----------------------------------------------
| | | Early |
| | Elizabethan | Victorian |
| | scale | scale |
|----------------------------------------------|
| Beef | 8 lbs. | 7 lbs. |
| Biscuit | 7 " | 7 " |
| Salted fish | 9 " | none |
| Cheese | 3/4 lb. | " |
| Butter | " | " |
| Beer | 7 gallons | " |
| Vegetables | none | 3-1/2 lbs. |
| Spirits | " | 7/8 pint |
| Tea | " | 1-3/4 oz. |
| Sugar | " | 14 " |
| Cocoa | " | 7 " |
----------------------------------------------
There is now a small allowance of oatmeal, pepper, mustard, and
vinegar, against which we may set the 'purser's necessaries' of
Elizabeth's day. In that day but little sugar was used, and tea
and cocoa were unknown even in palaces. It is just a question
if seven gallons of beer did not make up for the weekly allowance
of these and for the seven-eighths of a pint of spirits. Tea
was only allowed in 1850, and was not an additional article.
It replaced part of the spirits. The biscuit allowance is now
8-3/4 lbs. Weekly.
The Victorian dietary is more varied and wholesome than the
Elizabethan; but, as we have seen, it is less abundant and can be
obtained for much less money, even if we grant that the 'savings
price'--purposely kept low to avoid all suggestion that the men
are being bribed into stinting themselves--is less than the real
cost. The excess of this latter, however, is not likely to be
more than 30 per cent., so that Elizabeth's expenditure in this
department was more liberal than the present. Such defects as
were to be found in the Elizabethan naval dietary were common
to it with that of the English people generally. If there was
plenty, there was but little variety in the food of our ancestors
of all ranks three centuries ago. As far as was possible in the
conditions of the time, Elizabeth's Government did make provision
for victualling the fleet on a sufficient and even liberal scale;
and, notwithstanding slender pecuniary resources, repeatedly
increased the money assigned to it, on cause being shown. In
his eagerness to make Queen Elizabeth a monster of treacherous
rapacity, Froude has completely overreached himself, He says
that 'she permitted some miserable scoundrel to lay a plan before
her for saving expense, by cutting down the seamen's diet.' The
'miserable scoundrel' had submitted a proposal for diminishing
the expenses which the administration was certainly ill able
to bear, The candid reader will draw his own conclusions when
he finds that the Queen did not approve the plan submitted; and
yet that not one of her assailants has let this appear.[71]
[Footnote 71: It may be stated here that the word 'rations' is
unknown in the navy. The official term is 'victuals.' The term
in common use is 'provisions.']
It is, of course, possible to concede that adequate arrangements
had been made for the general victualling of the fleet; and still
to maintain that, after all, the sailors afloat actually did
run short of food. In his striking 'Introduction to the Armada
Despatches' published by the Navy Records Society, Professor Sir
John Laughton declares that: 'To anyone examining the evidence,
there can be no question as to victualling being conducted on
a fairly liberal scale, as far as the money was concerned. It
was in providing the victuals that the difficulty lay.... When
a fleet of unprecedented magnitude was collected, when a sudden
and unwonted demand was made on the victualling officers, it
would have been strange indeed if things had gone quite smoothly.'
There are plenty of naval officers who have had experience, and
within the last ten years of the nineteenth century, of the
difficulty, and sometimes of the impossibility, of getting sufficient
supplies for a large number of ships in rather out-of-the-way places.
In 1588 the comparative thinness of population and insufficiency
of communications and means of transport must have constituted
obstacles, far greater than any encountered in our own day, to
the collection of supplies locally and to their timely importation
from a distance. 'You would not believe,' says Lord Howard of
Effingham himself, 'what a wonderful thing it is to victual such
an army as this is in such a narrow corner of the earth, where
a man would think that neither victuals were to be had nor a cask
to put it in.' No more effective defence of Elizabeth and her
Ministers could well be advanced than that which Mr. Oppenheim puts
forward as a corroboration of the accusation against them. He says
that the victualling officials 'found no difficulty in arranging
for 13,000 men in 1596 and 9200 in 1597 after timely notice.' This
is really a high compliment, as it proves that the authorities
were quite ready to, and in fact did, learn from experience. Mr.
Oppenheim, however, is not an undiscriminating assailant of the
Queen; for he remarks, as has been already said, that, 'how far
Elizabeth was herself answerable is a moot point.' He tells us
that there 'is no direct evidence against her'; and the charge
levelled at her rests not on proof, but on 'strong probability.'
One would like to have another instance out of all history, of
probability, however strong, being deemed sufficient to convict
a person of unsurpassed treachery and stupidity combined, when
the direct evidence, which is not scanty, fails to support the
charge and indeed points the other way.
The Lord Admiral himself and other officers have been quoted to
show how badly off the fleet was for food. Yet at the close of
the active operations against the Armada, Sir J. Hawkins wrote:
'Here is victual sufficient, and I know not why any should be
provided after September, but for those which my Lord doth mean
to leave in the narrow seas.' On the same day Howard himself
wrote from Dover: 'I have caused all the remains of victuals
to be laid here and at Sandwich, for the maintaining of them
that shall remain in the Narrow Seas.' Any naval officer with
experience of command who reads Howard's representations on the
subject of the victuals will at once perceive that what the Admiral
was anxious about was not the quantity on board the ships, but
the stock in reserve. Howard thought that the latter ought to
be a supply for six weeks. The Council thought a month's stock
would be enough; and--as shown by the extracts from Howard's
and Hawkins's letters just given--the Council was right in its
estimate. Anyone who has had to write or to read official letters
about stocks of stores and provisions will find something especially
modern in Howard's representations.
Though the crews of the fleet did certainly come near the end of
their victuals afloat, there is no case of their having actually
run out of them. The complement of an ordinary man-of-war in the
latter part of the sixteenth century, judged by our modern standard,
was very large in proportion to her size. It was impossible for
her to carry provisions enough to last her men for a long time.
Any unexpected prolongation of a cruise threatened a reduction
to short commons. A great deal has been made of the fact that
Howard had to oblige six men to put up with the allowance of
four. 'When a large force,' says Mr. D. Hannay, 'was collected
for service during any length of time, it was the common rule to
divide four men's allowance among six.' There must be still many
officers and men to whom the plan would seem quite familiar. It is
indicated by a recognised form of words, 'six upon four.' I have
myself been 'six upon four' several times, mostly in the Pacific,
but also, on at least one occasion, in the East Indies. As far
as I could see, no one appeared to regard it as an intolerable
hardship. The Government, it should be known, made no profit
out of the process, because money was substituted for the food
not issued. Howard's recourse to it was not due to immediate
insufficiency. Speaking of the merchant vessels which came to
reinforce him, he says: 'We are fain to help them with victuals
to bring them thither. There is not any of them that hath one
day's victuals.' These merchant vessels were supplied by private
owners; and it is worth noting that, in the teeth of this statement
by Howard, Dr. Jessopp, in his eagerness to blacken Elizabeth,
says that they 'were, as a rule, far better furnished than the
Queen's ships.' The Lord Admiral on another occasion, before
the fight off Gravelines, said of the ships he hoped would join
him from Portsmouth: 'Though they have not two days' victuals,
let that not be the cause of their stay, for they shall have
victuals out of our fleet,' a conclusive proof that his ships
were not very short.
As to the accusation of deliberately issuing food of bad quality,
that is effectually disposed of by the explanation already given
of the method employed in victualling the navy. A sum was paid
for each man's daily allowance to a contractor, who was expressly
bound to furnish 'good and seasonable victuals.'[72] Professor
Laughton, whose competence in the matter is universally allowed,
informs us that complaints of bad provisions are by no means
confined to the Armada epoch, and were due, not to intentional
dishonesty and neglect, but to insufficient knowledge of the
way to preserve provisions for use on rather long cruises. Mr.
Hannay says that the fleet sent to the coast of Spain, in the
year after the defeat of the Armada, suffered much from want
of food and sickness. 'Yet it was organised, not by the Queen,
but by a committee of adventurers who had every motive to fit
it out well.' It is the fashion with English historians to paint
the condition of the navy in the time of the Commonwealth in
glowing colours, yet Mr. Oppenheim cites many occasions of
well-founded complaints of the victuals. He says: 'The quality of
the food supplied to the men and the honesty of the victualling
agents both steadily deteriorated during the Commonwealth.' Lord
Howard's principal difficulty was with the beer, which would
go sour. The beer was the most frequent subject of protest in
the Commonwealth times. Also, in 1759, Lord (then Sir Edward)
Hawke reported: 'Our daily employment is condemning the beer
from Plymouth.' The difficulty of brewing beer that would stand
a sea voyage seemed to be insuperable. The authorities, however,
did not soon abandon attempts to get the right article. Complaints
continued to pour in; but they went on with their brewing till
1835, and then gave it up as hopeless.
[Footnote 72: See 'The Mariners of England before the Armada,' by
Mr. H. Halliday Sparling, in the _English_Illustrated_Magazine_,
July 1, 1891.]
One must have had personal experience of the change to enable
one to recognise the advance that has been made in the art of
preserving articles of food within the last half-century. In
the first Drury Lane pantomime that I can remember--about a year
before I went to sea--a practical illustration of the quality
of some of the food supplied to the navy was offered during the
harlequinade by the clown, who satisfied his curiosity as to
the contents of a large tin of 'preserved meat' by pulling out
a dead cat. On joining the service I soon learned that, owing
to the badness of the 'preserved' food that had been supplied,
the idea of issuing tinned meat had been abandoned. It was not
resumed till some years later. It is often made a joke against
naval officers of a certain age that, before eating a biscuit,
they have a trick of rapping the table with it. We contracted
the habit as midshipmen when it was necessary to get rid of the
weevils in the biscuit before it could be eaten, and a fairly
long experience taught us that rapping the table with it was
an effectual plan for expelling them.
There is no more justification for accusing Queen Elizabeth of
failure to provide well-preserved food to her sailors than there
is for accusing her of not having sent supplies to Plymouth by
railway. Steam transport and efficient food preservation were
equally unknown in her reign and for long after. It has been
intimated above that, even had she wished to, she could not possibly
have made any money out of bad provisions. The victualling system
did not permit of her doing so. The austere republican virtue of
the Commonwealth authorities enabled them to do what was out of
Elizabeth's power. In 1653, 'beer and other provisions "decayed
and unfit for use" were licensed for export free of Customs.' Mr.
Oppenheim, who reports this fact, makes the remarkable comment
that this was done 'perhaps in the hope that such stores would
go to Holland,' with whose people we were at war. As the heavy
mortality in the navy had always been ascribed to the use of bad
provisions, we cannot refuse to give to the sturdy Republicans
who governed England in the seventeenth century the credit of
contemplating a more insidious and more effective method of damaging
their enemy than poisoning his wells. One would like to have it
from some jurist if the sale of poisonously bad food to your
enemy is disallowed by international law.
That there was much sickness in the fleet and that many seamen died
is, unfortunately, true. If Howard's evidence is to be accepted--as
it always is when it seems to tell against the Queen--it is
impossible to attribute this to the bad quality of the food then
supplied. The Lord Admiral's official report is 'that the ships
of themselves be so infectious and corrupted as it is thought to
be a very plague; and we find that the fresh men that we draw
into our ships are infected one day and die the next.' The least
restrained assertor of the 'poisonous' food theory does not contend
that it killed men within twenty-four hours. The Armada reached
the Channel on the 20th of July (30th, New Style). A month earlier
Howard had reported that 'several men have fallen sick and by
thousands fain to be discharged'; and, after the fighting was
over, he said of the _Elizabeth_Jonas_, she 'hath had a great
infection in her from the beginning.' Lord Henry Seymour, who
commanded the division of the fleet stationed in the Straits
of Dover, noted that the sickness was a repetition of that of
the year before, and attributed it not to bad food, but to the
weather. 'Our men,' he wrote, 'fall sick by reason of the cold
nights and cold mornings we find; and I fear me they will drop
away faster than they did last year with Sir Henry Palmer, which
was thick enough.'
'The sickness,' says Professor Laughton, 'was primarily and chiefly
due to infection from the shore and ignorance or neglect of what
we now know as sanitary laws.... Similar infections continued
occasionally to scourge our ships' companies, and still more
frequently French and Spanish ships' companies, till near the
close of the eighteenth century.' It is not likely that any evidence
would suffice to divert from their object writers eager to hurl
calumny at a great sovereign; but a little knowledge of naval
and of military history also would have saved their readers from
a belief in their accusations. In 1727 the fleet in the West
Indies commanded by Admiral Hosier, commemorated in Glover's
ballad, lost ten flag officers and captains, fifty lieutenants,
and 4000 seamen. In the Seven Years' war the total number belonging
to the fleet killed in action was 1512; whilst the number that
died of disease and were missing was 133,708. From 1778 to 1783,
out of 515,000 men voted by Parliament for the navy, 132,623 were
'sent sick.' In the summer, 1779, the French fleet cruising at
the mouth of the English Channel, after landing 500, had still
about 2000 men sick. At the beginning of autumn the number of
sick had become so great that many ships had not enough men to
work them. The _Ville_de_Paris_ had 560 sick, and lost 61. The
_Auguste_ had 500 sick, and lost 44. On board the _Intrépide_
70 died out of 529 sick. These were the worst cases; but other
ships also suffered heavily.
It is, perhaps, not generally remembered till what a very late
date armies and navies were more than decimated by disease. In
1810 the House of Commons affirmed by a resolution, concerning
the Walcheren Expedition: 'That on the 19th of August a malignant
disorder showed itself amongst H.M. troops; and that on the 8th
of September the number of sick amounted to upwards of 10,948
men. That of the army which embarked for service in the Scheldt
sixty officers and 3900 men, exclusive of those killed by the
enemy, had died before the 1st of February last.'
In a volume of 'Military, Medical, and Surgical Essays'[73] prepared
for the United States' Sanitary Commission, and edited by Dr.
Wm. A. Hammond, Surgeon-General of the U.S. Army, it is stated
that, in our Peninsular army, averaging a strength of 64,227
officers and men, the annual rate of mortality from the 25th
of December 1810 to the 25th of May 1813 was 10 per cent. of
the officers and 16 per cent. of the men. We may calculate from
this that some 25,000 officers and men died. There were 22-1/2
per cent., or over 14,000, 'constantly sick.' Out of 309,268
French soldiers sent to the Crimea in 1855-6, the number of killed
and those who died of wounds was 7500, the number who died of
disease was 61,700. At the same date navies also suffered. Dr.
Stilon Mends, in his life of his father,[74] Admiral Sir William
Mends, prints a letter in which the Admiral, speaking of the
cholera in the fleets at Varna, says: 'The mortality on board
the _Montebello_, _Ville_de_Paris_, _Valmy_ (French ships),
and _Britannia_ (British) has been terrible; the first lost 152
in three days, the second 120 in three days, the third 80 in ten
days, but the last lost 50 in one night and 10 the subsequent
day.' Kinglake tells us that in the end the _Britannia's_ loss
went up to 105. With the above facts before us, we are compelled
to adopt one of two alternatives. We must either maintain that
sanitary science made no advance between 1588 and 1855, or admit
that the mortality in Elizabeth's fleet became what it was owing to
ignorance of sanitary laws and not to intentional bad management.
As regards care of the sick, it is to be remembered that the
establishment of naval and military hospitals for the reception
of sick soldiers and sailors is of recent date. For instance,
the two great English military hospitals, Netley and the Herbert,
are only about sixty years old.
[Footnote 73: Philadelphia, 1864.]
[Footnote 74: London, 1899.]
So far from our fleet in 1588 having been ill-supplied with
ammunition, it was in reality astonishingly well equipped,
considering the age. We learn from Mr. Julian Corbett,[75] that
'during the few years immediately preceding the outbreak of the
war, the Queen's navy had been entirely re-armed with brass guns,
and in the process of re-armament a great advance in simplicity
had been secured.' Froude, without seeing where the admission
would land him, admits that our fleet was more plentifully supplied
than the Armada, in which, he says, 'the supply of cartridges
was singularly small. The King [Philip the Second] probably
considered that a single action would decide the struggle; and
it amounted to but fifty rounds for each gun.' Our own supply
therefore exceeded fifty rounds. In his life of Vice-Admiral
Lord Lyons,[76] Sir S. Eardley Wilmot tells us that the British
ships which attacked the Sebastopol forts in October 1854 'could
only afford to expend seventy rounds per gun.' At the close of
the nineteenth century, the regulated allowance for guns mounted
on the broadside was eighty-five rounds each. Consequently, the
Elizabethan allowance was nearly, if not quite, as much as that
which our authorities, after an experience of naval warfare during
three centuries, thought sufficient. 'The full explanation,' says
Professor Laughton, 'of the want [of ammunition] seems to lie
in the rapidity of fire which has already been mentioned. The
ships had the usual quantity on board; but the expenditure was
more, very many times more, than anyone could have conceived.'
Mr. Julian Corbett considers it doubtful if the ammunition, in
at least one division of the fleet, was nearly exhausted.
[Footnote 75: _The_Spanish_War_, 1585-87 (Navy Records Society),
1898, p. 323.]
[Footnote 76: London, 1898, p. 236.]
Exhaustion of the supply of ammunition in a single action is a
common naval occurrence. The not very decisive character of the
battle of Malaga between Sir George Rooke and the Count of Toulouse
in 1704 was attributed to insufficiency of ammunition, the supply
in our ships having been depleted by what 'Mediterranean' Byng,
afterwards Lord Torrington, calls the 'furious fire' opened on
Gibraltar. The Rev. Thomas Pocock, Chaplain of the _Ranelagh_,
Byng's flag-ship at Malaga, says:[77] 'Many of our ships went
out of the line for want of ammunition.' Byng's own opinion, as
stated by the compiler of his memoirs, was, that 'it may without
great vanity be said that the English had gained a greater victory
if they had been supplied with ammunition as they ought to have
been.' I myself heard the late Lord Alcester speak of the anxiety
that had been caused him by the state of his ships' magazines
after the attack on the Alexandria forts in 1882. At a still
later date, Admiral Dewey in Manila Bay interrupted his attack
on the Spanish squadron to ascertain how much ammunition his
ships had left. The carrying capacity of ships being limited,
rapid gun-fire in battle invariably brings with it the risk of
running short of ammunition. It did this in the nineteenth century
just as much as, probably even more than, it did in the sixteenth.
[Footnote 77: In his journal (p. 197), printed as an Appendix
to _Memoirs_relating_to_the_Lord_Torrington_, edited by
J. K. Laughton for the Camden Society, 1889.]
To charge Elizabeth with criminal parsimony because she insisted
on every shot being 'registered and accounted for' will be received
with ridicule by naval officers. Of course every shot, and for the
matter of that every other article expended, has to be accounted
for. One of the most important duties of the gunner of a man-of-war
is to keep a strict account of the expenditure of all gunnery
stores. This was more exactly done under Queen Victoria than it
was under Queen Elizabeth. Naval officers are more hostile to
'red tape' than most men, and they may lament the vast amount
of bookkeeping that modern auditors and committees of public
accounts insist upon, but they are convinced that a reasonable
check on expenditure of stores is indispensable to efficient
organisation. So far from blaming Elizabeth for demanding this,
they believe that both she and Burleigh, her Lord Treasurer,
were very much in advance of their age.
Another charge against her is that she defrauded her seamen of
their wages. The following is Froude's statement:--
'Want of the relief, which, if they had been paid their wages, they
might have provided for themselves had aggravated the tendencies to
disease, and a frightful mortality now set in through the entire
fleet.' The word 'now' is interesting, Froude having had before
him Howard's and Seymour's letters, already quoted, showing that
the appearance of the sickness was by no means recent. Elizabeth's
illiberality towards her seamen may be judged from the fact that
in her reign their pay was certainly increased once and perhaps
twice.[78] In 1585 the sailor's pay was raised from 6s. 8d. to
10s. a month. A rise of pay of 50 per cent. all at once is, I
venture to say, entirely without parallel in the navy since, and
cannot well be called illiberal. The Elizabethan 10s. would be
equal to £3 in our present accounts; and, as the naval month at
the earlier date was the lunar, a sailor's yearly wages would
be equal to £39 now. The year's pay of an A.B., 'non-continuous
service,' as Elizabeth's sailors were, is at the present time £24
6s. 8d. It is true that the sailor now can receive additional
pay for good-conduct badges, gunnery-training, &c., and also
can look forward to that immense boon--a pension--nearly, but
thanks to Sir J. Hawkins and Drake's establishment of the 'Chatham
Chest,' not quite unknown in the sixteenth century. Compared with
the rate of wages ruling on shore, Elizabeth's seamen were paid
highly. Mr. Hubert Hall states that for labourers 'the usual rate
was 2d. or 3d. a day.' Ploughmen received a shilling a week. In
these cases 'board' was also given. The sailor's pay was 5s. a
week with board. Even compared with skilled labour on shore the
sailor of the Armada epoch was well paid. Thorold Rogers gives,
for 1588, the wages, without board, of carpenters and masons at
10d. and 1s. a day. A plumber's wages varied from 10-1/2d. to
1s.; but there is one case of a plumber receiving as much as
1s. 4d., which was probably for a single day.
[Footnote 78: Mr. Halliday Sparling, in the article already referred
to (p. 651), says twice; but Mr. Oppenheim seems to think that
the first increase was before Elizabeth's accession.]
Delay in the payment of wages was not peculiar to the Elizabethan
system. It lasted very much longer, down to our own times in
fact. In 1588 the seamen of the fleet were kept without their
pay for several months. In the great majority of cases, and most
likely in all, the number of these months was less than six. Even
within the nineteenth century men-of-war's men had to wait for
their pay for years. Commander C. N. Robinson, in his 'British
Fleet,'[79] a book that ought to be in every Englishman's library,
remarks: 'All through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it
was the rule not to pay anybody until the end of the commission,
and to a certain degree the practice obtained until some fifty
years ago.' As to the nineteenth century, Lord Dundonald, speaking
in Parliament, may be quoted. He said that of the ships on the
East Indies station, the _Centurion's_ men had been unpaid for
eleven years; the _Rattlesnake's_ for fourteen; the _Fox's_ for
fifteen. The Elizabethan practice compared with this will look
almost precipitate instead of dilatory. To draw again on my personal
experience, I may say that I have been kept without pay for a
longer time than most of the people in Lord Howard's fleet, as,
for the first two years that I was at sea, young officers were
paid only once in six months; and then never in cash, but always
in bills. The reader may be left to imagine what happened when
a naval cadet tried to get a bill for some £7 or £8 cashed at
a small Spanish-American port.
[Footnote 79: London, 1894.]
A great deal has been made of the strict audit of the accounts
of Howard's fleet. The Queen, says Froude, 'would give no orders
for money till she had demanded the meaning of every penny that
she was charged.' Why she alone should be held up to obloquy
for this is not clear. Until a very recent period, well within
the last reign, no commanding officer, on a ship being paid off,
could receive the residue of his pay, or get any half-pay at
all, until his 'accounts had been passed.'[80] The same rule
applied to officers in charge of money or stores. It has been
made a further charge against Elizabeth that her officers had to
meet certain expenditure out of their own pockets. That certainly
is not a peculiarity of the sixteenth-century navy. Till less
than fifty years ago the captain of a British man-of-war had
to provide one of the three chronometers used in the navigation
of his ship. Even later than that the articles necessary for
cleaning the ship and everything required for decorating her
were paid for by the officers, almost invariably by the first
lieutenant, or second in command. There must be many officers
still serving who have spent sums, considerable in the aggregate,
of their own money on public objects. Though pressure in this
respect has been much relieved of late, there are doubtless many
who do so still. It is, in fact, a traditional practice in the
British Navy and is not in the least distinctly Elizabethan.
[Footnote 80: This happened to me in 1904.]
Some acquaintance with present conditions and accurate knowledge
of the naval methods prevailing in the great Queen's reign--a
knowledge which the publication of the original documents puts
within the reach of anyone who really cares to know the truth--will
convince the candid inquirer that Elizabeth's administration of the
navy compares favourably with that of any of her successors; and
that, for it, she deserves the admiration and unalloyed gratitude
of the nation.