by Roy Adkins
Very often other types of food were substituted, such as fresh vegetables instead of bullet-hard dried pease (nowadays spelled peas), fresh beef instead of salt beef, flour and raisins to make duff instead of meat, and grog instead of beer. The physician Gilbert Blane commented on alternative foods for butter: ‘There are certain articles that are the natural produce of the West India islands, which may be substituted for it with the greatest advantage. These are sugar and cocoa, which, during the last year of the war [1782], were served in place of butter with great success, and this proved an alteration in diet not only salutary, but agreeable to the seamen.’11
The galley (kitchen) was situated under the forecastle on the upper deck in two-decker ships and on the middle deck in three-deckers. A huge cast-iron stove on a brick or flagstone surface burned coal and wood and had a chimney to carry away the smoke. The stove comprised chain-driven spits, coppers with lids for boiling, ovens and hot plates. Cooking was done mainly by boiling in the coppers. The meals of the officers were cooked here as well, mostly by their servants, using more elaborate techniques. The men in each mess took daily or weekly turns as the ‘mess cook’. This did not involve actual cooking, but included fetching the day’s food from the steward, doing any preparation such as mixing the duff, taking what needed to be cooked to the ship’s cook in the galley, fetching the cooked food for his messmates, and keeping clean the mess utensils and equipment. Robert Wilson described the responsibilities of the ship’s cook, who did the cooking for the men:
The ship’s cook assisted by his mates dresses the victuals for the ship’s company, i.e. for all those under the denomination of officers. The cook’s mate does all the drudgery work, the cook inspects him. Every article into which the provisions are put is perfectly clean. The serving out of the provisions out of the boilers or coppers is managed entirely by the cook himself, for if there is any deficiency, he is answerable for it. When he receives the meat from the Ship’s Steward he has to count the number of pieces he receives, and to provide himself with a list of thoses messes which have received any raw meat so as to know what quantity of dressed meat to give them. As the cooks in general are not over and above stocked with learning, the manner in which they serve out the provisions by the list is by making a mark with a pin on the paper opposite the number of the messes issued out to.12
The post of cook was not a laborious one and was usually given to a disabled seaman:
The cooks are in most ships men that have lost a precious limb, or otherwise maimed in the defence of their King and Country, so as a compensation they receive a warrant as cooks. At the same time, the most of them are entitled to pensions, so that with their wages and perquisites, of fat [slush], etc., and their pensions together, they make it out pretty well. They are for the most part of them elderly men who have seen much of seafaring life, and when their work is finished for the day they’ll take their pipes, seat themselves in Copper Alley, and spin you a long yard [yarn] … about what they have seen and done.13
Daniel Goodall became friends with the cook in HMS Amelia, a fellow Scot by the name of John Robinson,* usually referred to as Jack, who often entertained the crew:
Jack was a Greenock man, a thorough bred sailor, and had been a petty officer on board the Temeraire at Trafalgar, where he lost his left hand. He was a first-rate specimen of the British seaman of the day – a frank, open-hearted, and open-handed fellow, who … sang a good song, and sung it well too, his favourites being ‘Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled’ and ‘Their groves o’ sweet myrtles let foreign lands reckon’, which he could give with great effect. For these and other reasons Jack was exceedingly popular on board with both officers and men.14
All hands were piped to breakfast around eight o’clock, leaving just a few men on duty. Thirty to forty-five minutes were normally allowed for this meal, the first since the previous afternoon. Breakfast was mainly burgoo, which was oatmeal boiled in water with salt, butter and sugar to produce a gruel or porridge, as William Robinson described: ‘This meal usually consists of burgoo, made of coarse oatmeal and water; others will have Scotch coffee, which is burnt bread boiled in some water, and sweetened with sugar. This is generally cooked in a hook-pot in the galley, where there is a range.’15
At midday they were piped to dinner, the main meal of the day, which was between one and one and a half hours’ duration. Basil Hall described the events leading up to the seamen’s dinner: ‘The ship’s cook, with his one arm (for he has seldom more; or if he have two arms, he has certainly only one leg), empties the coppers, by means of a monstrous fork … He likewise allows the pease-soup to run off by a cock [tap] from another boiler into a huge tub.’16 The cook actually relied on assistants to do the arduous work, such as removing the cooked salt meat from the boiler. In September 1812 the landsman William Warneck, on board the prison ship Vengeance, received ‘a severe scald in both eyes, in consequence of hot water having been splashed into them, which has impaired his sight … [when] taking up pork from the ships coppers’.17 Over a year later he was awarded a pension because ‘sight of right impaired and left weak’.18
The food at dinner was a mixture of bread or ship’s biscuit, meat and pease, though Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays were meatless days (banyan days) when cheese, butter or pease were served with duff, a kind of pudding made from flour, suet and currants or raisins. Lobscouse was the name given to a stew of salt meat, onions, potatoes, any other vegetables and crushed ship’s biscuit. The cooked food was fetched from the galley by each mess cook, and Hall noted the state of the containers: ‘As the hour of noon approaches, the cooks of the messes may be seen coming up the fore and main hatchways, with their mess-kids in their hands, the hoops of which are kept as bright as silver, and the wood work as neat and as clean as the pail of the most tidy dairy-maid.’19 He next described the scene as the men were piped to dinner: ‘The merry notes are nearly drowned next instant in the rattle of tubs and kettles, the voice of the ship’s cook and his mates bawling out the numbers of the messes, as well as by the sound of feet tramping along the decks and down the ladders, with the steaming, ample store of provisions … Then comes the joyous grog!’20
Supper was about four in the afternoon, sometimes a little later, lasting around 30 to 45 minutes. The galley stove was no longer alight by suppertime, and so this was a cold meal of biscuit with cheese, butter, and anything else that was saved from the midday dinner.
Officers had their meals an hour or two later, and dinner in the afternoon was when they invited guests from other ships or from ashore, taking pride in the entertainment that they offered. Robert Wilson pointed out that the ship’s cook was not the only cook on board, because the officers generally had their own cooks: ‘The Captain’s cook, and the gunroom ditto, cook for the Captain and lieutenants, etc., are most haughty in their exalted stations. They have not the least connection with the ship’s cook.’21 The ship’s cook was a warrant officer while the officers’ cooks were personal servants.
Food cooked for the officers was a world apart from that given to the seamen, and Aaron Thomas was highly critical: ‘It must be admitted that it is a little irksome to the Seaman to see a train of seventeen or twenty dishes borne in state to the Great Cabin – full of savoury meats and vegetables, with jellys and blomonges [blancmanges], when they themselves have dined off a gob of fat pork or pease and water.’22 Not that the captain’s food was always of the highest quality. Thomas complained that when he dined with the captain, they ‘had pease soup, as hot with kian [cayenne pepper] as a Devil. A capon boiled – by its taste I judge the body before it was put into the pot had been used to swab the decks.’23 Charles Pemberton mentioned that Vice-Admiral Collingwood was also mean with his dinners and was referred to as ‘Salt Junk and Sixpenny, – a soubriquet which his penurious hospitality won. With salt junk, and a wine he was proud of saying “cost him but sixpence per gallon,” he regaled his dinner guests.’24
The seamen ate in their mess groups, sitting aroun
d tables that were set between the cannons – usually wooden boards suspended by ropes from the deck above, which were stowed against the side of the ship when not in use. They sat on benches, chests, casks and any other suitable surface. Only the officers had chairs and proper tables, and they ate in the wardroom, while the midshipmen messed in the gun room, all waited on by servants. The captain ate alone in his cabin, unless he invited others to join him.
For the most part, wooden bowls, plates and tankards were used. An individual sailor might own one or two wooden vessels along with a basic knife and a wooden or horn spoon. Beakers of animal horn and wooden tankards were commonly used for drinking. For easy storage, the wooden plates were frequently square rather than round, giving rise to the phrase ‘a square meal’. These plates were flat with a raised rim called a ‘fiddle’ that stopped food slipping off.
Some seamen acquired earthenware plates and bowls as well as pewter cutlery and tankards, but these were vulnerable. On one occasion Pemberton said that they salvaged everything possible from a captured ship that was sinking: ‘Many crates of crockery-ware we thus recovered, which, being much damaged, was distributed, or taken ad libitum, among the seamen and marines; and the whole ’tween decks looked like an earthenware warehouse: each mess was furnished with cups, platters, and dishes sufficient for a cruise of half a century to come.’25
The officers dined off china, drank from real glasses and even had silver cutlery, but equipment for the midshipmen varied, and the new recruit Jeffrey Raigersfeld recalled that ‘our spoons and plates were pewter, a dozen of knives and forks, two cooking kettles, a frying-pan, and a copper tea-kettle, these with a dozen tumbler glasses, two decanters, and a dozen teacups and saucers, of the old blue dragon fashion, with a tin teapot … One of the mess took it in turn weekly to wash the crockery ware, lest the boy should break any of it.’26 The eating utensils might appear clean, but were seldom hygienic by modern standards.
Most food and drink, such as rum, beer, water, butter and salt meat, was stored in the hold in wooden casks, which were hauled up when needed. The marines helped with this heavy labour, which caused many injuries, as with Antonio Bernard, a Viennese private of marines, who had ‘a fall from the fore ladder against the armourer’s bench which produced hernia on the left side … in hoisting up water from the hold’.27 Once they were empty the casks were often dismantled by the cooper and stored for reuse. Bread and biscuits were kept in sacks in the bread room, along with the cheese. Only towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars were there experiments with canned food, initially with tins of meat.
The salt meat was often years old and so hard that sailors could carve it into fancy goods such as little boxes. Midshipman Robert Barrett in the Hebrus frigate off the coast of America in 1814 moaned that ‘there was little else in our mess but “salt junk,” seven years old, which, of course, was as hard as mahogany’.28 ‘Junk’ was a term for worn-out lengths of old rope, and the derogatory term ‘salt horse’ was also used. When boiled, salt meat produced a thick salty scum of fat known as ‘slush’, half of which was used to waterproof the rigging; the other half was the cook’s official perk, which he sold to tallow merchants, relying on this ‘slush fund’ to supplement his meagre wages. According to Archibald Sinclair, who joined the navy that same year, new recruits when called to dinner were invariably aghast at the meat:
In two minutes every man takes his post; but what is the dismay and astonishment at the first presentation of what was universally known as a piece of mahogany, to which it bore a striking resemblance in hardness, dryness, and polish … The slightest boiling, or even immersion in hot water, melted away anything that had ever borne a resemblance to fat. It was now a shapeless mass of hard and dry beef … The second day being pork day, it is hoped that matters may improve; but alas! we are all doomed to disappointment. After a basin of pease-soup, somehow always good, the allowance of pork was produced … A shrivelled piece of something bearing a resemblance to a cut from the hide of a rhinoceros appeared.29
Although the salt meat was soaked in tubs of water (steep tubs) before cooking, it evidently remained salty to the taste, and the men attempted other methods. Basil Hall said that the officer of the watch had to ‘cast his eye along the whole length of the ship’s side, to see if … a piece of salt beef or pork, slily tied to a string, be towed alongside – a practice the men adopt whenever they can, their object being to wash out some portion of the brine from the meat before dressing it’.30
Live animals were carried in warships for their milk and eggs, as well as being butchered for their meat, and on board the Fame in the Mediterranean the seaman George Watson related that
we had live stock on board of every kind, in abundance; bullocks, pigs, sheep, goats, geese, ducks, turkeys, chickens, &c.; many of these creatures becoming domesticated, were spared the general slaughter, and had names given to them by the Tars, there was ‘Billy, the goat; Jenny, the cow; Tom, the sheep, Jack, the goose;’ and many others, which I shall not mention; Jenny the cow, after being two years on board, ran dry, and therefore, was killed … poor Tom, the sheep, was killed by lightning.31
Livestock such as bullocks had to be hoisted individually from boats up into the ship, and Captain Griffiths advised that cattle should be treated carefully and that ‘if they do not like the water, &c. it arises from FEAR, and beating them, or any violent measures, will only add to it, while conciliation will overcome it. Always sling them to hoist them in. By the horns is a bad way.’32 When at St Kitts Aaron Thomas of the Lapwing watched one such transfer: ‘A canoe brought a very large American ox alongside, a rope was put about his head and horns, to hoist him in by, as usual. When he was just suspended over the boat, the animal being in a laxative state, he let fly with violence his excrement, which went with great force against the breast and face of one of the black men in the boat; to the high entertainment of the people leaning over the side.’33
Except for the bullocks, the animals were usually private property, and it was mainly a privilege of the officers to bring them aboard, though sometimes one or more seamen were allowed their own animals if they had enough money. Captain Thomas Fremantle and other officers did this at Cork just before their ship, the Ganges, set sail to Bantry Bay in October 1803. ‘We have three dozen of turkeys on board,’ Fremantle told his wife Betsey, ‘which cost us only two shillings a piece, fowls half a guinea a dozen. I have got a nice cow for ten pounds and we begin to bake very tolerable bread.’34 In March 1780, after leaving the Cape Verde Islands, Captain Thomas Pasley of the Sybil wrote: ‘Ship absolutely full of hogs and goats: the first I must order to be killed – goats make little dirt’,35 but two days later he was in a rage: ‘My steward, John … acquainted me this morning that my coops under the forecastle were in the night robbed of seven fowls; turned all hands up, talked to them, and pictured in the strongest possible terms the infamy and disgrace of such a conduct. There are many good and honest on board, but intermixed with a set of damned Irish villains, especially among the marines.’36
On board the Crescent at Jamaica in 1800, William Dillon remarked: ‘In our last cruize we had not much sickness. The Captain had allowed the seamen to supply themselves with pigs. These were left to run about on the Main Deck, and I one day counted more than one hundred of them. They were washed every morning and regularly fed by their owners. That indulgence contributed essentially to keep off the scurvy.’37 The environment of a warship was not good for animals, and when he was captain of the Neptune off Ushant in June 1805, Fremantle told Betsey about an accident to their goat: ‘Malheur, the only poor goat that was in the ship fell down the hatchway yesterday and I am obliged to drink my breakfast without a drop of milk.’38
A few days before the Battle of Trafalgar, Fremantle was blockading Cadiz and lamented that ‘We are now plentifully supplied with all sort of fresh provisions, eleven bullock we got today but such miserable devils you can scarcely imagine, they are however much better than salt meat.’39 The quality
of live animals purchased was a frequent complaint. William Richardson, a gunner in the Tromp at Martinique in 1800, said that ‘Our little crew were now victualled from the shore daily – every morning the jolly boat was sent to the Beef Wharf and brought off the day’s allowance of fresh beef, bread and a turn of water. The beef was like carrion and a man could bring up the side [of the ship] a whole quarter in his hand, they were so small.’40 Midshipman Barrett, stationed near the American coast in 1814, also complained that ‘The fresh beef, for which the Navy Board paid three shillings and fourpence per pound, was scarcely eatable, disguise it as you would, and in England would have been regarded as mere offal.’41
Off Sicily a decade earlier, Midshipman Gardner of the Berwick disapproved of the men objecting to their rations:
A mutiny took place among the ship’s company, in consequence of some bullocks that were anything but fat being sent for the use of the people … A survey was then held, and the report stated that as no other meat could be obtained, double allowance of this lean kine should be served out to make up the deficiency; but all to no purpose; and John Bull, forgetting his duty and only thinking of his maw, broke out into open rebellion. Some of the scoundrels were put in irons.42
