One final thought on naval food in the French navy is that whatever the official Ordonnances said, there must have been the regional variations that can be seen today: butter, beef, leeks and apples in the north; olives and their oil, pork and dried fruit in the south.
THE SPANISH NAVY
Information on Spanish naval food has proved to be very sparse. After 1768, there seems to have been a basic daily ration of wholemeal biscuit, vegetables and wine with salt meat or pork with ‘animal fat’ provided every day except Friday. On Friday, and Thursday and Saturday during Lent, salt cod, olive oil and vinegar were served. Sometimes, but on an irregular basis, there was cheese instead of the meat or fish. For the sick there was chicken and biscuit made with white flour.
Some further possibilities can be found from the rations supplied to the navies of the new South American republics of Chile and Argentina, which were probably based on those of Spain, and that of Portugal, which had the same sort of terrain and thus agriculture as Spain itself. Created in 1818, the Chilean Navy gave a daily issue of one pound of dried or salt beef, one pound of biscuit, one ounce of animal fat, half a pound of lentils, quarter of a pint of spirits and quarter of an ounce of red peppers. Given such a small quantity of peppers, these were almost certainly hot (ie chilli) peppers in dried form rather than the sweet red capsicum which we eat raw in salads. When in port, they had fresh bread instead of biscuit, and potatoes and vegetables instead of lentils and peppers, and a double ration of spirits, which was mainly rum. For the sick, there was half a chicken, six ounces of chick peas, one pound of fine biscuit, one ounce of animal fat and a quarter of a pint of rum.
The Argentinean Navy, when they prepared for their first war against Brazil in 1826, loaded food for 1300 men for thirty days consisting of almost 40,000 kilos of dried meat (this works out to just over two pounds of meat per man per day), 30,000 kilos of biscuit (one and a half pounds per man per day) and 7500 kilos of rice (just under half a pound per man per day), 1900 gallons of rum (just under half a pint per man per day) and a small amount of animal fat. This seems rather heavy on meat and completely lacks any element of vegetables, so perhaps it was intended to obtain other supplies in due course. It does however indicate the use of local methods of meat preservation: drying rather than salting, which would have the virtue of reducing the total weight carried.
A decree of 1797 set the basic ration for the Portuguese Navy at a daily ration of one pound of biscuit or one and a half pounds of flour, two-thirds of a pint of beans or onions, one pint of wine, one-thirtieth of a pint of oil, one-fifteenth of a pint of vinegar, coffee and sugar, and a meat ration of either one pound of salt beef or three-quarters of a pound of pork, or eight ounces of rice with two ounces of pork fat, or (on Fridays and fast days) half a pound of rice and salt fish.
Some general comments on these rations: ‘animal fat’ could be interpreted as beef or mutton suet or pork fat (ie lard). ‘Meat’ presumably does not mean pork, as this is listed separately but, although it could mean sheep or goat meat, was probably beef. Fish would have been served rather more frequently than once a week, given that all of these countries were Catholic; the actual frequency would have depended on the incidence of Saints’ and fast days, the piety of the captain, and/or the influence of any priests on board.
Sheep, goats and poultry were carried, probably belonging to the officers. One can surmise that these officers would have provided themselves with better food than the men enjoyed.10
CONCLUSIONS
Thinking of those two academic questions, it seems that there really was very little difference in the way different navies fed their men. Like the British navy, all were restricted by what was currently available and would keep in good condition for a long time, and with some regional variations, this came down to biscuit, salt or dried meat or fish, cereals, dried pulses and a little cheese and butter or oil with fresh food when in port. Quantities must have been adequate most of the time or there would have been more mutinies, especially in the French Republican navy where the men were less respectful of their officers; on the other hand, they did suffer from scurvy rather more than did the British and in some cases this affected them strategically.
Taking that second academic question (‘Did the difference in the way we did it and the way they did it have an effect on the outcome?’), although there was a general opinion among British seamen that foreigners were not as good in a fight as ‘an Englishman’, there is no evidence that this, even if true, was related to the quality or quantity of food, other than those reports of hungry men raiding the British provision stocks. The real reason for French and Spanish inadequacies during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were more likely to have stemmed from the fact that British blockades deprived them of sea time and practice.
Chapter 7
DIET IN HEALTH AND SICKNESS
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WE HAVE SEEN THAT THE Georgian seaman’s food was, if not full of variety, at least plentiful and of reasonably good quality. In an age when a sequence of poor harvests might, and in some parts of Europe did, turn the fear of serious food shortages into actuality, those two certainties were not to be sniffed at. Looking at it with modern eyes, people might consider that the official ration was over-heavy in meat and fat but in the short term, given the work those men did, it would have done little harm as it would mostly have been burned off to provide energy and warmth. The problems that might follow from an excess of animal fats do not usually manifest themselves until late middle age and it must be remembered that most seamen were considerably younger than that. The next aspect of the ration which brings a frown to the modern brow is the high salt content; although the salt meat was steeped before cooking, it was probably still very salty. We fear salt-induced strokes, but as with arterial problems, that is an affliction of late middle age. Nobody appears to have kept any statistically-significant records of health problems in late middle-aged ex-seamen, so we cannot know if any of these problems did manifest themselves.
As far as we are concerned here, there are two sorts of health problem: those which were not reported in a form which allows us to identify them as relating to diet and those which were. By 1800 there was a standard printed form for the ships’ surgeons to complete each week and where these forms were not available a hand-written version in the same format was used. A number of these forms have survived, the greatest number of them for the Mediterranean Fleet during the period 1800 to 1805, when the fleet was under the command of first Lord Keith and then Nelson.1 For Keith’s fleet there are forms for individual ships, while for Nelson’s fleet there are consolidated forms prepared by the Physician of the Fleet, one per week, for whichever ships happened to be with the battle squadron at that time. In both cases, the purpose of these forms was obviously to keep the commander-in-chief informed and he, in turn, passed this information back to the Admiralty.
It should be stressed that the available report forms for the Mediterranean are merely those which have survived and also are only those for the ships which were actually in company with the commander-in-chief at the time they were submitted. We do not have a complete set of reports for the whole Mediterranean Fleet, and although there are some returns of numbers in hospital, these are also sporadic, do not necessarily report the specific conditions involved, and do not always distinguish between Royal Navy personnel and prisoners. So we cannot draw any comprehensive conclusions on the level of sickness throughout the station from these reports, but they do give an indication of the prevalence of certain medical conditions and of the numbers of men involved. We do have some commanders-in-chief’s reports for the Channel Fleet for the period 1793 to 1801, and we will come back to these shortly.
ALCOHOLISM
The most obvious of the diseases which were not reported as such is alcoholism. Five-sixths of a modern gallon of small beer per day does not do too much harm to a man whose life consists of extremely hard physical work in cold, damp conditions; he burns it off pretty qui
ckly. Nor does a daily five-sixths of a pint of wine do much harm. Indeed, by current thinking, it would counteract the potentially harmful effects of all that fatty meat. Half a pint of very strong rum is another matter: although it would take some time before it irrevocably damaged the liver, it would have kept some men in an almost permanent state of intoxication.
Although there are no actual figures, it was often remarked that many shipboard accidents were caused by rum: falls from the rigging, falls down open hatchways, heavy items being dropped, heads meeting low beams, drunken fights, etc. Keith remarked on it: ‘a large population of the men who are maimed and disabled are reduced to that situation by accidents that happen from [drunkenness]’; and the surgeon Blane pointed out that the incidence of insanity in the Royal Navy was seven times that of the general population (ie one in 1000 as opposed to one in 7000). Blane suggested that this was mostly due to head injuries from drunken accidents.2 Quite a few men were invalided out as insane and there is a suggestion that many of these were in the advanced stages of alcoholism or showing the effects of blows to the head from those low beams. Quite a few officers were invalided out for what, in their case, tended to be called ‘diseased liver’. However, it should be pointed out that as far as the lower-deck men were concerned, since many of them were ‘quota men’ who had been wished on the navy by local authorities who saw this as a way to clear their jails, many could have already been borderline, if not actually, insane from the outset, and this could be what skewed the figures.
NIGHT BLINDNESS
The next problem which was rarely reported unless it afflicted a high proportion of a ship’s crew is night blindness. An outbreak was reported in the West Indies squadron in the early 1800s and Gilbert Blane reported having encountered it in soldiers during the siege of Gibraltar in 1779.3 Night blindness is brought about by prolonged deficiency of Vitamin A in the diet – prolonged’ meaning anything up to two years before the stores in the liver of normally-nourished people are diminished. Vitamin A comes in two forms: retinol or beta-carotene. Retinol is found only in animal or fish foods, the greatest amounts in liver and lesser amounts in dairy products and eggs. Beta-carotene is converted in the body to retinol and is found in yellow and green vegetables and some fruits. The deeper the colour, the more beta-carotene, so there is more in the outer leaves of a Savoy cabbage than the inner and even more in watercress, more in carrots than dried peas. The only fruit with appreciable quantities are mangoes, apricots and plums. For full details of amounts of Vitamin A in food, see Appendix 4.
Given that the recommended daily intake of Vitamin A for an adult man is 1000 µg, and that there is very little of it in the standard species of provisions except for butter and cheese, on those foreign stations where neither butter and cheese nor the alternative sources were available, it is likely that it occurred far more than anyone realised. Since night blindness is not a debilitating affliction, it may only have been noticed when lookouts or steersmen in restricted situations| failed to see something at night or in other dim light. This is the most likely reason for so few reports, not, as has been asserted, because of the general introduction of portable soup. There are two problems with this assertion: the first is that portable soup was only given to the sick; the second is that it does not contain any Vitamin A. The belief that it does contain Vitamin A arises from the statement that portable soup was made with offal, the erroneous assumption here being that ‘offal’ in 1756, when Mrs Dubois started making portable soup for the Sick and Hurt Board in London, meant what it does now and thus would include the retinol-rich liver and kidneys.
Alas, the secondary source which reported the use of offal failed to read on down the original document, which defines offal as ‘legs and shins’ of beef, then adds that one-third of the meat could be mutton.4 The following year, the appropriately-named Mrs Cookworthy was contracted to make portable soup at Plymouth, both she and Mrs Dubois using meat provided by the Victualling Board slaughterhouses. By 1804, a letter confirms that the only meat used since 1756 was leg and shin of beef with one-quarter of mutton. Shin of beef contains quite a lot of gelatinous connective tissue and it is this which makes the broth set like jelly, not the addition of calves feet suggested by yet another misguided modern writer. Anyone who is in the habit of cooking from basic ingredients will be aware of this property of shin of beef and will also know that liver and kidneys do not produce that result when boiled. Indeed, it was that knowledge which made the author, deeply sceptical, seek out the original documents, one of which fortuitously included the recipe. This showed that the meat was simmered for several hours, then drained and pressed to extract all the stock, which was then seasoned with celery seed, black pepper, garlic and essence of thyme. The end product, after reduction and drying, was a cake of solid jelly (stamped, of course, with the King’s broad arrow mark), one ounce of which would make one quart of soup when dissolved in boiling water.5 Contrary to some modern comments, this soup bears no resemblance to glue; it is extremely tasty (see Appendix 6 for the recipe).
Before moving on to the main dietary deficiency disease of sailors, scurvy, it is worth remarking that, while there are other vitamin deficiency diseases, we have no evidence that they afflicted sailors on a grand scale, which is not to suggest that they did not, merely that they were not reported in a form which makes them recognisable as such.
SCURVY
Scurvy was something you could not miss. It has easily recognisable symptoms: bruising and ulceration of the skin, haemorrhaging and joint pains, loosening of the teeth, loss of hair, opening-up of old wounds, lassitude and depression, hallucinations and blindness, and finally death. Now we know that it is due to a deficiency of Vitamin C which leads to the breakdown of the body’s production of the connective tissue collagen; then all they knew was that it was a disease which wreaked havoc among sailors on long voyages.
Scurvy was reported in two forms: scurvy and ulcers. Sometimes there was a separate entry on the forms for ‘scorbutic ulcers’; but it is probable that almost all, if not all, of these were of scorbutic origin, persistently ulcerated skin being one of the common symptoms of scurvy.6 They would not have been peptic ulcers, as these were not identified until 1857;7 this is not to say that seamen did not suffer from such ulcers, but that these would have been listed under different headings.8 The ulcers reported would probably have been mainly on the lower legs and feet; Dr Snipe, the Physician of the Mediterranean Fleet, remarked on the high incidence of such ulcerated scratches and condemned the practice of going barefoot as the cause.9
The earliest record of scurvy is from Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India in 1497, when he lost 100 of his 160 men; there have been many since. Perhaps the best known to British naval historians is Anson’s circumnavigation in 1740. Of the more than 1900 men who sailed with Anson, some 1400 died, and although some died of dysentery and the crew of the Wager of starvation, it is thought that the majority died of scurvy, many possibly because they were already weakened from having been confined to their ships at Spithead during a series of Admiralty-induced delays.10 Despite the good effects of citrus fruit having been known as an antiscorbutic since at least 1600, when the East India Company surgeon John Wooddall recommended it, the Anson expedition carried no citrus or other antiscorbutics.
It was the reports of this expedition which inspired the young Scottish naval surgeon James Lind to seek an effective cure for scurvy. He was not the first to think that scurvy could be cured by diet supplements, but he was the first to set about finding a cure by conducting logical experiments. This was, of itself, somewhat of a novelty at the time; previous attempts to find a cure having been on a rather hit-or-miss basis. It is when you consider some of the theories on the causes of scurvy and the ‘obvious’ cures that you begin to see the gulf between Georgian and modern medical theory.
The first thought, because some of the symptoms were similar, was that scurvy was a venereal disease. After all, sailors were known to be promiscuous and since no-on
e thought to question the sufferers on the matter and collate the answers, it was never disproved. Another theory, based on the doctrine of four humours, was that scurvy was a corruption of the blood, leading to putrefaction. This demonstrates another great gulf between modern and ancient medical thinking; now, when disease occurs on a grand scale, we believe it must have a specific cause rather than being a generalised imbalance of the whole body. The doctrine of four humours was originally promulgated around 400 BC by Hippocrates, who believed that the four humours were the principle seats of disease. Galen, some 500 years later, taught that as well as the four humours, there were four qualities, four elements and four complexions, all inter-related. His theory was that good health came from a good blend of all these; that specific diseases were linked to an excess or deficit of some, and that different foods had different qualities in different degrees. So, if you were suffering from an affliction which was hot and moist, you needed food or medicine which was cool and dry, and depending on the degree of the affliction, so you needed a balancing degree of the appropriate curative. At this point, a cynic might observe that such a complex doctrine could only be understood by a learned man, and that such a man would charge a large fee for his hard-learned knowledge and would also defend it vigorously against any alternative theories.
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