Feeding Nelson's Navy

by Janet MacDonald

  The final aspects of the provisions which required the captain’s attention were those relating to quality and fairness. He had to see that certain items, such as biscuit, were checked over regularly and any incipient problems dealt with; to ensure that food was shared out fairly (especially fresh meat); and generally ensure that the men were fed properly. A common entry in captains’ orders is one that says when a cooked meal is about to be served, a portion is first to be taken to the officer of the watch for sampling. Quite what should have happened if that sample was declared inedible is not stated but one can imagine the panic and demands for the keys to the cheese store!

  The captain’s orders were entered in the ship’s order book, which was kept where it was available to anyone who wanted to read it – often attached to the binnacle. These orders expanded on the Regulations, and typically would state the times at which food was to be issued and who was to hold the keys to various storerooms. Officers were expected to be familiar with the whole and many kept their own copies of the portions which covered their personal responsibilities.4 As above, there was typically a flurry of new orders when a new captain took over a ship, with the number and type of orders depending very much on the character of the captain. Those from Prince William Henry (later to be William IV), who was a real control-freak, run to many more pages than the normal and amongst other nit-picking, require everybody, including the senior lieutenants, to ask for permission every time they wanted to leave the ship.5

  THE MASTER AND THE PROVISIONS

  For the master, the Regulations which outline his duties with regard to the provisions appear, on the face of it, to be quite simple, covering the receipt and stowage of provisions and liquids, seeing them brought up from the hold and observing the quantities present when casks or bags were opened or fresh meat brought on board, having responsibility for the spirit room and making a daily report to the captain on the quantities of beer and water consumed and the amount remaining. The reality was far more complex.

  The easiest of these tasks was checking that the quantities within casks tallied with the quantities marked on the outside. A group of officers assembled for this job: the master, a lieutenant, the purser and perhaps the boatswain. The cask would be opened and the contents carefully checked. With beef or pork it was simply a matter of counting the pieces and recording them in the purser’s journal and the ship’s logs: for instance ‘opened 3 casks pork of 50 pieces, No 12 5lb short, No 13 5lb short, No 14 4lb short; opened 1 cask beef No 2154, 38 pieces, 12lb over’. This would be done in the vicinity of the galley and the pieces would go into the steep tubs under the cook’s eye. Other provisions would be opened in the purser’s steward’s room, transferring them into different containers and weighing them in the process, using a steelyard suspended from a beam. Again, shortages or excessive quantities were recorded in the logs and purser’s journal. Miscounts of contents in meat casks are very frequent, too many pieces in the cask being almost as common as too few. To take just one example, on Triumph, between July 1803 and June 1804, the master reported opening ninety-one casks of meat; only one contained the weight marked on the exterior; twenty-three were overweight (by up to fourteen pounds for the pork, thirty-two for the beef) and sixty-seven were underweight (by up to twenty pounds for the pork, thirty-two pounds for the beef).6

  Exactly how liquids were measured when casks were opened has not been recorded; it could have been with a dip-stick, or by emptying the cask from the bung into a measuring jug. There might have been some temptation to broach beer casks and steal the contents; there would have been far more with wine or spirits. One sequence of reports of wine in Triumph does cause one to wonder just what was going on. In December 1803, after receiving a sequence of complaints about faulty casks delivered by one particular transport, Nelson had issued a general order that the contents of every cask was to be measured and recorded in the log book when it was opened.7 Between 3 February and 4 July 1804 Triumph reported twenty-six faulty casks with losses of between four and eleven gallons. The reasons given, although acceptable at first, begin as time goes on to sound rather like the increasingly unlikely excuses of ‘food poisoning’ or ‘migraine’ which alcoholics offer as a reason for not turning up at work on Mondays: ‘split stave’, ‘broke stave’, ‘bad joint in head’, ‘bad knot in stave’. After a while, you begin to wonder whether Nelson’s warning about faulty casks had provided a convenient excuse for pilferage. Most of the losses were under six gallons, and they did not increase consistently as time passed as one might expect from casks which were faulty when received. Equally, one might expect after the first few were found that the master and purser would have had the whole lot up to inspect and measure, but there is no indication that this was done.

  Spirits were less easy than wine or beer for the unauthorised to get at. A clever petty officer could, however, organise himself a supply of extra grog by taking charge of the empty spirit cask after its contents had been issued. Filled with fresh water and left for a couple of days, the remains of the spirits in the wood would permeate the water and produce quite a strong liquor. A wise purser would see the empty casks rinsed out with salt water and left on deck to air; there was otherwise a risk of explosion from the vapour if the bung was removed with a candle close by.8 Fully aware of the risks, both to the spirits from thieves and from the spirits themselves as a fire risk, the Regulations required that they were kept in a separate spirit room which, like the powder room, was fully lined and plastered and lit from a separate light room, and that it was kept locked except at the specific times stated for issue. No lights were allowed in the spirit room itself, and spirits were only allowed to be served on the open deck, in daylight and with no candles in the vicinity.9

  It was at this point, of opening up containers of provisions, that most of the quality problems would be found. The procedure in such cases was that the container would be set aside, or if spirits, marked and returned to the spirit room, until a survey could be arranged. The term ‘survey’ was used in several ways: it could mean a stock-take; it could mean inspecting something to see if it was worn out and no longer usable, as in the case of an old sail (or even a sick human being), or defective and unusable, as in the case of provisions. In each case, the survey would be carried out by three commissioned or warrant officers, usually from other ships. For such things as boatswains’, carpenters’ or sailmakers’ stores, it would be three of that sort of warrant officer; for the sick, it would be three surgeons; for a purser’s stores it was more likely to three masters, perhaps because it was felt that they would be less sympathetic to misdemeanours. Whatever the type of item to be surveyed, its nominal ‘owner’ would ask the captain for a survey to be carried out and he arranged for the relevant officers to come aboard and do the survey. With provisions, if they agreed the items were inedible, they signed a formally-worded statement to that effect. Occasionally, when these provisions were so bad they were ‘stinking, rotten and a nuisance to the ship’, they would be thrown overboard, but otherwise they were supposed to be returned to victualling yard stores at the next opportunity. Some items, such as butter or ox-hides from beasts slaughtered on board, were meant to be offered for the boatswain’s use.

  The next part of the master’s duties with provisions was to see them brought on board and check quantities against the receipts or bills of lading. Sometimes they would be delivered to the ship by a hoy, other times a boat or party of men had to be sent to collect them, under the charge of a lieutenant or midshipman. Small casks and bags of bread or vegetables could be carried in a pinnace but for larger casks and large quantities of supplies, the launch or longboat would be used.10 Logs frequently report receiving provisions by the launch or sending the launch to transports for provisions.

  It has been suggested that seamen’s skills were adequate to make direct ship-to-ship transfers of provisions; this is theoretically possible, using cables and ‘traveller’ blocks. It would, however, require a level sea, a high degree of se
amanship and two captains with nerves of steel and the certainty of a forgiving commander-in-chief.

  STOWING THE PROVISIONS

  Spirits, as we have seen, were kept in a separate locked room. This was usually situated aft, under the cockpit; as well as being locked it would also have a marine posted to guard it. In the days when salt or dried fish were carried, this would be in a separate room, also aft. Even after fish was dropped from the official ration, the fish room retained its name, although it tended to be used as a coal store. Bread (ie biscuit) was kept in the bread room, right aft, where the shape of the hull kept it sufficiently high up to be clear of bilge water.

  Everything else, from water to raisins (with the exception of fresh meat and possibly vegetables and fruit) was kept in the hold; exactly where required the master to exercise some skill if the trim of the ship was not to be adversely affected. Consider the weight of provisions and beverages that had to be carried, and the not inconsiderable weight of the casks themselves (tare weight), and you can appreciate the magnitude of the problem.11 The basic ration works out at about eleven pounds per man per day, but to this you must add the weight of brine in the meat casks and the water needed for steeping and cooking. These are difficult to calculate, but a total per day, including these, of fifteen pounds would not be unreasonable. Multiply this figure by the number of men on a ship and the time for which they must be provisioned, and you get this result:

  These are speculative figures, but can be more or less confirmed by a list of provisions carried by the frigate Doris when she set off for the west coast of South America in 1821. Stored for 240 men for four months, she carried 107 tons of water, 14 tons of biscuit, 12 tons of salt meat (plus, of course, an unspecified amount of brine), about 4 tons of pease, oatmeal, sugar, cocoa, lime and lemon juice and tobacco, and just short of 6 tons of spirits; a total of 141 tons. She also called at Madeira en route, where she picked up 10 pipes (4 tons) of wine.12

  Although the figures for the sloop are considerably less than those for a First Rate, the comparative sizes of the ships made them just as important. The master’s problem is two-fold: keeping the ship trimmed, and at the correct draught, both essential to preserving the ship’s sailing qualities. The problem of trim required everything to be stowed so that each day’s removals balanced out over the course of a few days; for this the master would direct exactly what was stowed where, keeping in mind the rule of ‘oldest to be used first’, and then direct which items were to be taken out each day. They must all have drawn up plans of this stowage; some of them copied these plans into their logs.

  The draught problem could be extreme. Consume too much of the hold’s contents and the ship will lighten and rise in the water, becoming, since she carries a lot of weight in her guns, top-heavy and at risk of capsizing in rough weather. However, there was plenty of handy stuff to correct the problem: seawater. Many logs report filling water casks with seawater when the fresh water is getting low. One wonders to what extent they then flushed out these casks after emptying the salt water, or whether they just drank it slightly brackish. It cannot have tasted any worse than some of the stuff they got from Deptford Creek (although they did finally pipe water in from the Ravensbourne, a small river which ran into Deptford Creek above the tidal level).

  The basic rule on stowage was to keep the largest casks at the lowest level. The bottom of each hold was ballasted, first with pigs of iron and then with a layer of shingle, deep enough for the bottom tier of casks to nestle in. The ideal was ‘bung up and bilge free’ (the bung being in the widest part of the cask), but the shingle would inevitably become wet and often foul. Quite apart from the water continually making its way down the ship (and consider the state of the water that came off an anchor cable which had been lying on the bottom of a harbour where every ships head vented into the water), there must have been many men who, although this was strictly forbidden, found shingle ballast more inviting than the seats of ease exposed to the weather. There are stories of noxious gases being generated, so powerful that men in the hold would be overcome by them. It was another of the master’s responsibilities to ensure that the shingle ballast was ‘clean and sweet’. There were only two ways to do this: let in seawater and pump it out again, as many times as it took to flush all the foulness out, or remove all the shingle and replace it with fresh. This laborious task, which involved shovels and baskets, was slow work. On one occasion when the masters log for Victory reports this operation (emptying first one hold completely and reballasting, then moving the stores before repeating the exercise with the other), she dumped almost seventy tons of shingle ballast overboard before restowing her holds, and the operation took five days to complete.13 At the same time, she refilled all her water casks to the total capacity of 315 tons.

  Casks were stowed in rows lengthways down the hold, with perhaps a few crossways at either end. Once the bottom tier was in place, a second tier of smaller casks could be put on top in between the rows, wedged in to stop them shifting. There would be three or four rows in the bottom tier and there might, on larger ships, be a third tier on top. The smaller ships may not have used the larger sizes of casks.

  Despite the ‘bilge free’ ideal, that bottom tier of water casks would be almost permanently lying in wet shingle. This must have led to early deterioration and would explain the constant plaint from commanders-in-chief on all stations of the difficulties of maintaining stocks of water- and wine-casks, this despite the rule that ships going on foreign service were to be supplied with new casks. The Victualling Board were very fussy about casks; water- and wine-casks were never to be ‘shaken’ (ie taken to pieces) except in absolute necessity’ and then must be bundled with their hoops and labelled so they could be reassembled easily. It was undesirable to shake other casks, but often necessary to make it possible to get at the middle row of water casks. It is often suggested that food casks were automatically shaken to save space but on reflection, with the exception above, space may not have been an issue. You mainly need space to put supplies in, those supplies are going to come already packed in casks, in which case you can dispose of the empties and get a bigger credit for them if they are whole and the recipient does not have to pay a cooper to reassemble them. Of course, ships which were carrying such large quantities of supplies that they could not fit them all in the hold (for instance those going on very long voyages, or carrying troops) would store these on the decks, use these first and then shake them; others might do it when needing space to clear for action.

  The traditional method of stowing the hold (left) and orlop deck in the frigate Galatea, December 1802. Stowage was clearly dominated by the weight and volume of the laden casks – in this configuration the ship stowed a total of 92½ tons of water – which was vitally important for the trim and stability of the ship, and hence its sailing qualities. (PRO Adm 95/41)

  Theoretically, most ships, especially the larger ones, had a cooper on board. There is a special pay rate for them shown in the Regulations and sometimes a commander-in-chief mentions them in his correspondence; for instance, Sir James Borlase Warren offered to lend the flagship’s cooper to the victualling yard for a few days when he was on the North America station in 1808.14 However, there are also some remarks in the Victualling Board papers about the difficulty of persuading coopers to volunteer, given that they were in a ‘reserved’ occupation on a high wage, and a survey of muster and pay books for line-of-battle ships and frigates found them listed on less than a third of the ships, and those not necessarily First Rates.15 This does not mean no-one ever touched the casks when there was no qualified cooper on board – any competent carpenter can do what is necessary to remove the head from a barrel and put it back, and shaking a cask is simplicity itself – but it takes a very skilled man with special equipment to put a set of staves and hoops together to produce a watertight cask. Perhaps the rule was to provide coopers in only sufficient numbers to do this for a whole squadron, although a cooper’s duties would have included mak
ing small tubs and buckets for use in the sick-bay and elsewhere.

  One other thought which comes to mind about water casks is the business of ‘starting’ the water as a method, much loved by writers of naval fiction, of quickly lightening the ship when chasing or being chased. The theory of this is that you start the casks in the hold and then pump the water out using the ships’ main pumps. However, given that the casks were stored, as we saw above, bung up, one suspects that there was only one way to empty them quickly and that was to take an axe to them. Because they were stowed end to end, it would not be possible to knock in the heads, so it would have to be the staves that went; however, this could only be done with the specific (ie documented) instructions of the captain.16

  Each ship had two or more holds, although these would not necessarily be partitioned off. Goods access was through a series of hatches one above the other, through which casks in slings could be lowered by a system of pulleys from the yards or booms above. The general assumption is that water casks came up when they were empty and either new full ones went back down (certainly this happened when a transport brought water) or the empty ones were taken off in boats to a watering place. However, whilst it is all very well to hoist a 250-gallon leaguer into the hold with the aid of pulleys, it is quite another matter to get that full leaguer into a boat from the shore, although there were various methods of doing this. Wybourn reports a watering party at the Maddalena Islands using a triangle to hoist the casks into boats,17 while other possibilities were rolling them up a plank, or ‘rafting’ (ie towing them) out to the ship. Given the ever-present risk of hernias one wonders if watering parties used smaller casks and decanted the contents into the leaguers with pumps and pipes. They certainly had to do this once iron water tanks were introduced, as these were too big and too heavy when full to think of moving them.