Stockwin's Maritime Miscellany (18 page)

PLENTY OF SCOPE – sufficient resources to carry out a task.
DERIVATION
: from the Greek
skopos
, meaning to mark or aim, in nautical parlance scope is the length of cable run out when a vessel rides to anchor to safely clear her neighbours.

An entry in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
of 1773 reads: ‘Sea-bisket is a sort of bread much dried by passing the oven twice to make it keep for sea service. For long voyages they bake it four times and prepare it six months before embarkation. It will hold good for a whole year.’ Generally, these hardy forms of carbohydrate were produced using just flour and water, and were about one-third heavier than the flour from which they were made.

The ship’s biscuit (also known as hard tack) has a long association with seafarers, going back to the days of ancient Egyptian sailors. They were also favoured by the Greeks and Romans. Large quantities of ship’s biscuits were stored at the Deptford Naval Yard as early as 1513. Basic, durable and almost indestructible, they provided a reliable source of energy for seamen doing hard physical labour in all weathers. The ration of biscuit per sailor was 450 g a day. One biscuit, dated 1784, now exhibited in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, attests to their keeping powers.

A perennial problem with ship’s biscuits was infestation with weevils. A number of variations of the recipe were tried to remedy this, including adding caraway seed, but the pesky bugs merely ignored the additional ingredient. Admiral Muir suggested the polite way to deal with weevils was to split the biscuits open with a stout knife and scrape the insects off the cut surface. The more usual way to deal with them was with a brisk tap on the surface of the table so the weevils came out of their own accord. Sailors liked to crack the biscuits by breaking them open in the crook of their elbows.

If the biscuit was poorly baked the outside would crumble away, leaving a hard, rigid centre. These were called reef nuts and were not discarded. Hungry midshipmen collected them and nibbled them during the day – hence the nickname of ‘reefer’ for the young gentlemen. And if they couldn’t face them in daylight they saved them up and ate them in the dark.

Maggots, nicknamed ‘bargemen’, also infested biscuits. They were cold to the taste in the mouth. One naval wit said, ‘Bread, it is well remarked, is the staff of life; but it is not quite so pleasant to find it life itself, and to have the power of locomotion.’

Towards the end of the eighteenth century naval ships of the line stored biscuit in a special bread room. The steward’s assistant collected the daily ship’s ration from there. Because of the flour dust he was called Jack in the Dust or Jack Dusty. At the height of their production, the large bakehouses at Portsmouth and Gosport and other facilities were manufacturing thousands of biscuits a day.

Bakeries began to be fitted in naval ships in the mid 1850s, enabling fresh bread to be made available for the duration of the voyage. There were still large stocks of biscuit in the naval victualling stores, however, which were not going to be allowed to go to waste, and they continued to be supplied for a number of years. Moreover, the navy has not let the custom fade away; stout ship’s biscuits are still purchased by the Ministry of Defence for use in operational ration packs.

For the merchant marine, ship’s biscuits were an essential part of the sea diet. In the port city of Liverpool they were known as Liverpool Pantiles, after a type of roofing tile, because of their shape and texture. In many merchant vessels biscuits, along with salt meat, remained standard provisions until the late 1950s.

In Georgian times England’s six Royal Dockyards were the biggest industrial enterprises in the world, the most important ones being at Portsmouth and Plymouth. During the Napoleonic Wars 15,000 men worked in these dockyards, including 5,000 shipwrights, one-third of the number of that profession in the whole country. All told there were over 25 different trades. The dockyards were huge tourist attractions, drawing people from every walk of life, from ordinary citizens to artists to foreign dignitaries, all wanting to see the sheer scale and diversity of activity at first hand. Even the future Queen Victoria was taken to Portsmouth dockyard at the age of 12 as part of her education.

The dockyard at Portsmouth covered 33 hectares. Inside the complex were vast piles of timber and ironwork stacked on the ground. The clang and roar of smithies and the stink of tanneries assaulted the senses. There was all manner of buildings including storehouses, mast and plank houses, seasoning sheds, saw pits, shops for carpenters and other skilled workers, rigging houses, rope-walks 400 m long and the famous block mills. The dockyard did not just build and repair ships; it boasted massive bakeries, salting houses for preserving meat, and breweries.

A ship of the line needed over 1,000 blocks, the wooden pulleys through which ropes were hauled to control the sails and for other operations. At the end of the eighteenth century the navy was purchasing 100,000 blocks a year, all made by hand. Marc Brunel (the father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel) mechanised this process, creating the world’s first production factory in Portsmouth dockyard, and by 1807 the Portsmouth block mills were meeting the navy’s entire requirements, 10 unskilled men producing as many as 110 skilled craftsmen had done before
.

In the early 1800s one visitor to Portsmouth dockyard noted that the heat of the anchor-forge was so intense that the men who worked there had to be supplied with 5 litres (8½ pints) of beer a day. He marvelled that this, together with wages of 29 shillings a week, sufficed to tempt ‘these Cyclops to abridge their lives and live in this emblem of Tartarus for sixteen hours a day’.

The term is somewhat of a misnomer – they were nearly always old seamen, no longer fit for normal ship duties. They acted as assistants to the surgeon, with varying degrees of expertise and compassion.
Loblolly
is an old English word; its first known use was in the sixteenth century. The term is derived from
lob
, meaning to bubble, and
lolly
, a regional word for broth, or a kind of gruel. Loblolly was adopted in the navy to describe semi-liquid food given to the sick.

Loblolly boys were found in both the US navy and the Royal Navy. In US naval regulations the rate first officially appeared in 1814 (although it had been in common use for many years before). Sick call was announced by the loblolly boy standing at the foremast banging a mortar with a pestle.

Aboard USS
Chesapeake
a black loblolly boy called William Brown was the only person who could sound a trumpet and was rated bugleman by Captain Lawrence. Unfortunately his musical skill was not attended by martial temperament. Brown was court-martialled for failing to sound ‘Boarders away’ when ordered to do so.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century the Royal Navy replaced the rate of loblolly boy with that of sick-berth attendant. In the US, likewise, the loblolly boy faded into history with the introduction of the rate of surgeon’s steward.

SPIN A YARN – telling a story by stretching out the truth.
DERIVATION
: the many miles of rope aboard wooden ships needed regular repair and maintenance. Pieces of old rope were teased out to make spun yarn, which was used for this purpose. As the mariners bent to their task they swapped tales as they worked, embellishing them in the telling.

When Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492 he found that the natives used nets of cotton stretched between two posts as beds. They called them ‘
hamacs
’. This was changed to ‘
hamaca
’ by the Spanish. Hammocks in the British navy stem from the age of Drake, when they were widely adopted, and were still on issue until recent times.

Before the introduction of hammocks sailors slept on the deck. During rough weather they would be thrown about and were often injured. The hammock was a vast improvement as it wraps around the sailor like a cocoon, making it virtually impossible to fall out of; and it moves in concert with the motion of the ship, while gravity keeps it in line with the others.

Hammocks were slung fore and aft, each at a numbered peg so that the sleeper was always in the same place and could be found quickly if needed. The official allocation of hammock space was 36 cm per man, or 71 cm if the man was a petty officer. However, with the two-watch system half the crew was on deck at any one time, so each man had twice that, in effect as much space as someone sharing a double bed today.

By Nelson’s time each man had two hammocks, to allow for cleaning. They were made of canvas 1.8 m by 0.9 m and in each was a mattress made from flock or rags, a blanket and a coverlet. Hammocks belonged to the Navy Board and the men either brought bedding with them or purchased it from the purser.

Each morning hammocks were taken down and lashed with seven marling
hitches
, representing the seven seas. They were carried topsides to be stowed and aired, where they were put in special netting at the side of the ship to act as protection from musket balls under enemy fire.

Hammocks could also serve as life preservers; one thrown to a man overboard could keep him afloat for 24 hours. If a seaman died at sea he was sewn into his hammock with one or two round shot at his feet – and the last stitch through his nose.

Sometimes females were allowed to stay on board overnight when a ship was in harbour. The women could linger an extra hour in the hammocks, providing they could prove their gender by showing a hairless leg to the bosun’s mates as they did their rounds.

During the late 1700s the British prison system used hammocks in their correctional facilities in order to save space. The hammocks were hung from a brass wall hook or ring on one wall and secured to an opposite wall in the same manner, or to the bars of the cell. However, prisoners soon discovered that the metal hooks could be used as weapons for escape, and the use of hammocks was abolished.