Feeding Nelson’s Navy: The True Story of Food at Sea in the Georgian Era

246 Pages·2004·3.04 MB·English

by  Janet MacDonald

JANET MACDONALD
has written over thirty books, including a number on cookery. Her parallel
interests in food and naval history led her to undertake a Masters degree, and the
resulting research into the victualling of the Nelsonic navy formed the starting
point for this book. She was recently a featured historian on BBC Radio 4’s
Food at Sea programme.
FEEDING
NELSON’S
NAVY
________
The True Story of Food at Sea
in the Georgian Era
JANET MACDONALD
First published in Great Britain in 2004 by
Chatham Publishing, Lionel Leventhal Limited This paperback edition published in 2014 by Frontline
Books
an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd,
47 Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS
www.frontline-books.com
Copyright © Janet Macdonald 2004, 2006 & 2014
The right of Janet Macdonald to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN: 978-1-84832-747-4
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
1. Basic Rations
2. How It Got There – the Work of the Victualling Board
3. Administration On Board Ship
4. How the Men Ate
5. How the Officers Ate
6. What Other Navies Ate
7. Diet in Health and Sickness
Conclusions
Appendices
1. Weights and Measures
2. Official Substitutes for Species of Provisions
3. Calorific Values of Naval Foodstuffs
4. Vitamin Content of Naval Food
5. Bills of Exchange
6. Eat Like a Sailor – Recipes
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
________
This book represents the first stage of what I hope will be a very long journey –
a journey which started with a food writer reading of some marvellous meals in a
fictional series about a Napoleonic War naval captain and his friend, moved on
to a general interest in the true history of what has come to be called ‘Nelson’s
Navy’ and from there to the world of academia, archives, and serious historical
research. Much of the fine detail for the book came from the research for my
MA dissertation ‘Victualling the British Mediterranean Fleet, July 1803 – June
1804’ (hence the predominance of references to that fleet, but other logs and
documents strongly suggest that these reflect the general situation).
Along my journey I have received help and encouragement from many
people, to all of whom I will be eternally grateful:
At the Greenwich Maritime Institute, my tutor Professor Roger Knight, the
director Professor Sarah Palmer, Doctor Roger Morriss, who taught me how to
use the various archives, and my fellow students who shared information with
me, but especially Charles Consolvo and David Elvin.
At the archives, Jennie Wraight and Iain MacKenzie of the Admiralty Library;
Jane Wickenden at the Institute of Naval Medicine; Andrew Helm at the Nelson
Museum, Monmouth; Matthew Sheldon, Head of Research Collections and
Richard Noyce, Curator of Artifacts at the Royal Naval Museum Portsmouth; Lt-
Cdr. Nowoskielski, C.O. of HMS Victory; the staff at the British Library, the
Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, the Public
Record Office, and the library of the Wellcome Trust.
Elsewhere, Professor Richard Harding of the University of Westminster for
suggestions on logistics literature, John Harland for advice on stowage, Roel
Mulder for information on Dutch naval food, Brian Vale for information on
South America, Spain and Portugal, Andrew McCoig who checked my calorie
and vitamin calculations and Clive Gardner who helped with Richard Ford.
Dave Balderstone, Compuserve History forum; Bryn Hughes, General
Manager of HMS Trincomalee; Tyrone Martin of USS Constitution; Mark
Nesbitt, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Michael & Jane Phillips; Mr E J Revell;
Bill Sargeant; Lord de Saumarez; Roderick Stewart of the Unicorn Preservation
Society; Tim Voelcker; and all my e-friends at the Searoom forum who have
shared information and ideas with me on this and many other topics.
And last but by no means least, my husband Ken Maxwell-Jones: assistant
researcher, editor, proofreader, coffee maker and recipe sampler.
FOREWORD
_____
THE FIRST THREE THINGS you encounter when you start to read about the
Georgian navy are all horror stories: the work of the press gangs, flogging,
and the appalling food. I have my doubts as to whether the first two are as bad as
they are painted, and I find it impossible to believe in the third. A navy fed on
rotten meat and weevilly biscuits? My experience of the British working man is
that the men would not have tolerated this, nor, on such a diet, would they have
been capable of the very hard physical work involved in sailing and fighting a
ship, let alone doing it with the enthusiasm and success which they did.
So my basic disbelief set me off on the trail of research into exactly what
Nelson’s navy did eat, how they ate it, where it came from and how it got to
them. In the process I discovered the fascinating edifices of the Victualling
Board and its sister organisations the Navy Board, the Sick and Hurt Board and
the Transport Board, and their numerous employees in London and at naval
establishments all over the world. The other side of the story, which is equally
fascinating, is how the food was cooked and eaten, and the fact that sharing
meals is not only a major social occasion but one which is important for
maintaining the cohesion of any group of people.
Mealtimes also served a simpler purpose; that of refuelling the fleshy
machines that kept the navy sailing. There is a simple progression: continuous
hard work (and both sailing the ship and handling the guns are very hard work
indeed) requires fit and healthy men; men will only stay fit and healthy if they
are well fed. It is the naval version of Napoleon’s army marching on its stomach.
It is comparatively easy to feed a navy in peacetime, when numbers are low; it
is also comparatively easy to feed a navy when it is operating in home waters
and can return to port to replenish its stocks of food and drink. But when you are
engaged in a major war, with over 1000 ships and 140,000 men (as was the case
at the high point of the Napoleonic Wars in 1810) and when over half that force
is operating in foreign waters, the logistics of keeping all those men fed would
have been insurmountable without an efficient organisation to arrange things.
Add to this the facts that for most of the period we are discussing, the only
methods of preserving food were to dry it, salt it or pickle it, and the only
practical bulk packaging materials were wooden casks and cloth bags, and you
begin to see why the Admiralty elected to feed the navy on foodstuffs that owed
more to durability than to what we would now think of as a balanced diet: salt
meat, dried pease, oatmeal, hard tack and a little butter and cheese, with beer,
wine or watered spirits to wash it down.
Once you know what they ate, questions come to you: was there no fresh
meat, no vegetables or fruit? What about fish, or poultry? How was the food
cooked and who cooked it? Where did it come from and how did it get from
there onto the ships? Did the officers eat at the same time as the men? How
many men ate at a time, and what about the men on urgent watch duties such as
lookout or steering? Is it true about weevils and rats? Fortunately history has left
us plenty of information about most, if not all, of these things, in the form of
official correspondence between the Admiralty and the subsidiary departments
involved in getting food to the men in both health and sickness. There are also
some private letters and memoirs which brings the story beyond the official.
Alas, most of these private papers were written by officers, and they tended to
report their own experiences rather than those of the men; they also took a great
deal for granted, so there are many areas where we have no evidence for the fine
details. However, we can make some informed guesses while we wait for the
hoped-for lost journals to emerge from an attic and fill the gaps; speculations on
such details have been indicated as such.
INTRODUCTION
_____
SO, HOW DO YOU FEED thousands of men when they are afloat in ships which
may not touch land for months at a time, where cooking facilities are very
basic, where there are no refrigeration systems and where food can be preserved
only by salting, pickling or drying?
The answer, of course, is that you base the rations on foodstuffs which will
tolerate those preservation methods and remain edible for many months: salted
meat, salted or dried fish, dried pease or beans and items made from cereal
grains. This is not just a nautical solution; until canning became generally
accepted and affordable in the middle of the nineteenth century it was the
principal solution to preserving food through the winter in northern lands, when
plants stopped growing and when farming methods could not support large herds
of livestock through the cold months. So at sea, they ate throughout the year
what landsmen ate during the winter. By long tradition, the seaman’s diet was
based on salt meat, dried pease and hard-baked biscuit; on 31 December 1677,
Samuel Pepys drew up a victualling contract which set the ration for each man at
one pound of biscuit and one gallon of beer each day, with a weekly ration of
eight pounds of beef, or four pounds of beef and two of bacon or pork with two
pints of pease. The meat was served on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and
Thursday; on the other three days they had fish (either fresh cod, or wind-dried
or salt cod or hake) with two ounces of butter and four ounces of Suffolk cheese
(or two-thirds that amount of Cheddar).1
By 1733, when the British Admiralty published its first formal set of
Regulations and Instructions relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea2 (hereafter
‘the Regulations’), the fish had disappeared to be replaced by oatmeal and sugar
and the ration entitlement had evolved into the table below:
Table of ‘…daily Proportion of Provisions [to be] allowed to every Man
serving in His Majesty’s Ships’3