The Victualling Organisation
NAVAL VICTUALLING had been run by a single contractor since 1565. The Navy Commission briefly took direct responsibility for it in 1649–51 before it reverted to a syndicate and then to a single victualler after the traditional method. In 1657 the failure to find any individual willing to take on the post’s vastly expanded responsibilities and workload led to the appointment of a salaried victualling board.1 For much of the period, naval victualling was dominated by Alderman Sir Denis Gauden (1600–88), who first became involved with it about 1650 and was appointed surveyor-general in 1660, replacing the Commonwealth’s short-lived board. Gauden’s almost total independence and effective monopoly caused the Restoration government much disquiet, but from his viewpoint the state’s failure to pay him according to contract meant that as the fleet expanded in 1664–5, Gauden could not always provide the quantity required (although there were rarely complaints about quality).2 Consequently, victualling was again brought under direct Navy Board control during the second Anglo-Dutch War, with Pepys installed as surveyor-general of victualling. This was merely a wartime appointment pro tem, and Gauden was made to take on partners from 1669. Gauden was ultimately ruined by the government’s inability to pay what it owed him for the third Anglo-Dutch war, and in 1677 victualling was transferred to a new consortium consisting of the London merchants Richard Brett, John Parsons and Samuel Vincent. Despite the elaborate detail contained in their contract, for which Pepys claimed the responsibility, and the king’s promise to pay the contractors regularly, the new arrangement was not entirely successful. In 1683 control of naval victualling reverted to another salaried board, following the pattern established in the 1650s, and so it remained until the nineteenth century.3
VICTUALLING FACILITIES
The victualling offices were on the east side of Tower Hill, on a sprawling site that had once housed the abbey of St Mary Graces. It also included brewhouses, storehouses and bakeries, and was immediately adjacent to the buildings used by the Ordnance Office, which made the whole site perhaps one of the greatest safety hazards in seventeenth-century England. The Tower site was expensive to run and not immediately adjacent to the river, making it difficult to get victuals quickly to the shore through the crowded London streets. By 1672 the site was also too small and was no longer able to store the quantities of cask, beef and pork needed to victual the ships of the three Thames and Medway yards. In that year, therefore, Gauden set up a new victualling yard at the considerably cheaper location of Deptford, where the slaughterhouse had already been acquired for the navy in 1650.4 This also had its inconveniences; cattle had to be driven over London Bridge, causing inevitable ‘gridlock’ at the city’s only fixed river crossing, while it was difficult to persuade coopers and others to work there because of its distance from their families, the cost of travel and the unhealthiness of the riverside site. New lodgings were quickly put up for the workforce at Deptford, which gradually became increasingly important. Seventy years later the Tower site was abandoned entirely in its favour, and Deptford then remained as the navy’s pre-eminent victualling yard until it was supplanted during the first half of the nineteenth century by the Royal Clarence and Royal William yards at Portsmouth and Plymouth respectively.5
The Tower of London and the River Thames in the middle of the seventeenth century. The buildings and yards of the Victualling Office were behind the Tower, and victuals were shipped downstream from the wharves adjacent to it.
(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)
THE VICTUALLING SYSTEM
The victualling declaration for a given year was usually made by the middle of the previous October, primarily because beer could be brewed, and meat packed, only during the winter months. The declaration specified the number of men that were projected to serve in the fleet and for how long, and the ports at which victuals should be provided.6 In peacetime during the 1660s, declarations were made for between 1,500 and 7,000 men. The first wartime declaration, made on 21 September 1664, was for 25,000 men for thirteen months, to which another 5,000 men for six months were later added. The 1666 and (aborted) 1667 declarations were for 35,000 men for thirteen months. The total cost was then based on a formula drawn from detailed commodity prices; Gauden’s 1669 contract specified that each man should be victualled at 6d a day in harbour, 8d at sea and 8%d in ships going beyond twenty-seven degrees southwards.7 When victualling was contracted out, the contractors received one-third of their money at the time of the October declaration and the remainder through ten monthly payments.8 By seventeenth-century standards, the scale of the operation was vast. A fleet of 10,000 men (less than half the size of the fleets deployed in the Anglo-Dutch wars), victualled for eight months, required 11,443 tons of cask (primarily beer), 1,000 tons of flesh (primarily beef and pork) and 22,400 bags of bread.9 Boats and wagons had to be hired on a large scale to move the victuals to the fleet or the outports, and huge sums passed in and out of the victualling office (over £743,000 in 1665–6, and even £271,000 for the 1672 campaign, when only two British squadrons had to be vic-tualled).10 Yet the permanent staff available to carry out the task was tiny: in 1660 the office employed nine men at Tower Hill and another two, an agent and a storekeeper, at each of Portsmouth and Plymouth.
The demands of the second Anglo-Dutch war in particular were so great that the victualling system virtually collapsed. By January 1666 London had only about a fifth of the bread it should have had, and no beer; Portsmouth had even less bread, though everywhere had adequate supplies of beef and pork.11 The Plague also took its toll, killing many of the coopers who would have made the barrels for the beer to be shipped to the fleet in 1666.12 The inadequate victualling of the fleet during that year’s campaign led to acrimonious blame-swapping between, on the one hand, the commanders-in-chief at sea (the abrasive duo of Prince Rupert and the Duke of Albemarle) and on the other, the naval administrators, led by Sir William Coventry and Pepys, who at his own behest served as Surveyor-General of Victualling, supervising Gauden’s work, between 1665 and 1667.13 The victualling office itself became more efficient after Gauden entered into a partnership in 1669, but it was hamstrung by the effects of Charles II’s policies; in particular, the ‘Stop of the Exchequer’ of 1672, by which the king suspended the payment of all bills, seriously damaged the credit-worthiness of all departments of state, including naval victualling, and made suppliers reluctant to sell victuals to the navy without receiving immediate cash payment. Unsurprisingly, there were further problems with supplying the fleet during the third war. The victuallers provided barrels without iron hoops, so that those containing beer and water smashed each other to pieces in rough seas. Prince Rupert, commanding the fleet, was again the most trenchant critic of the victuallers, demanding that they be brought to the fleet under arrest to experience the fare that they palmed off on the men.14
The annual victualling declarations included details of outports at which victuals were to be stored, supplementing the stores at the main yards and providing a more immediate, forward service to wherever ships happened to be. In 1666 the outports specified were Ipswich, Dover, Plymouth, Hull, Newcastle, Yarmouth, Bristol, Milford and Kinsale (see table).15 The 1677 victualling contract specified that a contingency reserve had to be maintained in case of emergencies; this consisted of two months’ supply for 2,700 men at London, and for 1,300 at Portsmouth.16 ‘Extra freights’ had to be employed when victuals were moved en masse in hired tenders to anchorages which the main fleet was using pro tem, such as Solebay and Hollesley Bay during the 1665 campaign.17 Additional declarations were sometimes made for detached squadrons overseas; in January 1665, for example, Gauden was contracted to provide victuals at Leghorn for 1,500 men for one year.18 Outside these formal arrangements, captains and pursers often had to fend for themselves, making ad hoc arrangements with local suppliers and subsequently drawing bills upon the victualling board. In this way, the captain of the Speedwell was able to provide his ship with ten bullocks and thirty-six pigs at Lerwick in 1666.19
VICTUALLING DECLARATION AND DISTRIBUTION, 1665–6
Victuals were the subject of perhaps Samuel Pepys’s most famous bon mot.
Englishmen, and more especially seamen, love their bellies above anything else, and therefore … to make any abatement from them in the quantity or agreeableness of the victuals, is to discourage and provoke them in the tenderest point, and will sooner render them disgusted with the king’s service than any one other hardship that can be put upon them.20
To ensure that seamen received their specified allowances, victualling contracts, such as that made in 1677, laid down what were intended to be stringent regulations. The men’s entitlement to two pounds of beef on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday was meant to be drawn from ‘a well fed ox’ weighing not less than five hundredweight in London and four and a half in the outports. This could be replaced on two of those days by a pound of bacon or salted pork from a well-fed hog of not less than three-quarters of a hundredweight. On Wednesday, Friday and Saturday every man was to have one-eighth of a full-sized North Sea cod, twenty-four inches long, along with his staples of bread and beer. It proved increasingly difficult to get sufficient quantities of fish to meet this requirement, and in 1679 the victualling contractors were allowed to substitute oatmeal, a change that did not go down well among their clients.21 Various exceptions to the usual diet were made for overseas service, such as the addition of wine and raisins or currants for ships in Africa or the East or West Indies. Precise regulations were laid down to ensure that the victuallers filled casks of beer and food properly and did not provide short measure to maximise their profits.22 The Navy Board attempted to guarantee ‘quality control’ itself, by getting a quorum of three of its members to sample the victuals.23
There were three different kinds of beer. Iron-bound ‘sea beer’, for ships on extended voyages, had twenty quarters of malt to every twenty tons of beer; wood-bound ‘Channel beer’ had eighteen, while wood-bound ‘harbour beer’ had twelve.24 Men seem to have been prepared to put up with bad food as long as they had decent beer. But in 1665 a crewman of the Coventry, ‘being thirsty, drank a great draught’ of beer which proved to be almost poisonous, while aboard the Duke in 1689, ‘great heaps of stuff was [sic] found at the bottom of the butts not unlike to men’s guts’ .25 Several of the Eagle Fireship’s men deserted her in 1675 in protest at the poor beer they were being expected to drink; at much the same time, the captain of another fireship grumbled that his beer was ‘worse than water, they do but spoil good water in brewing such’.26 However, any hint of reducing the seamen’s dependence on beer was damned as ‘un-English’. In November 1665 the Earl of Sandwich declaimed against wine, which had been suggested as an alternative, on the grounds that ‘in our cold country it begets sickness and belly-ache’.27
Cases of poor victuals were not particularly frequent, despite all the difficulties under which the victuallers laboured.28 Paradoxically, the standard of victuals provided in wartime tended to be higher, in the second and third Anglo-Dutch wars at least; the problems experienced in 1666–7 were almost all concerned with quantity, not quality, as the high demand and rapid turnover meant that the victuals being supplied to the fleet were generally fresh. From 1660 onwards the most frequent complaints about poor victuals came in peacetime, when the victuallers might be tempted to offload commodities that had been in store for some time, and from ships on foreign stations, which had less opportunity than ships in home waters to check and replace inferior victuals before it was too late.29 Edward Barlow damned the Christmas dinner that he and his crewmates were served at Cadiz in 1661: ‘we had nothing but a little bit of Irish beef for four men, which had lain in pickle for two or three years and was as rusty as the devil, with a little stinking oil or butter, which was all the colours of the rainbow, many men in England greasing their cartwheels with better’.30 Even this was substantially better than the fare that generated official complaints. In such cases, captains often took the side of their men; in 1681 Sir Robert Robinson of the Assistance denounced the provision for his ship, which was serving in the Mediterranean:
The beef looked very bad before it went into the furnace, but when it came out, ’twas almost as black as coal and shrunk to nothing. The pork tasted so fishy that the men could not eat it. The peas boiled almost as hard as shot, and would by no means break. The oatmeal was so sour that many times it could not be eaten. The beverage wine so bad that men choose rather to drink water. And in general the provisions was so bad that several of the men chose rather to eat dry bread alone almost to the starving of themselves, than eat the other victuals.31
Robinson was certainly not alone. There were frequent complaints that the victuallers were cutting corners, providing food and drink of inferior quality in order to maximise their profits and often colluding in the process with ships’ pursers, who were accused of accepting short measure. The abuses complained of included the cutting up of bones, which were then put in meat casks and thus included in the allowance of meat; in 1678 Pepys complained that fifty-eight pieces of beef delivered to the Cambridge included twenty-one legs.32 Beer and water casks were not fully filled, or else were not sealed by strong hoops, leading to leakage. Inferior malt was sometimes used in the making of beer. The victuallers often refused to honour bills of exchange drawn on them in foreign ports by captains who sought to replenish their inadequate stores locally. Critics of the system demanded better regulation of the victuallers and more stringent checks on pursers’ books, and although the revised contract of 1677 made an attempt to address these issues, Robinson’s complaint, made four years later, suggests that the reforms had minimal impact. Indeed, complaints about poor victuals and chicanery on the part of the victuallers continued intermittently for many decades.33