Some other evidence for the type of crockery used at sea comes from a recent excavation of the wreck of Swift in Argentinean Patagonia in 1770. Items found at the stern, where the wardroom and captain’s cabins would have been, show a clear predominance of high-quality ceramics and porcelain, including numerous ornamentally edged white English plates and bowls and some fine Chinese porcelain bowls and plates with blue decorations of a pagoda and trees. There are also many square ‘case’ bottles (so-called because they fitted into a lockable case), and many semi-glazed stoneware jars and jugs.9
There are no published reports of tableware at the lower warrant officers’ messes, or details of where they actually ate on smaller ships where they were not included in the gunroom. Each of them would have some sort of office desk for their paperwork which they might have used as a dining table, either on their own or perhaps in pairs, desk size permitting; or the carpenter could have organised a trestle table so they could eat together. There are one or two reports of captains’ clerks or schoolmasters being disgruntled at having to eat with the midshipmen for lack of any alternative.
The midshipmen ate in their own berth. Depending on the makeup of the group (age-range, family background, etc), conditions varied from the civilised to the squalid. Where there was a responsible older midshipman he would be the most obvious mess caterer. The very young ‘young gentlemen’ (also known as ‘squeakers’) were put under the charge of the gunner, although the captain usually took responsibility for their money and expenses, doling out pocket-money as appropriate and writing to their fathers for more when necessary. Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood wrote to his friend Walter Spencer-Stanhope of his son, William, ‘Your son’s debts are not enormous yet – you cannot think how cheap salt water is, and there is nothing else to buy.’10 No-one seems to have reported what happened with the older midshipmen, at the age between squeaking and financial responsibility; perhaps the captain delegated the task of mess caterer for these boys to one of the other officers. William Dillon reports joining the Alcide (74) in 1790 as an eleven-year-old and paying a 5-guinea entrance contribution.11 Jeffrey de Raigersfeld reports having 12 guineas when he joined his first ship and says it did not last long. He also took ‘plates and spoons of pewter, a dozen knives and forks, two cooking kettles, a frying pan, a copper tea kettle, a dozen tumbler glasses, two decanters, a dozen cups and saucers of the old blue dragon fashion and a tin teapot.’ One can imagine his loving mother buying all of this; little could she have suspected that these items, together with his stock of tea, sugar, onions and celery seeds (‘to add interest to the pea soup’), would immediately be seized ‘for the common good’. However, the common good did at least involve members of the mess taking it in turns to wash the dishes ‘lest the blackguard boy should be the cause of breakages’.12
Raigersfeld’s list of food supplies suggests enhancement rather than replacement of the official ration. He does remark later than they had their Saturday meat ration roasted for Sunday dinner, a diet also borne out by Dillon: ‘One o’clock was the dinner hour, fresh meat in harbour with vegetables and salt at sea [with] potatoes and such, puddings and pea soup…we might have a slice of cheese and biscuit previous to turning in.’13 However, they seem to have had some of their ration issued on a larger than daily scale, unless butter was something they bought for themselves. Raigersfeld tells of the tub of melted butter which started with some small hairs in it and grew progressively hairier as they used it up, eventually to discover a bald dead mouse at the bottom.14 He does not say whether they threw the rest of the butter away; knowing the propensities of growing adolescent boys, one is left with the horrid suspicion that hunger may have overcome squeamish scruples. Nor would most of them be over-nice about the table linen: Frederic Chamier reports a midshipmen’s mess where the table cloth, changed once a week on Saturdays, was used as a towel when not on the table and bore the marks of dirty hands and fingers. It was also used to wipe spoons and to clean the tines of forks by the simple method of poking them through the fabric. Chamier also throws some light on the methods by which hungry midshipmen acquired extra food, although in his case the plan misfired: he and a fellow midshipman stole some tripe from a dish intended for the captain’s dinner; when the captain found out, he turned them before the mast (relegated them to the status of common seamen).15 Like the wardroom officers, the midshipmen had servants to wait on them, a number which might only theoretically be expressed in the plural. Abraham Crawford reports ‘notwithstanding the berths of the midshipmen were so numerously furnished with inmates, from the reduced state of the ship’s crew, the idlers list could not be conveniently increased; and one wretched boy allotted to each berth had alone to perform the three-fold functions of steward, cook and attendant.’16
At the other end of the scale, captains and admirals ate in considerable style. The young ‘commander’ captains of the smaller ships might not be able to afford much beyond the basic ration, but they ate it at their own table in their day cabin. In the larger ships the captain had a separate dining cabin. Unless they chose to invite a guest, they ate in solitary state, although it was traditional for them to be invited to dine in the wardroom once a week. Most captains made a point of regularly entertaining the wardroom officers, in small groups if not en masse, and would include at least one midshipman at such meals, deeming it part of their duty to the boy’s parents to show him how to behave on social occasions. Some, including Nelson, often took a midshipman with them when they were invited to dine ashore. An impoverished captain could fulfil at least part of his obligations by inviting the officer and midshipman of the watch to join him for breakfast.
The same situation of dining up and down happened with admirals: in their flagship they would invite and be invited by the captain of the fleet and the ship’s captain and the wardroom; when the weather and the movements of the squadron allowed, with the captains and higher-ranking lieutenants of the other ships. In one letter home Nelson remarked that he was to have entertained William Elliott (son of Sir Hugh Elliott, minister at Naples) in Victory ‘but a fair wind came and that cancels all invitations’.17 In squadrons where there were sufficient freemasons (and this may well have applied to Nelson himself) such dinner parties would have coincided with a lodge meeting. Admirals, while in port, would also have to entertain diplomats, local worthies and other senior naval personnel such as the port admiral and dockyard commissioner. On many of these occasions, ladies would join the party.
Officers were allowed a number of personal servants dependent on their rank, these servants being men or boys carried on the ship’s books. Marine officers’ servants would be marine privates – Glascock mentions that while negro boys waited on the naval officers, the marine officer’s servant was a tall marine, ‘whose head and the beams above were in perpetual collision’.18 All levels of admiral and commander-in-chief were allowed fifty servants, captains were allowed four for each hundred men of their complement, the wardroom officers of ships of more than sixty men had one each, and the boatswain, gunner and carpenter had two on ships of over sixty men, one on ships with less.19 Some of these captains’ and admirals’ ‘servants’ were actually young gentlemen being taken to sea to oblige their parents, others would be adult seamen, while some would not be seamen at all but personal servants whom the officers kept with them on shore as well as at sea. These latter servants would include a steward to perform the duties carried out by a butler on land, and also a cook. A moneyed captain who liked his food, and an admiral or commander-in-chief who entertained a lot, might have more than one cook.
OFFICERS’ STORES
Officers had their own storerooms for wine, comestibles and table accoutrements. This would be a personal store for captains and upwards, a group store for wardroom officers, and perhaps another for midshipmen. The better-quality table settings, especially if they included silver, would be kept in the storeroom and returned to it after each meal, to avoid ‘disappearances’. On some ships one of the roundhous
es off the wardroom might be fitted up to serve as a steward’s pantry, where everyday mess traps could be stored. James Anthony Gardner mentions such a pantry ‘fitted in the wing to stow our crockery and dinner traps with safety.’20 A small sink, draining out through a pipe, would facilitate the washing-up. Otherwise, the mess traps would have to be carried away for washing. Although no-one has mentioned this, the cook may have refilled one of the boilers with water for this purpose after the men’s dinner was served.
The tradesmen warrant officers were actually better off for private storage space than the lieutenants. They had, as did the purser and the surgeon, lockable storerooms for their trade equipment and stores and would be able to stow some personal edibles in them as well; the wardroom probably had a single private storeroom on the orlop. The content of these stores, as well as wine, would mostly be preserved foodstuffs and tracklements. These were freely available. There had been a thriving trade in spices from the East into Europe as far back as the eleventh century and by the seventeenth century food retailing had divided into salters, who dealt in wet goods, and grocers, who dealt in dry goods. As well as salted foods such as bacon, ham and other preserved meats, salters sold such things as anchovies, oil, pickles and vinegar. Grocers stocked sugar and molasses, dried fruit, rice, oriental spices and other dry foods such as pease and flour.21 As well as the big outlets in London, there were shops in the main naval ports to cater for naval officers.
Receipts for St Vincent, Nelson and other officers show a wide variety of spices, pickles, chutneys and flavoured vinegars: white, black and ‘Chyan’ (cayenne) pepper, ginger, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, nutmeg and mace, mustard and curry powder; lemon and mango pickle and ‘yellow Indian pickle’ (piccalilli), mushroom ketchup, pickled onion and walnuts, cucumbers and cabbage; soy sauce; tarragon, chilli, herb and elder vinegars; anchovies and French olives; capers and celery seed; and horseradish. Many of these would be served with the cold meats: hams, tongues and, listed in one of Nelson’s requests to his agent Alexander Davison, ‘Hamburgh Beef’. (Although Germans, possibly inspired by the Tartars, were already eating finely chopped raw beef at this time, this is more likely to have been the dried and salted beef which was also known as ‘Dutch’ [Deutsch] beef which features in several contemporary cookery books.)22 That same request also included twelve ‘Gloster’ cheeses and four kegs of ‘sour crout’; on other occasions Nelsons purchases included forty-two pounds of Parmesan cheese, ‘sallad oil’, Brunswick sausages and pickled tripe.23 Much of this would have been intended for his guests. Nelson himself was a very moderate eater; according to his surgeon William Beatty, ‘[he] often contented himself with the wing or liver of a fowl and a small plate of macaroni and vegetables’.24
On the sweet side, St Vincent bought milk chocolate and candy, currants, raisins and muscatels, Jordan almonds, ‘moist’ sugar and loaves of sugar, with a pair of sugar nippers to break pieces off the loaves. In the summer, during a return visit to port, he bought cherries, raspberries, currants and gooseberries. Nelson bought macaroons, dried cherries, raspberry and apricot jam and ‘currant’ jelly (whether red, white or black is not specified). Other officers took strawberry jam and marmalade; these fruit preserves would have made a considerable contribution to their Vitamin C intake. Midshipmen (or their mothers) would probably have packed cakes or sweet Naples biscuits. The biscuit manufacturing firm of Carrs started up towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, making a refined version of ships’ biscuit called ‘Captains’ Thins’ (an even thinner version of these is still for sale and popular for eating with cheese: ‘Carrs Table Water’ biscuit). Other firms whose names are still to be found on the supermarket shelf, in Britain at least, include Huntley & Palmer and Jacobs, who all started by supplying ships’ captains and then moved on to other and sweeter biscuits.
As well as preserved meats, officers bought fresh meat (beef, pork and mutton) and prepared poultry. Nelson received a reminder in 1791 from Mary Saunders of the Isle of Wight that he owed her a total of £7.10.0 for two-dozen fowls, a pair of ducks, and four crocks of butter.25 Officers sent each other gifts of food and when operating reasonably close to home often received hampers of food from their wives or friends. Nelson, at Copenhagen in 1801, took the opportunity of one of his sailors catching a fine turbot to patch up his relationship with Admiral Hyde Parker by sending the fish to him.26 Admiral James de Saumarez, when off Ushant in 1800, had been sent a fine salmon and a sucking pig, and when in the Baltic between 1808 and 1812 was sent a haunch of venison and a turtle by friends; his wife sent some porter, some hearts, pickled oysters, butter and biscuits, and arranged for a Guernsey cow to be sent. The cow was a great success, providing cream for the breakfast table and, reported Sir James to his wife, becoming ‘a great pet on board…there is no fear of her starving’. He also reported receiving salmon, turbot and cod when off Gothenburg, and elsewhere ‘plenty of fine mackerall’. Peas and other vegetables came out on the packet from Harwich and some of the officers cultivated a small garden on one of the islands; for a while they had great hopes of salad, spinach, new potatoes and green peas, but alas, the peas fell victim to thieves.27 Such gardens were not new: Saumarez and other officers had cultivated small gardens off the French coast while serving in the Brest blockade in 1800.28
Other islands in the Baltic provided partridges, hares and other game, shot by the officers and occasionally contributed to the admiral’s table. Raigersfeld reports shooting pigeons at St Helena and feeling guilty afterwards on thinking the survivors were mourning their dead companions. Other officers have reported shooting various birds, including doves, wild duck and snipe, and even peafowl on the Javanese islands; no doubt they also bagged the odd wild pig, goat or sheep when the opportunity presented itself.29 The difficulties of such activities are explained by William Stanhope Lovell, who was a midshipman in Renown in the Mediterranean: when visiting Sardinia he took part in shooting parties, but these were ineffective without dogs to flush and retrieve, and ‘Although some species of game were numerous, and flocks of blue pigeons, to the amounts of thousands, were seen, few were brought on board for no person would dare to follow them for fear of the wind changing, when we knew the fleet would sail immediately to regain our station.’30 Basil Hall reported that when in Leander in 1802, at Bermuda, many of the officers kept pointers for their shooting expeditions ashore.31
And of course, the officers had their own livestock on board. They kept a full range of chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys, but the author has seen no mention of tame rabbits, although these are very efficient converters of food into meat. They may have been too temptingly pettable; as it was, many captains found the poultry-keeper (known as ‘Jemmy Ducks’) had to be changed regularly, lest he grow too fond of his charges. Cows for milk were rare but goats were common, as were sheep and pigs, both of which would provide a series of good meals, starting with the offal.32 That intention could not always be realised, as Basil Hall found out on one voyage to China. Jean, the last of a litter of piglets had become very tame ‘cruising along among the messes, poking her snout into every breadbag and often scalding her tongue in the soup-kids’. She even took her grog but was rarely seen to be drunk. Then, when halfway across the China Sea, Hall decided it was time to kill her. ‘Let us have the fry today, the head with plenty of Port wine as mock-turtle soup tomorrow; and get one of the legs roasted for dinner on Saturday,’ he told his steward, who listened to this and went off, only to return shortly to announce that the ship’s company had begged for Jean’s life. She had been trained to keep off the quarterdeck, but ‘if the captain will only call her, she will show how tame she is’. Hall duly called Jean, she came gambolling up to him (tripping the first lieutenant as she passed him) and Hall relented. As time went on, Jean became fatter and fatter, until she could only lie on her side with her upper legs up in the air, grunting for food to be brought to her. When they arrived at Whampoa, visiting Chinese were much impressed by Jean, but then a horrid realisation set in:
the Chinese were only waiting for Jean to die and be thrown overboard, so they could scoop her up as they did any other dead creatures that were thrown over. This was not acceptable to the crew, so when Jean did die, they sounded the river for a really muddy place and having bound some pieces of ballast rod to her snout, dropped her over at night in the selected spot, where she went straight down, deep enough to evade the grappling hooks, to great Chinese disappointment.33
And, just as did the men, officers bought fresh produce whenever they had the chance. St Helena provided vegetables for ships going to or from the East Indies and was famed for its watercress; one officer bought bunches of bananas in Madeira and slung them from the boats’ davits, another had netsful of grapes, oranges, peaches and nectarines hanging from his cabin ceiling.34 Admiral Rainier, commander-in-chief of the East Indies station from 1794 to 1804, was reputedly so fond of mangoes that he was said to have delayed his seagoing activities so that he did not miss the mango season on the Malabar coast.
Feeding Nelson's Navy Page 16
