’s own yards stipulated that these were not to be included, nor beef legs or shins. We will see what the Victualling Board did with the shin meat later on.
The meat having been cut up into appropriate pieces, the salting process could begin. Although they would not have been aware of it in these terms at that time, the salting process, having first drawn out much of the water in the meat, combines with the rest and makes it unavailable for bacteria to feed on. Saltpetre (potassium nitrate), which was used at the time, was thought to aid the penetration of the salt and co-incidentally give the meat a uniform pink colour. It also, unfortunately, tends to harden the meat over time; to counteract this, people salting meat for home use often added sugar. The first part of the process was to rub the pieces of meat with the dry salt and saltpetre mix, then lay them in a bin and cover them with more dry salt. As the salt drew out the water from the meat, the resultant brine was drawn off, poured back over the meat and more salt added, this being done twice a day for six days. Then the meat was packed into barrels with more dry salt between the layers and left to stand for several days. This extracted more liquid, so the cask was then turned on its side with the open bung-hole at the bottom and given twenty-four hours to drain, before the bung was replaced and the cask filled with strong brine. The simple test for brine strength was that the meat should float.15
Victualling agents and pursers were instructed to check all meat casks when they were received, to ensure that none of the brine had escaped, topping them up if necessary. Salt meat, when removed from its cask, was wet, which gives the lie to stories of its being hard and glistening with salt crystals. If the brine leaked out, the meat did not dry up, it rotted; there are many reports of meat being condemned as uneatable because the brine had leaked. Once sealed, each cask was marked with the contents and a unique number which enabled its source to be identified if it was sub-standard. Although in theory meat casks were meant to contain a standard number of pieces, entries in logbooks made when the casks were opened show that many did not, some having more pieces than marked, some less.
Although the standard sizes of meat pieces may have been fixed to tally with the number of men in an average mess, they were also of a size which allowed the salt to penetrate right through the meat. With over-large pieces of meat, the salt will not penetrate and the meat will putrefy. This, combined with poor-quality salt and over-large barrels, caused a major fuss in 1804 over a consignment of meat from Russia intended for the navy in the Mediterranean and the army based at Malta. The story starts with St Vincent (now the First Lord of the Admiralty) agreeing with Nicholas Vansittart of the Treasury that it would be a good idea to obtain some provisions from ‘the Russian provinces’, thus helping to cement the relationship with Russia. An agent, one William Eton, was sent to the Black Sea port of Odessa to organise some supplies, including hemp and made-up cordage and sailcloth, and at the same time to make a bulk purchase of wheat, pease and meat. Nelson, who was commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean at this time, was informed and told to arrange for transports to collect the provisions and take them to Malta. For some reason which is not known, Nelson was violently opposed to the idea, or at any rate opposed to Eton, remarking in a letter to William Otway, the naval commissioner at Gibraltar, ‘I never saw Mr Eaton [sic], but my opinion of him was formed some years ago; and from all I hear I have no reason to alter it. He is, as Burke said of a noble Marquis “a giant in promises, a pigmy in performance”,’ and later, ‘I agree perfectly with you respecting Mr Eaton, and we must watch what comes from him; for first samples are, with knowing ones, always the best…’. Elsewhere, he referred to Eton rather rudely as ‘this sort of gentry’ and insisted that when the supplies finally arrived in Malta they should be inspected and tested before acceptance. However, Nelson did not pass up the opportunity to send a lieutenant with the transports to gather trade and military intelligence on the Russian provinces round the Black Sea.
In due course, the first shipload of provisions arrived in Malta, and were inspected and sampled by the masters of three naval ships; the pease and wheat were declared good but the pork, tongues and hogs’ lard were not (there was no mention of beef). Nelson wrote to the Admiralty secretary on the lines of ‘I told you so’ and ordered the agent victualler at Malta to accept the wheat and pease and sell off the meat for whatever it would fetch. Eton, when he heard of this, wrote to excuse himself, explaining that the decision to send him had been delayed to the point where he arrived too late to buy the best of the animals on the hoof; the meat had already been packed, having been cut it into over-large pieces, using inadequate quantities of inferior dirty salt and put into over-large casks. When he had explained and demonstrated the proper way to do it, the local Russian general was, Eton said, so impressed by the results that he wanted Eton to stay and teach the local workers how to do it ‘the English way’. As a result, the next batch would be much better, as long as his instructions to buy were not delayed again.
Eton was also corresponding with Sir John Borlase Warren, who was at that time the British ambassador to Russia at St Petersburg. Some of this correspondence consisted of intelligence reports but most of it concerned his purchases for the navy and his relationship with another agent, Henry Lavage Yeames, who had taken on some of the purchasing task. This relationship soon fell into disarray, each man accusing the other of incompetence, stupidity, cupidity, and generally erratic behaviour. Eton, apparently, made a practice of flying into a violent temper whenever crossed: ‘…his conduct,’ said Yeames, ‘has been uniformly as if he intended to destroy the British credit here’. Both agents sent detailed memoranda to Warren, pleading for his intervention, and in Eton’s case, also pleading for those instructions to buy more supplies.
These were not forthcoming. Warren had resigned his post and gone home and the Victualling Board were not pleased with Eton. As well as buying the actual provisions themselves, he had also taken the unauthorised decision to buy ‘the Great Baths at Caffa’ to use as a storehouse; by the time he had had this building repaired, the cost had risen to over £1700. ‘Except for the wheat and pease,’ the Victualling Board wrote to the Admiralty, ‘our judgement is that Mr Eton’s mission to Russia has not been attached with any advantages to the service of this department.’ Even then, the saga was not finished. Russia changed sides and embargoed all British property, including the bathhouse at Caffa and its contents. Then Russia changed sides again, and the Victualling Board, now trying to finalise Eton’s accounts, reported to the Admiralty that the bathhouse had been demolished to make way for other buildings, and its contents had been sent for the use of the Russian navy at Sevastopol, so there seemed no point in keeping Mr Eton’s account open any longer. They owed him £849.17.2¼, but suggested that before they paid him, perhaps they should make sure he did not owe money to any other of the naval departments, or any other government body. The Admiralty agreed, suggesting that since Eton had also purchased cordage and sailcloth, the Navy Board was the first place to check; it seems that Mr Eton’s reputation had caught up with him and he had become generally unpopular everywhere.16
Salt meat was all very well, but fresh beef was thought to be better. It did not have to be steeped to get rid of the salt, and although the stories about aged salt beef being hard enough to carve into snuff boxes were probably exaggerated, there can be no denying that it does become tougher as it ages; this problem does not occur with fresh beef. But the real consideration at the time was that it was thought that salt food caused scurvy, this being one of the reasons for dropping salt fish from the naval ration. Finally, it had become traditional for vegetables to be served with fresh meat when in port, which was obviously popular with the men. Fresh beef was declared to be equal in weight to salt beef, and slightly less so than pork: the rule here was three pounds of fresh beef for two pounds of salt pork with pease. Judging by log reports of receipts of fresh beef when in port, it was served almost every day, at a rate of one pound per man. Gibraltar, with her 600-man complement, received daily deliveries of fresh meat averaging 590 pounds.17 According to William Dillon, when his ship was at Spithead in 1794, it had to be collected from the slaughterhouse early in the morning (often as early as 2am) on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. It was cut into quarters – a piece which can be carried on the shoulder of a strong man – and as Dillon learned to his cost, it was necessary to keep a close eye on it all the time; on one occasion a whole quarter disappeared between the slaughterhouse and the boat.18
The other method of providing fresh beef was to carry live cattle on board ship and slaughter them as needed. This was a common practice and had the advantage of allowing salt provisions to be saved for times when no fresh was available. It may not always be possible to find a port with a supply of salt meat, but if you can get within boat-reach of land you can usually find a merchant or farmer to sell you some cattle (or sheep or pigs); even if you are nominally at war with the country, as long as there is no military presence and you have specie for payment, pragmatism tends to override patriotism. In 1805 Cornwallis’ fleet blockading Brest found that the inhabitants of the islands off Brittany were perfectly happy to sell them live cattle and other fresh provisions.19 Carrying live cattle was only practical on a short-term basis since cattle do not stand up well to long sea journeys, as was found during the American War of Independence when attempts were made to send live cattle across the Atlantic. Of one shipment of 290 cattle, only 105 were still alive on arrival, and the attempt was abandoned as being both impractical and expensive.20
By 1800, most commanders-in-chief were convinced that fresh meat was essential for maintaining the health of the seamen; Nelson was fanatical about it, being firmly convinced that excessive salt was one of the causes of scurvy. When he was in the Baltic in 1801, he had arranged for one of the senior pursers to obtain fresh meat and cattle for his squadron, and when he took over the Mediterranean command in 1803, he took great pains to obtain live beasts. His first attempts to do this by organising supplies himself or through his captains were not entirely successful. His method was to appeal to the consuls at Naples, Barcelona and the Maddalena Islands; although these gentlemen tried, most of these dealings came to nothing, partly due to difficulties of collection and unacceptable prices, partly due to poor communications. In one case, Captain Keats had been in contact with an ex-army officer called Archibald MacNeill in Naples, who offered to supply beasts on a monthly basis starting in September. This offer was accepted and Nelson ordered transports to collect the cattle, but when he heard no more, cancelled the transports. The following January he received a letter from MacNeill saying he had instructed his partner, Warrington, to organise the bullocks, but again there was no further contact until June when a letter arrived from Warrington saying 100 beasts were ready to collect. By this time Nelson had made other arrangements, so he agreed to collect this set of cattle but that was the end of the deal. While all this was going on, Nelson had been using the services of a senior purser to organise supplies of cattle, first from the Barcelona area and then, when the Spanish seemed ready to join Napoleon and declare war against Britain, from the Maddalena Islands at the north end of Sardinia.
These islands had good anchorages and were reasonably close to the main cruising grounds off Toulon. Apart from the times when several ships arrived together at the islands, the procedure was for one of the larger ships, usually a Third Rate, to go off and pick up a substantial number of beasts then distribute them among the squadron on her return.21 When the individual ships only received a few cattle at a time, they seem to have slaughtered them soon after receipt: the log books show ‘received x bullocks’ on one day, and ‘killed x bullocks, weight xxx pounds’ either later on the same day or on the next. When they received larger numbers, they also recorded receipt of ‘fodder’ or ‘hay, then recorded the numbers killed and their weight, a few at a time, over the next week or so. But sometimes they kept them longer, reporting large numbers taken on board over a couple of days, then batches of them being killed over several weeks.
These cattle, with a few exceptions, were bullocks and all were the animals we think of now as cattle (ie, the domestic ‘cow’, Bos taurus). Admiral Pellew, when commander-in-chief in the East Indies, insisted that neither live buffaloes (Bubalus bubalis, the Asian water buffalo) nor their meat were to be accepted; other commanders-in-chief and the Victualling Board itself stated that heifer beef was not acceptable. Even so, a few cows did sneak through the system, usually with a calf at foot. There are several log entries which show this, followed by a report of killing an animal which weighed so little it can only have been the calf; these may have gone to the sickbay. Perhaps the idea was to provide milk but it would have needed a crew member capable of persuading the cow to let down her milk – not always an easy task if she is not used to being milked.
What is noticeable when studying these log reports of killing cattle is the great disparity in weights, beasts producing anything between 140 and 675 pounds of meat. This was not a random thing, but more or less related to where they came from. The lightest mostly came from the Maddalena Islands and Sardinia itself, the heaviest from Italy, especially from Naples. (John James, one of the consuls who had offered to supply cattle from Naples remarked that the average weight of the Calabrian cattle he was offering would be 540 pounds.) Although the weight of a beast is influenced by its age, and what we now call ‘management systems’ (ie where it is kept and how it is fed), these different weight ranges when associated with locations indicate that we are considering different breeds of cattle. It has not been possible to find out exactly what breeds these cattle were but there are modern British equivalents: Herefords are quite large, Dexters are very small.
It is actually incorrect to refer to these Georgian-age cattle as ‘breeds’: strictly speaking, a breed is the product of selective reproduction in controlled conditions, with that breeding recorded in a herd book, something which was not done until later in the nineteenth century. The correct term is a ‘landrace’ (not to be confused with the modern pig breed of that name), a type of animal which has adapted over time to the local conditions. So, given that Sardinia is a mountainous country with sparse grazing, it is not surprising that its cattle would be small, and that countries with flatter areas of good grass, such as southern Italy, would have larger cattle. Another consideration is that goods tend to be moved around mountains by agile pack animals such as mules, and in flatter terrain on carts drawn by placid traction animals such as neutered cattle, which are also in demand for ploughing. These tasks require not only placidity but strength, which means they must be large and carry a lot of muscle. Examples of what are now known as ‘traction cattle’ include Charolais, Simmenthal and the enormous Italian Chianina. How these cattle, and the sheep which accompanied them, were kept on board, despatched and butchered, will be discussed in Chapter 3.
Although mutton was listed as a substitute meat (three pounds of mutton being equal to four pounds of salt beef or two pounds of pork with pease), no examples of it being received have been found by the author, other than in the form of live ‘sheep for the sick’. We do not know exactly what was meant by the term ‘sheep’. Although there was a type of mouflon in Sardinia and Corsica (Ovis musimon), these would not have been domesticated and the sheep bought by the navy would thus have been the local landrace of the domestic sheep (Ovis aries), and probably mature animals. The concept of a one-year-old lamb being raised for its meat is a modern one: sheep, then, were too valuable as producers of wool or milk and cheese to kill them at the ‘young, tender and easily digested’ stage. Milk-fed or sucking lambs were an Easter delicacy on the continent but these would mostly have been males of the milk breeds, which carry very little wool; milk-fed lamb was rarely eaten in England where the sheep were mostly wool breeds. So a sheep for meat would be a mature animal and its meat would be the gamey mutton, not the more easily-digested meat of a juvenile. Although mutton broth was thought to be a good restorative for the sick, it is hard to see how it would have been any better than beef broth.
Mutton was considered suitable for the sick at that time because it had properties which served to balance the ‘humours’, and it continued to be popular as food for the sick well into the nineteenth century. However, another possible explanation is that provisions for the sick had to be accounted for separately. It would have been easier to charge a single purchase of sheep to the sickbay than a series of small amounts of beef. Even more likely, though, is the comparative ease of keeping a small flock of live sheep on board against a number of bullocks, even allowing for the fact well-known to farmers that sheep only have one ambition in life, and that is to find a reasonable excuse to die! Even allowing for this propensity, live sheep meant an ongoing supply of fresh meat for the sick instead of the less desirable salt version.
Although lamb is sometimes salted in Norway, making a product called fenalår, this is exceptional; neither lamb nor mutton seem to be salted elsewhere, either for nautical or land-bound use. This may be related to the small size of the animal, but is more likely because sheep meat has a higher water and fat content than beef and thus penetration of the salt into the tissues could be slowed down to an extent which could allow the centre to rot before the salt reached it. To embark on a major operation such as salting-down large quantities of meat, you have to be sure it will work well.
Salting was not the only method of preserving meat. In the 1660s, Robert Boyle described his successful experiments in preserving cooked meat in butter. The meat was roasted, cut up and packed into a cask and melted butter was poured in to fill all the airspaces. He claimed that it kept well for over six months, even in the hot voyages to the East Indies. This is more or less the same method as used for making the French delicacy confit de canard (or d’oie), where the thighs of duck or geese are cooked and preserved in their own fat. The British version of this is ‘potted’ meat, which had become so popular in the eighteenth century that a subset of the pottery industry developed to supply the pots. However, those pots were quite small and not practicable for large-scale supplies, although no doubt many officers brought them to sea with their private stores. The principle of hermetic sealing with fat eventually developed into the method using glass jars which the British call bottling and Americans canning. Glass was not a practicality for general ships’ victualling on a large scale, but the idea of canning eventually developed and transformed the whole business of victualling.
Chickens were kept on most ships, where they supplied eggs for the officers and the sick until they went off lay and were eaten. Officers also brought cockerels, clucks and even geese to sea, but rarely turkeys, which are not the easiest of birds to keep alive in cold, damp conditions. The seamen were, however, not averse to eating any migrating birds which were rash enough to rest within grabbing distance; some of them would ‘fish’ for albatrosses or other sea birds with a baited hook on a fine line.
And sometimes, on special occasions, an indulgent captain might treat them to a feast. Basil Hall did this for Christmas in 1815, when he was fitting out the sloop Lyra at Deptford, buying one goose and one turkey for each mess at Leadenhall market. All went well until after dinner, when one of the crew could not resist showing off to the crew of an adjacent ship, asking them how many geese and turkeys they had eaten that day. ‘None’ said the others, and ‘Look at that and weep, you hungry-faced rascals!’ said the sailor, waving a drumstick in each hand. This was too much to bear; the drumsticks were pulled out of his hands and flung in his face and a general melee ensued.
The following year, the ship was in the Canton river alongside several Indiamen, and Halls steward reported that the main topic of conversation below was Christmas dinner and the fact that there were plenty of chickens, ducks and geese in the nearby village. Hall felt that it would be unkind to deprive the men of such a treat and agreed that the poultry could be bought. He thought no more of it until dawn on Christmas morning when a tremendous racket broke out, bringing on deck not only Hall but the crews of all the Indiamen. Hall’s crew had taken the poultry aloft during the night, tied their feet to the yards, cross-trees, gaff and jib-boom on six-feet long pieces of twine and then sat there with them, trying to keep them quiet (and getting scratched and bitten in the process). When the sun came up, the birds were dropped, setting up a screaming, quacking, cackling and flapping, accompanied by yells from the men, to draw the envious attention of all viewers. Hall does not report whether a general scrap resulted this time!
Butter- and cheese-making were, like meat-packing, seasonal activities, the difference being that these were spring and summer tasks, when the new grass and the newly-calved cows produced the most milk. Yet, although they both started as milk, as far as the navy was concerned most of the butter came from Ireland while all of the cheese came from England. For many decades the cheese favoured by the Victualling Board was the hard Suffolk cheese, which, being made from skim milk, was cheaper than the full-fat versions from Cheshire or Cheddar. Suffolk cheese kept a long time but even at its best it was not popular – hard enough to start with, it became harder with keeping and there are stories of it being carved into buttons. Badly or hastily made, it became either too hard to eat or turned soft, went bad, stank, and became infested with long red worms (Eisenia foetida). During the Seven Years’ War the urgent demand for naval provisions led the Suffolk cheese-makers to cut the necessary curing time and the complaints about this cheese became so common and so bitter that in 1758 the Victualling Board more or less abandoned Suffolk cheese and turned instead to Cheshire, Cheddar, Gloucester or Warwickshire cheese. Although more costly and not so long-keeping, these cheeses immediately reduced the level of complaints, although they were issued on the basis of two-thirds of a pound of Cheshire being equal to one pound of Suffolk. For shipboard purposes, these would be whole cheeses, wrapped in the tough muslin-like fabric called cheesecloth. Packed in barrels until needed, they were then kept in shaped racks in the steward’s room. The individual cheeses weighed between twelve and thirty-seven pounds, depending on the place of manufacture, the smallest being from Gloucester and the largest from Cheshire. They were stored in casks until 1799, then kept in shaped racks in the bread room.22
Fully aware of the comparatively short ‘shelf-life’ of cheese and butter, the Victualling Board introduced two rules: one for the suppliers which said that if any of a batch of these products did not stay good for six months, they would not be paid for any of it and would have to remove the remainder from the stores at their own expense; and another to ships’ pursers which required them to issue all their stocks within three months of receiving them, failing which they would receive no credit for the unused portion.23
Bad cheese rotted and stank, while bad butter became liquid and rancid. This was partly due to the difficulty of keeping it sufficiently cool, but mainly due to inadequate care in manufacture. To make butter, you start by leaving milk, which is an emulsion of fat and water, to stand so that the cream rises, then put the cream in a churn and agitate it so that the fat globules separate from the water and adhere to each other. In time, the fat becomes a solid mass separate from the watery liquid now called buttermilk. However, droplets of this buttermilk will be trapped within the mass of butter and these must be removed by a process of washing and working it with paddles. It is this watery buttermilk content which makes the butter rancid. It is impossible to get it all out and so all butter will go off eventually, but if too much buttermilk is left in or the butter is handled by dirty hands or paddles, it goes rancid even more quickly. Adding salt to butter helps retard the process; almost all butter made in England and Ireland was salted to help it keep. One process which does extend the keeping quality of butter is to heat it gently until the last of the buttermilk separates and sinks to the bottom. The fat can then be poured off and left to set; this is known as clarified butter or, in India, ghee. The East India Company’s personnel must have been aware of this, but the concept does not seem to have worked its way back to Britain and the Victualling Board.
Unlike rotten cheese, which was good for nothing, there were uses for rancid butter. Whether or not it was still within the allowed date when found to be bad, if the boatswain did not want it for lubrication purposes, it was to be returned to the victualling stores and then sold. Although some of this was no doubt bought for land-bound lubrication tasks, some of it may have gone to butter cleaners’ who washed it in fresh water to remove the salt and the smell, then washed it again with fresh milk and finally worked it back into a product which could be sold to the unsuspecting as ‘fresh’ butter. This practice was mostly carried out in London; in Ireland, where they took butter-making very seriously, the butter industry was subject to strict legislation, one section of which forbade mixing old butter with new.24 Whether produced in England or Ireland, the standard practice was to pack butter in 56-pound firkins.
There were various official substitutes for butter and cheese. For one pound of cheese, these were one pound of rice, one pound of sugar, half a pint of oil, half a pound of cocoa, or a quarter of a pound of tea. For one pound of butter, the substitutes were one pound of sugar or one pint of oil. The type of oil is not specified, but at that time and given that ships going to the Mediterranean were not supplied with oil, the purser having to buy it there, it can have been none other than olive oil.
Butter and cheese were issued on the same day as oatmeal and sugar, on the three meatless or ‘Banyan’ days. There was, of course, the usual pound of biscuit, so if no meat had been saved, the cheese was probably eaten with the biscuit, as the butter might have been. On the other hand, the butter might, as with the sugar, been added to the cooked oatmeal, turning it into a dish of ‘buttered groats’. Quite how the oil was eaten, we can only guess. Soft bread dipped in oil will absorb quite a lot and is a common snack in Mediterranean basin countries to this day, but biscuit will not absorb oil like this. Smollett’s novel Roderick Random describes a dish of hot pease with oil and chopped onion mixed in; it could also have been used as a dressing for cold or raw vegetables. Oil might also have been added to soup, or, with the co-operation of the cook, used as a frying medium for fish, onions or pieces of meat.
Added as an afterthought to the official list, half a pint of vinegar was issued once a week, but whether it was wine or malt vinegar is not specified. As with the oil, it could be used as a condiment or even, when circumstances permitted, used to make simple pickles. On a large scale (not from the seamen’s issue) it was used as a disinfectant about the ship; the seamen might have used some of theirs to deter vermin and sweeten their mess areas, just as before the introduction of modern cleansing agents housewives used it to wipe out fridges and cupboards.
Pease, meaning the hard dried pease which were one of the staple foods of the time on land as at sea, come in two forms. The oldest, the Carlin pea (Pisum sativum ssp arvense), is a small, dark brown pea which is still traditionally eaten during Lent in some north-eastern counties of England. Also known as grey peas, these are a sub-species of the green garden pea which we mostly buy in its frozen form today (P. sativum ssp sativum). By Georgian times, this earlier pea had been replaced for most purposes, including naval victualling, by the mature form of the garden pea. For those who wonder if the term ‘pease’ means the dried form while ‘pea’ means the soft fresh form of this vegetable, it should be explained that the modern spelling is just that: a modern way of spelling the old word; here we will continue to use the old form unless the fresh version is meant.
Dried pease are either whole, green and wrinkled (still in their skins), or yellow, ‘split’ (ie separated into their two halves), unwrinkled and skinless. The whole green variety take a lot longer to soften and cook; they really need overnight soaking as well as several hours of cooking. Yellow peas are more accommodating: they can be cooked in a pudding bag, in which case they will swell and form a mass which is soft enough to eat with a spoon when hot and sets into a solid cake when cold, which can then be sliced and eaten in the hand. If boiled loose in plenty of water, they will break down into an unctuous thick warming soup; this soup is traditionally enhanced by adding pieces of pork or ham.
There is some dispute about whether the pease used by the navy during Nelson’s period were whole or split. An editorial note in James Anthony Gardner’s recollections remarks that at that time pease were issued whole, and that split peas were not issued until ‘about 1856’.25 What they mean by ‘about 1856’ is that the Admiralty circular was issued in that year and said that once the existing stocks of whole peas were used, split pease would be supplied instead.26 However, this is not to say that split pease were never used before that date; although the author has been unable to find any conclusive evidence either way, given the Victualling Board’s propensity to choose the cheapest option every time, it is quite possible that split pease were used earlier than 1856.
Whether whole or split, these pease mostly came from East Anglia, either grown there or imported from the Baltic countries through the port of Yarmouth. Pease are a crop of northern climes; ships on stations further south substituted the local dried pulse. In the Mediterranean or the West Indies it was ‘calavances’, a type of haricot bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) also known as the French, canellini or navy bean; sometimes chick peas (Cicer arietinum) might have been substituted. In the East Indies the substitute was referred to as ‘dholl’, which equates to the modern spelling of dhal or dal; this could be anything from split chick peas to the larger forms of lentils (Lens esculenta), some of which are very much like the yellow pea. All these were issued weight for weight for pease. There is just one problem attached to these assorted pulses: they have an unfortunate effect on the intestinal system, which cannot have improved the atmosphere below decks. However, for those of a competitive nature and a robust sense of humour this probably had some entertainment value!
This also came from East Anglia or the Baltic, and was a coarser version of the ‘porridge’ oats we use today. It was mainly used to make porridge or ‘burgoo’ and eaten for breakfast with some form of sweetening, either sugar or molasses. Nelson got into a terrible tizzy about this sweetening in the Mediterranean when Victory’s captain, Hardy, wrote him a formal letter in September 1804 stating that there had been no molasses in the ship since the previous June, and requesting that since there had not been an additional issue of oatmeal to make up for this, the men should be paid for the missing molasses as ‘savings of provisions’. Nelson sent a copy of this letter to the Admiralty with his own covering letter, remarking that he thought the men should be paid for the daily allowance of oatmeal when there was no molasses to go with it, ‘as it was found that generally a man could not get a pint of dry Oatmeal down his throat’. Could there not be a supply of cocoa or tea sent in lieu of molasses, as had been the case when he was in the West Indies, or at least sugar, he asked. These two letters were passed from the Admiralty to the Victualling Board, whose response was on the lines of ‘What is he talking about?’ They never had tea or cocoa as a substitute for molasses in the West Indies, and anyway, no-one was expected to eat dry oatmeal, since it was always made into porridge in a big batch by the ship’s cook; furthermore, the issue of oatmeal was a pint every two days, not a pint a day.27
It would have been surprising if there had been any need to find substitutes for molasses in the West Indies, where it came from; unless this was a piece of heavy sarcasm, Nelson’s memory was at fault here, as was his knowledge of breakfast below decks. He may have been confused by the situation of substitutes for the oatmeal: one pound of sugar for two quarts of oatmeal, or five and three-quarters pounds of molasses for one gallon of oatmeal. These substitutes may have been another situation like that of suet and flour as a substitute for beef, where a sweet-toothed mess could juggle the individuals’ issues to benefit all. The other possible substitutes for oatmeal were wheat or ‘pot’ barley (a version of the grain which has some of its hull removed, but not as much as does modern ‘pearl’ barley); these were substituted on an equal weight basis and both were boiled and sweetened to make an acceptable substitute for oatmeal porridge, rather like the Medieval dish frumenty.
Oatmeal was never terribly popular with English sailors. Jeffrey de Raigersfeld reported that when operating in the Shetland Islands during an oatmeal shortage, his men were nothing loath to trade their oatmeal with the islanders for eggs and poultry.28 Eventually the Victualling Board recognised this and the thrice-weekly issue of oatmeal was halved and two ounces of sugar issued instead.
Used as a substitute item (one pound of rice for one pound of bread or cheese, one pint of pease or a quart of oatmeal), rice was the standard breakfast dish for the men on the East Indies station, either boiled dry or served slightly wet and known as ‘congee’. (The officers usually had theirs in the form of curry.) Elsewhere it was little known until 1795, when a series of particularly bad harvests led to a wheat famine and the East India Company brought several shiploads of rice back from India. Although in fashionable circles it became patriotic to eat rice, it was never very popular with sailors.29
The only officially-listed fruit was the dried raisins issued as part of the substitute for salt beef. Raisins are, of course, dried black grapes, traditionally muscatel grapes from Malaga; they could themselves be substituted by half their weight of currants, another form of dried grape whose name is a corruption of ‘raisins from Corinth’. On the East Indies station, the dried grape was called ‘kismish’, which is presumably the same thing as the modern kishmish sultana made from the green ‘Thompson seedless’ grape. There are, of course, many other forms of dried fruit which the men would have bought for themselves whenever opportunity allowed.
Nelson and other officers who accepted the idea that citrus fruit were good antiscorbutics would direct their pursers to buy lemons and oranges for the crews when the opportunity occurred. The logs of many of the ships on the Mediterranean station, under various commanders-in-chief including Nelson, show frequent purchases of lemons or oranges, either in small batches for their own ship or in larger quantities to share out among the rest of the fleet.
Like citrus fruit, vegetables were something which pursers bought for their ships when opportunity permitted; they could also obtain them from victualling yards. It had been traditional to do this long before the Spithead mutineers expressed their desire for vegetables in 1797; in the Additional Regulations and Instructions published with the 1790 edition of the Regulations and Instructions a clause remarked that it had long been the practice of pursers, when fresh meat was served, to include ‘such a quantity of greens and roots to … give sufficient satisfaction to the men …’.30
Other than the numerous log entries which just say ‘vegetables’, the most commonly mentioned are cabbages and onions. Nelson in particular was convinced that onions were health-giving, remarking in a letter, ‘I find onions are the best thing that can be given to seamen.’31 Leeks are also frequently mentioned, these entries being late in the winter when onions would no longer be available. An interesting point about the onions is that these were, as often as not and even when bought in large quantities, described by number rather than weight or bagsful: Gibraltar received 300 onions every day while stationed in Naples harbour, and 6000 the day before she left; other ships received 2400 or 3000. Given the Victualling Board propensity for nit-picking over precise accounting, it is likely that these numbers were exact, not guesses, and indeed these sorts of numbers occur again and again, in different ships at different places. As one cannot see the lieutenants or masters who were responsible for these log entries actually counting loose onions, these consistent figures suggest that onions traditionally came in strings of a certain number: twenty-five or thirty perhaps. The cabbages also came by number, but a cabbage is much larger than an onion and smaller numbers were involved: Gibraltar at Naples received eighteen each day. Sometimes, rather than cabbages, the description ‘greens’ is used, either as a single description or sometimes ‘x bunches of greens’. This probably meant kale (Brassica oleracea convar. acephela) or the type of loose-headed cabbage known in America as ‘collard greens’ (‘collard’ being a corruption of ‘kale’).
In the Mediterranean, another frequent purchase was pumpkins. The nomenclature of this class of the cucurbita family is complex and by no means clear-cut: the term ‘pumpkin’, depending on whether you are in Britain, America, the Caribbean or Australia, may mean either the big orange fruit with a light and watery flesh, or the orange, green, grey, cream, pinky-yellow or multi-coloured and denser fleshed, chestnutty-tasting, fruit that modern Americans and British call winter squash.32 Short of finding a detailed journal of a contemporary Neapolitan market gardener, we may never know exactly which these were, but although the Royal Navy of the time would not have been aware of it, either version is a good source of several useful vitamins and trace elements. They also have seeds with a tasty ‘nut’ for those who have the inclination to nibble them open.
Carrots and turnips are sometimes mentioned, but until well into the nineteenth century, rarely potatoes, although during the 1795 wheat famine the Victualling Board were offered (and refused) a large quantity by a correspondent, and Dillon mentions eating what he called ‘toast made from potatoes’ on shore during that hard winter. The reason potatoes do not seem to have been bought often may relate to their propensity for turning green and poisonous if exposed to light or sprouting if exposed to warmth; but it is more likely to have been related to the fact that there was somewhat of a social stigma attached to them. Having been continually referred to by social reformers as an ideal food for the poor, the potato had come to be seen as something only to be eaten by the desperate, a label that would not have fitted the image sailors had of themselves.
It has not proved possible to find out with any precision exactly which varieties of vegetables were grown at this period but it is likely that many of them were like those shown in Vilmorin-Andrieux’s late nineteenth century book The Vegetable Garden. Like animals, different varieties of vegetables and fruit developed in different parts of every country, adapting themselves to suit local conditions, with seeds being passed down through the generations. Currently known as ‘heritage’ plants, these old varieties are now being jealously preserved by various organisations anxious to protect genetic variation against the depredations of big seed companies and tidy-minded bureaucrats.
Because it has a nasty tendency to become damp and then putrid, and because of the ‘salt causes scurvy’ theory (see page 25), dried or salt fish had been dropped from the official naval diet. After centuries of conflict with France and Spain, there may also have been an adverse psychological connection with the fact that the dreaded and hated Catholics ate such fish on several days each week. Fresh fish was another matter, and all ships were supplied with fishing tackle which they were meant to use when opportunity permitted and when they were in ‘a place where fish can be had’. The resultant catch was first to be offered to the sickbay and the remainder shared out among the crew, on a rota system if necessary. This fish was to be considered a free, extra item, not a substitute for anything else.33 Perhaps for this reason, fishing is so rarely mentioned in log books that one might suppose it never happened.
Journals, memoirs and letters home tell a different story. Captain Duff, of the Mars, when on blockade outside Cadiz in the months before Trafalgar mentions in a letter that they had the trawl out and that his share of the catch was ‘a very good turbot’.34 William Mark, cruising off Havre le Grace in 1800 also mentions trawling, remarking that it served as a useful diversion for the men in a situation where there was little else to do.35 The inshore waters of the Mediterranean, where the most fish are to be had, were not always the best place to make the attempt. Patrolling up and down off a port like Toulon may seem a likely place to try a trawl, but there was always the danger of an enemy frigate dashing out. The preferred method for obtaining fish in the Mediterranean was to get it from a local fishing boat. The Royal Navy tended to leave fishing boats alone, finding them useful sources of information as well as food, and some fishing boats took to carrying fruit and vegetables when they knew the Royal Navy was about. However, there were occasions when the French navy took to pressing fishermen to man warships and at these times fishing boats were seized and the crews taken prisoner.
In tropical waters there were the flying fish, or the ‘dolphins’ (actually bonito) which pursued them, or even porpoises. Basil Hall reports a porpoise being caught half an hour before the officers’ dinner. He told his steward to cut and grill some steaks from it and pass the rest to the crew. Not having encountered the idea of eating porpoise before, the crew were dubious about eating it and a seaman was appointed to hover outside the cabin door. When the steward came out he was waylaid and questioned: ‘Did they really eat it?’ The steward showed the empty dish and the seaman scampered off to report to his mates. By the time the officers had finished dinner and the captain and surgeon went up to view the remains of the porpoise, there was nothing left to see.36
Sharks were also popular prey for seamen fishing in warm waters. Raigersfeld tells of their using pieces of salt pork to bait the shark hooks and thirteen-footers duly being hauled in and despatched with an axe. Then as many men as could sit astride the carcass did so, each hacking off a slice in front of him, having first warned the man behind to watch out what he was doing with his knife. The resultant slices were par-boiled, salted and peppered and grilled, the result reputedly tasting rather like cod.37 Landsman Hay mentions shark being layered with slices of pork and then baked.38
Other things came out of the sea besides fish. Dillon tells of an alligator washed out to sea when he was on the Jamaica station; foolish enough to swim round the ship, it was soon caught and eaten. It looked and apparently tasted like veal, but Dillon, not fancying it, refused the piece he was offered. And anybody who had the opportunity caught turtles, keeping them alive on board by turning them upside-down to prevent escape and dousing them with sea water to keep them moist, or, according to Landsman Hay, keeping them in what he describes as ‘our water tank’.39 In 1813, when there was a shortage of beef on Bermuda (one of the victualling ports for the North American squadron), the Victualling Board agreed that one and a half pounds of turtle could be issued in lieu of one pound of beef.40 Giant tortoises, too, although not sea-creatures, were to be had on islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The American frigate captain David Porter raved about their ‘luscious and delicate’ taste, having acquired a number from some captured whalers. Having tasted them and found how good they were, the Americans remarked sadly about the numbers which had been thrown overboard by the whalers in their attempts to evade capture. Then, a few days later, sailing back over the same stretch of water, they found about fifty tortoises still alive, floating in a group, which they picked up and stowed away, no doubt drooling happily in the process!
The official drink for seamen was not, as is popularly thought, grog, but beer – the daily allowance was one gallon. However, it should be explained that this was not what we now know as a British gallon, but ‘wine’ measure, which is five-sixths of that amount (a British gallon ‘wine measure’ is equivalent to the American gallon). To those accustomed to modern beers this sounds a lot, but the beer issued to seamen, like the normal table beer on land, was ‘small’ or weak beer of 2 to 3 per cent proof. (Modern British bitter beer is about 4 per cent, American Budweiser is 5 per cent, Guinness is 4.4 per cent and European lagers such as Heineken are 5 per cent.) The advantage of beer is that having been boiled in the manufacturing process it is reasonably free from bacteria; if it does not ‘go off’, beer will last in the cask for months whereas water, unless it starts off sterile and goes into a sterile container, becomes nastier and nastier over time.
Beer does go off quite easily in warm weather, which makes it cloudy, sour or vinegary; one brewer’s response to complaints about a batch of beer was that it had been left out in the sun on the quayside. For this reason, brewing was essentially a cool season activity. But even in cold weather, using imperfectly cleaned casks could make the beer go sour and acidy in a few days. Although some beer was supplied by contractors, the Victualling Board also brewed its own, first at Tower Hill in London, then at Deptford, and eventually at Plymouth and Portsmouth. Apart from its keeping qualities, the main reason for making beer the official drink was that it attracted lower excise duty than wine or spirits. The government was concerned about theft and smuggling, and for this reason in the navy it was actually forbidden to open casks of wine or spirits within reach of the British coast for fear of the contents being diverted ashore.41
When the beer ran out, and on stations where it was not available, the official preference was for wine, although this was often fortified with brandy to improve its keeping qualities. One pint of wine was deemed equivalent to one gallon of beer (modern wine bottles hold 75 centilitres, or one and a third pints). We do not know the strength of wine at that time, but now most table wines are about 11 to 13 per cent proof and fortified wines are about 20 per cent. Table wine then probably was much the same strength as it is now. Wine was obtained from Italy and Sicily, and from France or Spain when Britain was not at war with them. Probably, via canny merchants and neutral vessels, it still originated in those countries when Anglo-French or Anglo-Spanish wars were in progress – two of the wine merchants in Barcelona supplying Nelson in the Mediterranean in 1804 as war with Spain loomed were confident that this would not stop supplies. One remarked that if necessary he would send it in neutral ships, the other hinted delicately that he knew whose palm to grease to ensure that stocks would not be confiscated.42
One might suppose that the wine supplied for seamen would be the sort of rough red favoured by working men in the Mediterranean basin countries today, but white wine from Portugal, Italy and Sicily was also bought by the Victualling Board and pursers on the spot. Like other forces stationed in the Mediterranean, Nelson’s fleet bought locally and drank whichever colour was available. When wine and spirits were bought for naval stores in England, a special dispensation was obtained from the Treasury to exempt it from customs duty.
Most ships carried supplies of spirits as well as wine, the official issue being on the basis of a half-pint of spirit equalling a gallon of beer. There must have been some occasions when the captain deemed it appropriate to issue spirits instead of wine when wine was still available – in cold weather, perhaps, or when particularly arduous duties called for a quick booster or reward – but although this seems a reasonable supposition, the author has not yet found any reports of this practice. The type of spirit drunk depended on where they were and what was made locally. In the Mediterranean, it was brandy, on the East Indies station it was arrack and on the West Indies station it was rum. Later, at the instigation of the politically-strong West Indies merchants, rum became the standard spirit. Whichever it was, the rule was that it was to be diluted with water ‘and none suffered to drink drams’.43
The strengths of the brandy and arrack are not known, nor with any accuracy is that of the rum of the day, but it is believed to have been at least four times as strong as the ‘Navy’ rum sold today; that official half-pint would have been the equivalent of two modern bottles. The requirement to dilute spirits is thought to have originated with Admiral Edward Vernon, in the West Indies in 1740. He ordered the rum ration to be diluted with a quart of water, this to be done on the open deck in a scuttle butt kept for that purpose, in the presence of the lieutenant of the watch, and of course any of the crew who cared to observe the process to make sure they were not given short-measure. Admiral Vernon was known as ‘Old Grog’ from his habit of wearing a cloak made of grosgrain (a heavy corded silk fabric) and his rum and water mixture came to be known by the same name.44 Later, on the advice of Doctor Trotter, lemon or lime juice was added to the mixture as an antiscorbutic. Rum has come to be known as ‘Nelson’s blood’, perhaps by people under the impression that his body was preserved in rum; it was actually brought home in a cask of brandy, as evidenced by a letter from the Victory’s purser Walter Burke, asking to be allowed credit for this in his accounts.45
Various mixtures based on rum were popular at the time. Rum, water, sugar and nutmeg was known as ‘Bumbo’; rum or brandy mixed with beer and sugar and heated with a hot iron was known as ‘Flip’; and in the officers’ wardroom similar mixtures with lemon juice and hot water were made into punch. Seamen on shore used their own slang to describe their preferred dilution of spirits: ‘due north’ meant plain spirit, ‘due west’ meant plain water, ‘north westerly’ meant half and half, and describing a glass as ‘southerly’ meant it was empty.46
When there was no beer, and wine or spirits were served, the men filled up with water. Away from a good watering place, there was always concern about replacing what was used, and most captains made a rule that while men could drink their fill at the scuttle butt, they could not take water away. To prevent this, a marine sentry would be stationed by the butt, the fear being that water taken away might be used for some frivolous purpose, such as washing their smalls (damp and salt-encrusted underwear being one of the tribulations of life at sea). Admiral St Vincent became quite incensed about this practice when women were on board, and issued a general order forbidding it.47 When water was short, instead of an open butt at the scuttle, there would be a closed cask with a bung-hole in the head and a hollow tube would be provided as a drinking straw; there are even stories of this cask being put in one of the tops to make it even more difficult to get a drink, but these are probably apocryphal. When there was a real water crisis, it would be rationed out to each man at set times, and at such times rainwater would be collected by spreading sails like awnings, with a couple of shot placed in the middle to form a pool. This water might taste a bit odd, but it would serve to steep and maybe cook the salt meat or pease if nothing else. Pasley reported heavy rain when becalmed near the Atlantic Equator in 1782 when they collected a ton and a half for the cooks to steep the pease, ‘being greatly superior to any other [water] for breaking the pease’.48 The quality of the drinking water depended on three things: how long it had been kept, the state, age and cleanliness of the casks when they were filled, and where it came from. Plymouth had good sweet water from Dartmoor, piped in a conduit known as Drake’s Leat; Deptford water was less dependable, sometimes being compared with the contents of London’s cellars and cess-pits. Although there had been earlier experiments with distillation devices, it was not until 1810 when a new type of cooking stove was introduced that there was any facility for producing fresh water on a useful scale.49
Other officially issued drinks were tea and cocoa but only as substitutes for cheese: ‘half a pound of Cocoa or a quarter of a pound of Tea, is equal to one pound of Cheese.’50 Since one of the other substitutes for cheese was sugar, it would have been possible for a mess of men to have taken their tea or cocoa sweet, but either drink would have been without milk unless the captain was indulgent enough to allow the crew to keep their own goat on board. To the modern mind, tea and cocoa are odd substitutes for cheese; while it can be seen that there is food value in cocoa, there is none in tea, so one can only conclude that these substitutes were chosen as being roughly equivalent in cost to cheese. Even so, economy prevailed: in 1803, when contemplating a purchase of tea, the Victualling Board discussed the available types of tea and then recommended the cheapest.51 This was not popular, and soon after this decision was made, Lord Keith wrote to report that there had been a murmuring in the fleet’ and that the men had thrown the tea overboard.
Despite being a substitute for cheese, tea and cocoa were generally taken at breakfast, when hot water was available, although some men made themselves a drink called ‘Scotch coffee’ which consisted of burnt biscuit ground up with hot water added.52 Tea was, by this time, a popular breakfast drink on land while cocoa had become not just popular but ultra-fashionable. The only source of supply for tea was the East India Company, which brought it back from China; it was ‘black’ tea, the sort made by fermenting the bruised leaves (of the camellia bush, Camellia sinensis) to allow oxidisation before drying. Cocoa, which is the powdery residue left after cocoa butter has been extracted from the beans of the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao), had been introduced to Europe by the Spanish after Cortes invaded Mexico. Originally found growing wild in Central America and the northern Amazon basin, the cacao tree was successfully cultivated in the West Indies and in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century most of Europe’s supply came from the Caribbean, arriving in solid blocks which had to be pounded into powder by the mess cooks, each taking it in turns to do this job for the whole ship.53 Popular then as now for its comforting nature, cocoa was also rumoured to be an aphrodisiac; it is perhaps best not to enquire too closely into how sailors found this beneficial!