They would feed on the scraps from the fresh provisions loaded in Southampton but when they were exhausted, first one pig then the other would be slaughtered. Tom hoped to buy more provisions at Madeira and the Cape to eke out their stocks of canned beef.
Chapter 5
Ships had carried live animals as part of their stores for centuries, though chickens, ducks and other fowl, and the eggs they laid, were invariably reserved for the use of the captain and his senior officers.
The longboats were often pressed into use as temporary livestock pens and a pigsty was constructed in the hold. If they were lucky, crewmen would get one mess from every pig that was killed and would also be given the less choice cuts from sheep and occasionally cows, though unlike pigs, which seemed to thrive on it, the larger animals did not take well to life at sea. On larger ships, sows would even round the Horn or the Cape with no worse discomfort than the men, though the litters of piglets with which they began the journey steadily diminished in number to meet the appetite of the crew.
Once the fresh meat was exhausted, seamen were fed on the ‘salt beef’ specified in naval regulations. The contractors who supplied the Navy during the Napoleonic wars grew rich on the trade but were despised by every seaman. The meat was pickled in barrels of brine and was invariably of questionable provenance, sometimes from a cow but often pork or other, less palatable meats. Its nickname ‘salt-horse’ reflected the men’s suspicions about its true origins and it was also called ‘salt-junk’. Pieces of bone, hoof and other extraneous matter were often found among the tough and unidentifiable cuts.
The process of preserving food by boiling it and sealing it in tins had been discovered by a Frenchman, Nicholas Appert, in the first years of the nineteenth century, and as early as 1813, the English firm of Donkin and Hall supplied the Channel fleet with an experimental supply of canned beef; but though the advantages of the new process were obvious, the comparative expense led to it being issued only on long-distance expeditions, particularly to the Arctic.
Canned meat was not available on the commercial market until 1830 and did not become a regular part of the Royal Navy diet until the middle of the century. Merchant ship-owners persisted with the cheaper salt beef far longer than that, its quality as variable as the seas on which they sailed. The worst was the decommissioned Royal Navy meat that Tom had been forced to eat on board the Lady Rodney.
When cases of scurvy were reported in the papers in 1876, Samuel Plimsoll once more addressed the House of Commons. ‘The Government keeps seven years’ store of provisions in the Gibraltar and Malta garrisons. This pork and beef, simmering out there in pickle for seven years, is brought home and the hoops are knocked off the barrels down at Deptford. That which is rotten and bad is sold to the soap-boilers. The rest is put into clean casks and fresh pickle by our government and then sold to ship-owners.
‘One ship arrived at San Francisco last autumn after burying twelve of her men with this horrid disease on the passage, with one dead man on board and twenty-two men who were sent to hospital, two of whom died there. I demand for our sailors that they shall no longer be fed with food that they would not give their dogs.’
His demand was not answered for many more years. The last barrels of salt beef to be carried on a British vessel were shipped in 1920.
The ‘bread’, which was the other staple of the naval diet, was an equally misleading term. Until 1855 bread was exclusively hard-tack — ship’s biscuit baked at the victualling yards, the Royal Victoria at Deptford, the Royal Clarence at Portsmouth and the Royal William at Plymouth. It was baked to the consistency of mortar and considered so imperishable that it was stored in canvas bags, to which insects and vermin found easy access.
It was an automatic gesture of every seaman to tap his hard-tack on the table before eating it to knock out any maggots and weevils. One nineteenth-century seaman, Dalrymple Hay, described hard-tack so riddled with them that the only way to make it palatable was to lay the entrails of a freshly caught fish on top of a mound of it. The maggots and weevils came out of the biscuit into the entrails, which were then thrown away. The process was repeated until no more emerged and the hard-tack was then described as ‘fit to eat’.
A Bristol baker, Henry Jones, had patented a method of making self-raising flour and a bread-oven for use on board ship in 1845. He immediately offered his invention to the Navy Victualling Office. After waiting ten years for a positive reply, Jones sent details of his invention and copies of his correspondence with the Admiralty to every Member of Parliament. Within a month self-raising flour was issued to every Navy ship, and for the first time in their history, seamen had the pleasure of soft-tack — bread — alongside their ship’s biscuit, though it was served only on Sundays.
The rations specified for Tom’s crew included flour from which, like in the Navy, bread was baked on Sundays; but even in 1884, their other ‘bread’ was still hard-tack which continued to be supplied to ships until the early years of the twentieth century.
In the Napoleonic era the only variation in the dull, constipating diet of beef and bread had been a small amount of pease pudding and, if the seamen asked for it, a little vinegar. The intervention of naval surgeons led to the inclusion of vegetables from 1825 onwards but these were usually only available in the early part of a voyage. By the second half of the century more variety had been introduced. Cook-stewards could add rice, split peas, pearl barley, flour, tinned potatoes, turnips and other root vegetables, currants and raisins, and even mustard and pepper to make the food more palatable.
What seamen drank on board ship had also gone through a long and curious period of evolution. Before the Victorian era, there was no way to keep a ship’s water sweet. Stored in wooden butts, it quickly became foul-smelling, fetid and undrinkable. At each port of call, all the butts — full as well as empty — had to be hauled out of the water room in the hold, emptied and refilled. The effort of handling the huge and very heavy barrels made ruptures the most common occupational injury in the Navy.
Seamen only drank water at the beginning of a voyage, while it was still palatable, and in the course of a battle, when buckets of ‘fighting water’ were tied to the stanchions on deck. It was often contaminated with gunpowder, or even blood and flesh from the wounded, but in the heat and intensity of battle it was still drunk.
At all other times, seamen drank beer instead of water, a thin and often sour brew from the Navy’s victualling yards. Each man was allowed a gallon a day and naval regulations laid down that the beer must be finished — or so sour that it was undrinkable — before any substitute drink could be supplied. If the ship was in home waters, more beer was purchased. In foreign ports, ‘beverage’ — any light wine of the local region — was bought, but the regulations also stipulated that spirits could be substituted if no beer or wine was available. In the Caribbean that inevitably meant rum, mixed fifty-fifty with water and known as grog.
It became one of the staples of Navy life. Although the rules laid down that it could be drunk only once the beer had been exhausted, in practice, and eventually even in the regulations, a daily grog ration was issued. Initially two gills — half a pint — a day, it was progressively reduced over the course of the nineteenth century.
A seaman could either drink his ration when it was issued or save it, but if he gave or sold it to one of his fellows he would be flogged. Despite these attempts at strict control, the drunkenness that characterized gin shops and taverns ashore was equally rife on board ship.