Feeding Nelson's Navy

by Janet MacDonald

  Before obtaining his warrant, the purser had to find two other people to stand as surety for him, in amounts relating to the rate of the ship: starting at £1200 for a First Rate and reducing to £400 for a Sixth Rate or sloop. However, ‘For encouraging him to a zealous and faithful discharge of his duty’, after his accounts were passed, in addition to the wages for himself and his servant he received a commission based on the amounts of provisions he had dispensed, ranging from tuppence per pound of cheese to three shillings per bushel of pease. His wages were not over-generous: he received an amount related to the rate of the ship; in 1790 this was set at £4 per lunar month for a First Rate, reducing to £2 for a Sixth Rate, then in 1806 this was increased to £4.16.0 reducing to £3.1.0. In all Rates he was allowed a steward, in First to Fourth Rates his steward was allowed a mate.34

  As well as accounting for all the food that came onto the ship, the purser had to account for its use on a ‘per man, per day’ level. He had to keep a copy of the muster book, noting when each man joined or left the ship and why; when they were away on duty (perhaps manning a prize) and when they were taken to the sick bay, at which point they were fed on a different basis. The purser also had charge of slop clothing, beds and tobacco; the men had to pay for these, by deduction from their wages. If they wanted more tobacco than their normal ration, the purser was allowed to sell it to them from his private stock. All of these items, except the private stock, had not only to be noted against each man’s name in the purser’s muster book, but in a sequence of other books: an appearance (ie joining the ship) and discharge book for all men, a book of all sick men sent out of the ship, a slop book, a tobacco book, and a book detailing every cask or package of provisions brought aboard, with full details of the identifying marks on each so the origin of defective items could be identified, and separate lists of all these defective items together with the formal certified documents of survey condemning them as not fit for men to eat’.

  Finally he had to keep receipts for, and details of, purchases and issues of ‘necessaries’. This term covered all items which were either not supplied through victualling yards or for some reason had to be bought on the open market, such as candles, ‘lanthorns’, turneryware (wooden utensils for the men to eat from) and coal. For all these items he was allowed a sum of between fourteen and seventeen pence per man per lunar month, depending on the size of the ship and the categories of men involved. He could either draw cash for necessary purchases from an agent victualler, or when away from a victualling port, could draw Bills of Exchange on the Victualling Board if supported by his captain, using the same method to purchase fresh meat and vegetables.

  All of this was comparatively easy when in home waters, where most of a ship’s requirements could be obtained from the outports and the rest purchased in sterling. It was when abroad that the documentation became more complex. Victualling yards were fewer and thus more items would have to be purchased from local merchants, each transaction requiring certification from two or three ‘principal inhabitants’ (one of whom would ideally be the local governor or consul) that the amount paid was the current market price. In addition, full details had to be given of the currency used and its exchange rate at the time of the transaction, this also requiring certification. For larger transactions and where the seller was amenable, the purser could pay by drawing a Bill of Exchange on the Victualling Board. The preferred format for these and an explanation of how the Bill system worked is shown in Appendix 5.

  Finally, whether in home or foreign waters, the purser had to keep full stock records. When he joined or left a ship, a ‘survey’ or full stock-take of all his stores had to be performed and certified by three warrant officers; when the commission was completed and the ship laid up, all the remaining provisions had to be returned to the victualling stores and he had to accompany them to see them properly received and accounted for. And of course, whenever ships passed provisions between them, both pursers had to prepare and exchange ‘warrants’ and ‘distinct accounts’ of those transactions.

  If for any reason any species of provisions were not available, or were refused by the men as being bad, or if provisions were saved for other reasons such as the boys receiving less than the full allowance of wine or spirits, the purser had to keep track of the value of these provisions and pay it over to the men in cash, theoretically at no greater than quarterly intervals. This ‘short allowance’ money was considered sufficiently important to warrant its own chapter and printed form in the Regulations. It was to be paid in cash, at sterling value but in local currency, with the men having the benefit of the exchange and the money was to be paid to each individual in person, regardless of debt notes or other financial obligations. This is probably how the men obtained the money which they would spend on shore or when the bumboats came calling.

  This makes it appear that the purser’s life was, if complex from an accounting point of view, at least safe financially: provisions were either expended by issuing them to the men or declared inedible and the subject of an accounting credit. Alas, poor purser, the Victualling Board were not that generous. Even after the Spithead mutiny, when he was officially allowed a margin for wastage, he only received that allowance after his accounts were passed, not before to make up any shortages. There were also various situations in which he did not receive any allowances. Leakage of wine or spirits or oil once the casks had been checked on receipt were considered to be his personal problem and he might even be refused credit for items which had been legitimately surveyed and condemned: one unfortunate purser produced survey certificates for a large quantity of bread which had been eaten by cockroaches, but the Victualling Board refused him any credit, on the grounds that this might create a dangerous precedent. Nor, if he was bulk-buying at a non-victualling port and needed to store his purchases, could he claim for the cost of that storage, or for hiring boats. Small wonder that albatrosses, with their propensity for following ships for days on end, were said to be the souls of dead pursers, desperately seeking a ship that would allow them to recover their losses.

  Many pursers, no doubt, did resort to sharp practice to make ends meet. It is not unusual to find them being court-martialled for fiddling their vouchers or even being prosecuted by the Victualling Board for various frauds. There are many time-honoured ways of building up a ‘reserve’ stock of items to replace those lost by accident: for instance, one wonders what quantities of items which were reported as damaged in battle were reserves of this sort. A good purser who was a competent book-keeper did not have to resort to such things, and could rise up the career ladder from small ship to large one; a few made the next step from purser to agent victualler at one of the victualling ports; some even made a further step by acting as prize agents to the officers and men of the ships on their station. If he was astute and entrepreneurial, a purser could make quite a bit on the side by stocking and selling various small items to the officers and men, from crockery to pepper and from warm socks to boot polish. Many would have anticipated a retirement career as a ships’ chandler on shore.

  Of those who failed – and judging by the volume of the Victualling Board’s letters to the Admiralty suggesting write-offs of irrecoverable pursers’ debts, there were many of these – some may have had bad luck but many more were the victims of their own incompetence and bad judgement, sometimes with a dash of ill-health thrown in. Samuel Grant was probably typical of this latter sort. The son of a merchant in Aberdeen, he had been purser of various ships, ending up in Pembroke and then Goliath between the late 1790s and 1803; some of his papers have survived and they tell enough of his story to give a picture of the whole. His journals are a mixture of brief personal diary entries and notes of money lent and borrowed. He was not well and mentions this frequently, once remarking that he was a little better and had been able to leave off the flannel from his throat and to prevent catching cold, tyed a lock of my dear Jeannies Hair round my Neck in its stead’. Then he says that the commander-in-chief has w
ritten to Admiral Campbell to call him to account for neglect of duty, and adds ‘He may be Damn’d’. After a while, the ship came back to England and Grant went home to his Jeannie, leaving his steward to sort out the remaining stores but it transpires that the steward had been lining his own pocket.

  After a sequence of letters to and fro, Grant wrote to the steward accusing him of selling the ship’s stores and embezzling the stocks of candles; the steward returned this letter with a cheeky note scrawled on it, which basically says ‘Hard Luck’ Then there is a statement from Grant’s bankers, Thomas Coutts & Co, and an instruction to them to sell some stocks. A tiny piece of paper, from the constable of the parish where he lived, summoned him to appear and bring details of his income; a copy of the statement prepared for this meeting shows that his income for the year was his net pay of just over £30 and investment income of £65. It is clear that he was in money trouble as well as ill-health. He tried to find someone to take his place on Goliath but failed; he had to go back to sea and his health and spirits suffered again. In the last file, a letter from a friend tells him to buck up and a copy letter from him shows he wrote to the Physician of the Fleet saying that his health was getting worse and begging to go home by the first possible ship. The final, poignant, letter is a formal one from the secretary of the Victualling Board to Grant’s bankers, asking if they want the various documents found in the trunk of ‘the late Samuel Grant, purser of Goliath’.35

  VERMIN

  Rapacious stewards were not the only vermin to bother pursers. To the modern mind, the idea that ships should be constantly infested with varying levels of rats and insects is horrific, but at that time, although it was possible to control these pests, it was impossible to eradicate them. Wooden ships were full of havens where rodents and assorted insects could hide away and breed and when there had been a major blitz to reduce numbers, others could get on board easily enough. Mice are rarely mentioned. They were, perhaps, less likely to climb the mooring ropes, and there were few stores brought aboard in the forms which usually carry mice, except the occasional fodder and bedding for cattle. Perhaps the rats killed them.

  We do not know exactly what sort of rats they were. They could have been the common brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) or the black rat (R. rattus), both of which have the alternate name of ‘ship rat’ It is the latter which brought the bubonic plague to Europe in the fourteenth century. Rats were ever-present on ships and a constant nuisance. They breed at an alarming rate, producing litters of eight or more every couple of months. They gnawed their way into storerooms, bread bags and even casks, and once in they fouled much of what they did not eat. They also damaged other things besides food: sails, clothing and paperwork. Bittern, in the Mediterranean in 1803, has a note in the masters log explaining that a twelve-week gap was due to ‘vermine’ having attacked the rough log ‘being all cut to pieces so as to render it impossible to copy it with any degree of correctness…’. This conjures up a picture of the clerk opening the box or bag and discovering a family of little pink ratlings, all cosy in shredded paper; it also gives an interesting insight into the system of ‘fair’ copying. None of the logs for Bittern cover this missing period and it is common on many ships for all the logs (lieutenants’, masters’ and captains’) to be in the same hand and almost identical wording; some sets have identical doodled enhancement of capital letters. There was no report of what Bittern did about the rats, but the storeship William, when in Malta dockyard, reports ‘smoked the ship with charcoal to kill the rats which had done a great deal of damage to the crew and ships stores’: the next day they found fifty-two dead rats and the following day ‘upwards of 20 dead rats in different parts of the ship’.36

  However, rats were not entirely bad news. There are many reports of rats being caught by wily sailors and offered for sale to the hungry (an almost permanent state for the numerous growing boys on board most ships); peppered, salted and grilled, they were declared to be good to eat. They taste rather like rabbit and like all fresh meat, contain small amounts of Vitamin C; the Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane who spent one winter trapped in the ice believed that his willingness to eat rats was the reason he was the only one of the crew to avoid scurvy.37 Many people cringe at the idea of eating rat but this is totally irrational; they are considered a delicacy by aboriginal peoples in much of the developing world, as are their close relatives the grey squirrel (Scirius carolinensis) in North America; every nationality (except those whose dietary laws forbid it) eats shrimps, lobsters and crabs, all of which have far nastier habits than rats.

  The other ship-borne pest which everyone thinks they know about is the weevil: the cause of biscuits which moved like clockwork was supposed to be black-headed maggots which tasted metallic. This comes from Smollett; he probably got it from Antonio Pigafetta who sailed round the world in 1520 with Magellan; and it was then repeated by Masefield and so on down to the present day, many of the stories embroidered to the extent that it is assumed that all biscuits were like this. Some real accounts of damaged biscuits tell of ‘cockroaches’ having reduced the biscuits to powder, assuming that because ‘cockroaches’ were present, they were the culprits. They were wrong on several counts, as was Pigafetta, Smollett and everyone who has repeated these stories ever since.

  The reddish-brown beetle which was taken for a cockroach was actually the Cadelle Beetle (Tenebroides mauritanicus), and its larvae, up to 20mm long, are those black-headed white maggots called bargemen by sailors because they crept out of the biscuits into the bread ‘barge’, the small tub used to hold biscuits on the mess table. These bargemen did not eat the biscuits themselves, but instead ate the minute Bread Beetle (Stegobium paniceum) or its larvae. The Bread Beetle (no bigger than 4mm) is not a weevil either, but a relative of the woodworm. It is the larvae of this creature which eat the biscuit; these are even smaller than the adult (no more than 0.5mm) and since they cover themselves in a mixture of saliva and flour dust, to the naked eye they would be indistinguishable from that dust. This means that no-one would have been aware of their presence in the bread bags; if they had not got onto the bread in the bakeries, they would have done so when they were packed in the reused bags. Weevils, which are a different type of beetle with a very long snout (belonging to the family Curculio) may also have been present in the flour, as there are several varieties which live on grain. These are also very small and would have been almost impossible to see in their larval stage. All of these little brutes lay tiny eggs and all of them breed and mature more quickly in warm, damp conditions. They would have been in or on the bread from the moment it came on the ship, but as long as the bread stayed cool and dry no-one would have noticed, or not until the bread was very old.

  This might explain Nelson’s letter to the agent victualler at Malta, ordering more bread to be sent, and remarking ‘I sincerely hope that no weevily bread will be sent, as the Fleet is free from those insects at present…’. This letter was written in November 1803 and despite Nelson’s propensity for exaggeration, may have been true, or as true as the invisibility of the ‘weevils’ allows. If it was not an exaggeration, and given that Nelson had a fleet of over 30 ships under his command, this is an indication that the weevil problem was certainly not as bad as the ‘oh weren’t it awful’ brigade would have us believe. Alas, the situation did not last: between March 1804 and August 1805 ten batches of weevily bread, one of oatmeal, three of flour and five of rice were condemned. But there are no such condemnations before that.38

  There are a couple of interesting letters in the Victualling Board papers in 1813, referring to a method of clearing weevils from flour and biscuit which had been suggested to them via the Admiralty. They duly tried it out, and reported, sadly, that it did not work: they had put a live lobster in each of three casks of flour or biscuits, but after three days the lobsters were found to be dead and there was no diminution in the number of weevils; they were even crawling over the bodies of the lobsters. They declined to repeat the experiment, a
s the workers in the warehouses were complaining about the smell of dead lobsters.39

  Other small beetles might have appeared in the pease or dried beans; the author once had the unhappy experience of putting a saucepan of allotment-grown haricot beans to soak in hot water and finding on her return that the water was full of small black beetles. Organically grown and air-dried fruit even today often harbours various tiny insects which proliferate in warm cupboards; these, or other more visible insects were probably the reason that 130 of the 165 messes on Victory refused to accept the raisins in 1798.40

  The warmer the environment, the more insects there are. Dillon tells of the occasion when, in the West Indies in 1796, they suffered an invasion of black ants. It is probable that some queens had flown on board and set up their nurseries, as the annoyance lasted several months, with the food covered in ants; and cold pies, when cut, looking more like ink than food. Eventually the ants, Dillon said, grew larger, sprouted wings and disappeared, leaving the way clear for the cockroaches.41 Perhaps he should have been grateful that they had not acquired any bananas complete with stowaway tarantulas.

  Chapter 4

  HOW THE MEN ATE

  ______

  WE KNOW A GREAT DEAL about what the seamen in the Georgian navy ate and how it got to them. What we know less about is how they ate; it is one of those aspects of naval life which no-one seems to have thought important enough, or perhaps different enough from land-borne life, to describe in consistent detail. Compared with the number of letters and journals written by various levels of officers there are very few written by lower-deck men and of those few, hardly any mention of food or mealtimes. So, we must piece the story together with what has been documented from naval and other writings on food history and what we can reasonably surmise.