Naval food in the time of Nelson

• By Daphne Caruana Galizia

Winston Churchill, when he encountered protestations about the need to preserve tradition in the Royal Navy, burst out with: “Naval tradition? Monstrous! Nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash!” His view appears to have been shaped by the classic book written by John Masefield and published in 1905, Sea Life in Nelson’s Time, which gave a horrendous account of the privations endured by seamen. Masefield described a navy in which cruelty and suffering were the order of the day, with sailors controlled by corporal and capital punishment, exposed to virulent diseases and served disgusting food, their only solace being the daily ration of grog, or watered-down rum. Yet as the naval historian Andrew Lambert has remarked on more than one occasion, in the context of the times, these sailors were better off than very many of their contemporaries on land. At least they had the reassurance of food every day, somewhere to sleep and regular pay. Professional sailors were a valuable resource, and so they were not treated cavalierly. As Samuel Pepys wrote: “Englishmen, and more especially seamen, love their bellies above anything else, and therefore it must always be remembered in the management of the victualling of the navy that to make any abatement 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 other hardship that can be put upon them.”

Supplying the fleets was a significant undertaking, controlled by the Victualling Board. The purser on each ship was in charge of supplying the food and other consumables like candles, coal, clothes (known as ‘slops’, hence, ‘sloppy’), and tobacco. Corruption among ships’ chandlers was far from unknown, and bad food often made its way on board. Beef and pork were salted and hauled up in barrels. Cabbage was preserved in vinegar. Other foods, like bread and the infamous ships’ biscuit, or hard tack, were supplied very dry. Traditionally, pursers took a cut of everything: the ‘purser’s eighth’ meant that for every pound (16 ounces) of food designated for the sailors, he took two ounces. He was allowed to keep one-eighth of the suppliers and 5% to 10% of the rest as his commission.

Scurvy, which is caused by total deprivation of vitamin C for months at a time, was the greatest affliction among sailors then. It took hundreds of years of scurvy before people made the connection between its presence and the absence of fruit and vegetables in the diet of sailors. By the late 18th century, that link had finally been made, and an effective antidote was found in the form of lemons and limes, or their juice. English sailors continued to be given an obligatory ration of lemon or lime juice, which is how they came to be known as Limeys, particularly in Australia. Lemons still take up a good part of limited on-board storage space on British naval ships today. The insistence on fruit and vegetables was long in coming. In the official ‘allowance of provisions’ list for sailors in 1808, there is no mention of them. The list sets down what each man was to be fed. Besides a pound of ‘bisket’ and a gallon of beer every day, the sailors would receive: on Sunday and Thursday, a pound of pork and half a pint of ‘pease’; on Monday, half a pint of oatmeal, two ounces of sugar, two ounces of butter and four ounces of cheese; on Tuesday and Saturday, two pounds of beef; on Wednesday and Friday, half a pint of ‘pease’, half a pint of oatmeal, two ounces each of sugar and butter, and four ounces of cheese. A gallon of beer may seem like too much, but it was small beer, which was low in alcoholic content and high on water and floating hops. When the rations included rum, this was watered down to make ‘grog’, which survives in British-navy-influenced Maltese as grokk, to denote a tot of rum or whisky. There was a daily allotment of bread, kept in the ‘bread barge’ on the mess table, and the diet was sometimes varied with flour, suet, and raisins, which were made into a ‘duff’ (viz. ‘plum duff’ for the traditional pudding still made at Christmas) to guard against scurvy. A version of this – a rice pudding with currants in it – continued to be made for the next couple of centuries, and was known in naval slang as Chinese wedding cake.

Fresh vegetables were issued when the ship put into port, and substituted for the ‘pease’. Cabbage was prepared like the German sauerkraut, with water, vinegar and salt, because that way it kept for a long time when sealed into barrels. It helped with the problem of scurvy, but the men are said to have hated it because of the appalling smell. If a ship was in port, the crew could expect fresh meat twice a week. Cows and pigs were slaughtered in the victualling yards and each man was given four pounds of beef and three pounds of pork, less the purser’s cut. When the meat was issued, there was a ritual to be followed. The casks of meat were opened on deck under the watchful eyes of the ship’s master and the purser’s steward. They watched the pieces being counted out and checked them against the supplier’s list.

The only methods of preserving food were pickling, salting, smoking and drying. Supplies at distant stations were often several years old. There were specific rules on how to dispose of provisions that had gone bad. A ‘board of survey’ consisting of three officers, preferably from another ship, inspected the offending items and declared them to be inedible. With the exception of butter and cheese, they would have to be returned to the Royal Navy stores. The butter would be given to the boatswain to grease the ropes, and the cheese would be thrown overboard because “..in a corrupted state, it is a nuisance to the ship’s company, and cannot possibly be kept in the close confined space where stowed…”.

The officers were given the same rations as the men, but they also bought in additional supplies, using their own money. Their mess was the wardroom, or the gunroom on a frigate, and they were waited on by crewmen. They also kept live animals on board for supplies of fresh meat while at sea: chickens, cows and even pigs, with the pigsty placed in the forecastle and the chicken coops on the quarter deck. The captain could eat (mess) with his officers or ‘keep a table’ (viz. ‘the captain’s table’ on cruise liners), which meant that he would invite his officers to dine with him at his own expense. The captain had his own cook and servants, and still does so today on Royal Navy ships. The midshipmen had their own mess in the cockpit.

The main cause of indiscipline was drink. Men smuggled alcohol on to the ship or shared and bartered their grog rations to render themselves insensible. If this behaviour was thought to threaten the safety of the ship or to affect the discipline of the crew, the offenders were punished with a lashing by the cat o’ nine tails. This is where the expression ‘to let the cat out of the bag’ comes from, to describe a situation where the secret is out and it’s too late to do anything about it. The cat o’ nine tails was only taken out of the bag where it was kept when the offending sailor had been tied up to receive his lashing, and there was no possibility of reprieve. While rum was a very popular spirit among the crew, it was issued only when beer was not available. Another liquor that was used was called arrack, which was made from rice and sometimes cocoa sap. It was available on ships that served in the Far East. Ships assigned to the Mediterranean would receive supplies of wine. The crews were very fond of a fiery Spanish wine, mistela, which they called Miss Taylor, and also of rosolio. They did not like the red wine known as black strap, which is why being sent to serve in the Mediterranean was to be ‘black-strapped’.