Feeding Nelson's Navy

by Janet MacDonald

  The matter of provisions being ‘raised to the weight of sixteen ounces to the pound’ was due to the practice of pursers issuing rations at a rate of seven-eighths of the stated amounts, which gave rise to the expression ‘a pursers’ pound’, meaning fourteen ounces. This is often presented as a deliberate bit of chicanery by crooked pursers seeking to line their pockets at the expense of the long-suffering sailors, but it was nothing of the sort. As the Victualling Board knew full well, dispensing food from bulk and the various accidents that could happen on board was bound to lead to some wastage; the purser’s eighth was an officially-recognised buffer to allow him to balance his accounts. This is evidenced by their issuing a new set of weights two each purser, the old weights obviously having given short weight. As we shall see later when we look in depth at the pursers’ business, when the ration was ‘increased’ after the mutiny, the Victualling Board found another way to compensate the pursers for their wastage losses. Did pursers in general take advantage of the seamen by keeping them short of food? Some might have done, but given the situation of a ship full of dark nooks where aggrieved seamen could lurk with a belaying pin, it is unlikely to have been a general practice. Even without resorting to this sort of thing, the seamen had a mechanism for complaining about food, as for other complaints, and could take these complaints as far as their commander-in-chief if necessary.

  Groups of men with little else to do will often complain about the food; it is only when other things are wrong that they do more than complain. Unfairness over food was one of the grievances on Bounty in 1788 but it took a lot more before they were ready to rebel on the grand scale.10 There has been a more recent case, known to the historians at the Admiralty Library as ‘the great mashed potato mutiny’. At Singapore in 1945 the crew of the landing ship Northway were served badly-prepared reconstituted mashed potato after some had spent the morning peeling real potatoes (it transpired that the cooks had managed to burn these). This was the trigger to down tools and refuse orders to fall in, but again this single incident was not the sole cause, having been preceded by some weeks of complaints about the food in general. A court martial followed and various members of the crew were found guilty, the ringleader receiving five years penal servitude and the others minor punishments, mostly suspended detentions.11

  There have been other minor mutinies related to bad beer, but in general they are very rare. This indicates pretty strongly that although the men might have enjoyed chilling the marrow of gullible civilians with stories of awful food, the reality was rather different.

  Chapter 1

  BASIC RATIONS

  _____

  AS WE HAVE SEEN, the navy had a laid-down scale of victualling, but that rather bald table does not tell even half the story. It is worth considering each item, or ‘species’ as they called it, to examine exactly what it was and where it came from. Things that could go wrong and how this was dealt with are discussed in Chapter 3, as are the logistics of loading, handling and stowing. The detail of issuing and cooking the food and how and when it was eaten are discussed in Chapters 4 and 5.

  BREAD AND BISCUIT

  The staple item of the seaman’s diet was a daily pound of bread or biscuit. To a certain extent the two words were used to mean the same thing; when they meant bread in loaf form, they called it ‘soft bread’. For the general below-decks population, this was only available when in port, or (assuming there was someone on board capable of baking it) when they were in the sickbay. When Gibraltar was stationed in Naples harbour for long periods in 1803 and 1804, the master’s log shows that she received a daily delivery of 600 ‘soft’ loaves; when a delivery was missed (perhaps due to a Saint’s day) they had a double delivery on the day before or after. Since there were about 600 men on board, this suggests that each loaf weighed one pound; there is no indication of whether this bread was white or wholemeal.1

  In England, bread production was subject to legislation which covered the weight of loaves, the type of flour used and how loaves were to be marked. Those made of ‘fine white’ flour (actually a pale cream colour) was the most expensive, as this flour had to be ‘bolted’ (sieved) through fine cloth and thus was more time-consuming and difficult to produce; loaves made from this flour had to be marked with a ‘W’ The next type was ‘standard wheaten’ bread, marked ‘SW’ which is more or less what we call wholemeal today, except that this meal could contain quite large pieces of grain. The cheapest and lowest quality bread, made with seconds flour, was called ‘household’ bread and was marked ‘H’. The most popular was the white loaf; this popularity lead to unscrupulous bakers adding alum, which improved the texture of a loaf made from inferior flour as well as improving the colour. The naval surgeon turned novelist Tobias Smollett was quick to join other alarmists in stating that chalk or bonemeal was used, but this is unlikely as these additives would have spoiled the texture of the loaves and reduced their size.

  Other unofficial additions were flour from cheaper grains such as barley or rye, or pea flour, but all of these were dark and thus could only be used with the brown flours. They would also, since they contain less gluten than wheat, make for a poorly textured loaf. However, when bad harvests caused steep price rises, these and other things were added to wheat flour. The Board of Agriculture did conduct experiments with buckwheat, maize, oats, chestnuts, turnips and potatoes. More specifically, between 1793 and 1800 and in 1809 the Victualling Board experimented with mixtures of wheat, molasses and potato, or wheat, molasses and barley; of the two, the captains whose crews had eaten them reported that the first type was preferred but that it looked and tasted rather like gingerbread.2 The author has made the same experiments: buckwheat flour and cooked mashed potato do make quite good light bread if added to wheat flour in the proportion of three parts wheat to one part buckwheat/potato; the other items make a dense heavy bread which is tolerable when fresh but tends to go green and hairy after three or four days. Turnip or swede bread is acceptable on the day of baking but then takes on an unpleasant ‘cabbage water’ flavour. Bread made of good wheat flour alone will keep in a sealed container for up to ten days.

  Given all of the above, it is not surprising that the Royal Navy preferred biscuit to bread. Biscuit would keep for many months, it came in handy pieces, and because it did not require any form of leaven it did not need any great skill to make and it could be made in large quantities more quickly than the equivalent weight of soft bread. And the ingredients were simplicity itself: flour, water, a minimal amount of salt. The method was equally simple: water was added to flour, it was mixed, kneaded until smooth, rolled, cut, stamped with the broad arrow (affectionately known as the ‘crow’s foot’) which marked it as Crown property, baked, cooled and packed.3 This process required no great degree of knowledge or careful temperature control, both of which were essential for the methods of bread-making used at the time. For bread the flour was put in a trough, a hollow was made in it, and leaven and some of the water was added. It then had to be left for an hour or more while it fermented, before the rest of the water was added and mixed in. It was then kneaded, left to rise for an hour or so, kneaded again, cut up and shaped, left to rise again and finally baked. This whole process meant more space, more time, and, because it was essential that the dough had to be in a certain condition at its various stages, it also required trained bakers who could recognise when the dough was ready to work with.

  It should be explained that the forms of leaven available at that time were not as dependable as they are now. Some yeasts were available from the brewing industry but since, as we will see below, brewing was a seasonal activity, fresh yeast was not always on hand; dried forms of yeast were not developed until well into the nineteenth century.4 The alternative was what we now know as ‘sour-dough starters’; these are retained amounts of risen dough which are added to new flour and water and then work by feeding on the new flour. This process takes longer than using yeast, and requires an even more skilled eye than does yeast-raised d
ough.

  Some of the biscuit was bought from outside contractors, some was made by the Victualling Board at its depots in Deptford, Portsmouth and Plymouth, and later in some of its victualling yards abroad.5 They were made of wholemeal, some of the surviving specimens containing quite large pieces of recognisable wheat grains. The contracts for outside bakers stated that the biscuits should ‘weigh not less than five to the pound’ (ie at least 3.2 ounces or 91 grams each) and that they should be packed in bags of a hundredweight. The shape was not specified and they could be square, round or octagonal, usually pricked with holes and with the broad arrow and a letter designating the bakery stamped in the middle. This compressed the dough, making the middle even harder than the rest; eaters tended to leave this hard piece until last, designating them ‘pursers’ nuts’.

  It was almost impossible to bite into these biscuits without first soaking them. The normal technique was to break bits off on the edge of the table, or to use a hard object to crush them, having first wrapped them in a piece of cloth to avoid explosive dispersal. These pieces could be sucked and chewed, or added to soup or gravy. Despite their hardness, these biscuits were tasty enough. It was when they became damp that the taste deteriorated and the livestock moved in. The secret of keeping the biscuit dry and sweet was to pack it in airtight boxes; the Dutch knew this as early as the seventeenth century. American sailors knew it too, but somehow the message did not get through to the British Admiralty until well into the nineteenth century. Captain Basil Hall, writing of his experiences during the War of 1812, remarked on this: American biscuit, he said, was tasty and good quality and he attributed this to their practice of keeping it sealed up until needed, whereas the British practice was to ventilate the bread room in fine weather with the aid of wind-sails which funnelled air down from above. Unfortunately in warm weather this air was warm and moist while the cellar-like bread room was cold; the biscuit absorbed this damp air and the process of deterioration started.6

  When the bread ran short, or had deteriorated beyond the eatable stage, the standard substitute was rice, issued on an equal-weight basis: one pound of uncooked rice was considered by the Victualling Board to be equal to one pound of biscuit. Since it was only ever referred to as ‘rice’, we do not know whether this rice was brown or the polished white version.

  MEAT

  The meat ration, as shown in the table on page 10, seems straightforward: beef twice a week and pork twice a week, but the true situation was rather more complex. Far from land, both the beef and the pork would be salted, and as long as there were adequate stocks of both, the ration would be one pound of salt pork on two days and, theoretically, two pounds of salt beef on two days. However, the Regulations state: ‘For the better preservation of the health of the seamen, it is ordered, that one day in every week there shall be issued out to them a proportion of flour and suet in lieu of beef…’ and it goes on to say that they were also to be supplied with canvas for pudding bags.7 This seems to suggest that on one day a week dinner consisted of suet pudding and no meat, but this is unlikely. What probably happened was that half of each mess opted for flour and suet one day while the other half opted for beef, then the process was reversed on the other beef day, so each beef day consisted of one pound of beef with suet pudding for each man. The official substitution rate was four pounds of flour, or three pounds of flour and one pound of raisins, being equal to four pounds of beef, and half a pound of suet being equal to one pound of raisins. The normal ratio for suet puddings or dumplings is, to quote the pastry cooks mantra, ‘half fat to flour’. Fat, for either puddings or dumplings, does not have to be suet; beef dripping or the beef fat that rises to the top of the liquid when the meat is boiled will do as well. So although the issue of three pounds of flour and a half-pound of suet would in theory leave a spare two pounds of flour, there was scope for obtaining other fat for puddings as well as using the flour in other ways.

  Pork, as far as the crew were concerned, usually meant salt pork. Officers might, and often did, keep pigs on board and there was theoretically no reason why some of the men should not, with the captain’s permission, have done the same, but the only record of this being allowed serves to demonstrate the problems attached. In 1780 Thomas Pasley in the Sibyl (28) was en route to the Cape of Good Hope to collect a convoy of Indiamen and he stopped at the Cape Verde islands for water. He found there was plenty of food to be bought and allowed his men to buy what they wanted; he remarked that few of the messes did not buy ‘three or four pigs, as many goats and half a dozen fowls’. Then a couple of days later they sailed and he commented that the ship was absolutely full of hogs and goats and resolved that he would have to order the hogs to be killed first, as the goats made much less mess. A little reflection allows one to calculate that a 28-gun frigate would have somewhere in the region of 30 messes and thus over 100 pigs and the same number of goats on board.8

  As the table shows, pork was issued with pease and as far as the Victualling Board was concerned, it always was; the substitution of fresh meat was on the basis of three pounds of fresh meat being equivalent to ‘a two-pound piece of Salt Pork with Pease’.9 Pork of any sort is an unfashionable meat now among the anti-fat brigade and even those who are not fanatical about avoiding fat often express distaste at the idea of salt pork. This is strange: what are ham, gammon and bacon if not salted pork meat? And what of the popular French dish petit sale? Beef might also be salted and here again some modern people do not like the idea, but it is, in many forms, a classic dish: British boiled beef and carrots, New England boiled dinner, Jewish hot salt beef sandwiches, pastrami, and corned beef (so-called because it was preserved with large grains or ‘corns’ of salt). These are the modern equivalents of what Georgian sailors were eating.

  Salt meat, classed with butter as ‘wet’ provisions (‘dry’ being cereals and pease), came either ready-packed from contractors or arrived on the hoof at the British victualling yards, to be slaughtered and salted-down there. A very high proportion of the pre-packed meat came from Ireland and most of that from ‘the ox-slaying city of Cork’, the ‘slaughter-house of Ireland’; the rest came from the adjacent cities of Limerick and Waterford. The wet provisioners of Cork were proud of their reputation for quality; in 1769 they had formed a committee and established a grading system to enable high standards to be set and maintained.10 In both Ireland and England, the cattle travelled long distances to the great autumn cattle fairs, modern estimates suggesting that somewhere in the region of 80,000 cattle changed hands each year at the London fairs alone. Some of the cattle sold at Barnet Fair (north of London) had started their journey in Anglesey, swimming the Menai Straits and walking on shod hooves along the drove roads to their destinations.11 You can still see evidence of these routes in parts of England, where the modern road has very wide grass verges.

  The killing season began in the autumn and carried on through the winter, partly because meat killed and packed in cool weather keeps better than that prepared when it is warm and partly because the difficulty of feeding cattle through the winter months meant that farmers did not want to keep them. It was not until after the end of the Napoleonic Wars that the practice of growing turnips and other roots for winter feed was generally adopted. The temperature at killing time was even more critical for pigs, so that season started a good month later than for cattle. Pigs, like cattle, were driven to market but over much shorter distances; they lose weight quickly and, being rather more intelligent than cattle, are much more troublesome to control. Since pig-fattening was a more intensive activity than cattle-raising, some farmers tended to specialise on a large scale, especially those close to the big cities. These specialist pig-fatteners often fed the pigs on brewers’ grains, the barley which had been used in the brewing and distilling process. It was not long before some laterally-thinking brewers and distillers realised that they could make more money by fattening pigs than by selling the exhausted grain, and they set up fattening sheds next to the breweries. In 17
40 there was some discussion between the Victualling Board and the Admiralty about the relative merits of this ‘town-fed’ pork and whether it reduced in weight when cooked more than the ‘country-fed’ version, which finally concluded that there was no difference between the two types. They thought that the ‘town-fed’ version ought to be cheaper and was therefore preferable for that reason.12