THE COOK (SAILING SHIPS).
It may, perhaps, have appeared strange to many that, in dealing with
the cook in the preceding chapter, I hardly mentioned anything about
the materials with which he is called upon to deal. Most people have
heard something about the badness of food in the Merchant Service,
and therefore it might seem at first sight a great mistake to write
a chapter on the sea-cook, and say nothing about the kind of food.
My excuse must be, that in the kind of ships with which I have been
dealing the food question rarely causes any trouble. In the finest
steamships I doubt very much whether the workers are not fed quite as
well as are any corresponding class of toilers ashore; and even in the
lowest tramps there is not that general lack of decent food which does
press so hardly upon the seamen in sailing ships.
For one reason, the steamship is never so long away from port, except
she breaks down, as to give the same excuse for carrying the kind of
food considered necessary in sailing ships. And in many, as I have
said, there is a system in vogue of paying the men so much per week,
and permitting them to "find" themselves--a hateful system, and one
that can only be indulged in by the authorities at the cost of much
suffering and loss of efficiency by the improvident men who are under
it. How can a man do his work who, without more forethought than a
babe, comes to sea for a fortnight's passage with a few ship-biscuits
and a dozen salt herrings? Without any of the minor comforts, such as
tea, coffee, cocoa, or sugar, he is in misery all the time, besides
being an unmitigated nuisance to those of his shipmates who have come
provided with what they need. Then when the vessel arrives in port, and
such a man gets his pay, it is but rarely that his bitter experience
results in his being more careful. He will have an extensive drunk, and
again face the passage in a condition of starvation. But, in any case,
his behaviour does not affect the cook.
Therefore, to see what manner of man it is whom sailors have had to
deal with their food in the majority of vessels up till the advent of
the great passenger-steamers, and who is carried as a cook of to-day
in thousands of sailing vessels, it is necessary to take a trip in a
vessel dependent upon sail-power for propulsion--a vessel wherein you
may be a matter of five or even six months at sea without making a call
anywhere, for ever so short a time. It is perfectly safe to say that,
even at the present day, seven out of ten sailing-ship cooks are only
so styled by courtesy, or for want of a better name to give them. And
this is in despite of the well-meant, and, in most cases, philanthropic
efforts that have recently been made to train cooks for ship work.
The good people who, with the welfare of the seaman at heart, take
so much pains in order that he shall have his food properly prepared
are undoubtedly doing a good work for their pupils; but the unhappy
sailing-ship man seldom gets the benefit from those educated cooks that
their teachers hope for. And this for the simple reason that, when
once a ship's cook has really learned cookery, he will use his utmost
endeavours to get a ship where there is something that requires skill
in cooking. So he gets into steam, and, once there, only some dire
misfortune will bring him back to a wind-jammer again.
Yet, strangely enough, even the elementary skill required for cooking
the staple food served out in the great majority of sailing ships
to-day is generally wanting. Surely it is only reasonable to expect
a man who engages to serve as cook of a ship to be able to boil salt
beef and pork, make pea-soup, and bread, and boil rice. Nothing more
is required of him at sea than this, for the better food carried for
the cabin is prepared by the steward, who will generally give an eye
to it also during preparation. But it is seldom that you will find a
sailing-ship cook who will, or who can, do these things properly. And
as to taking a little trouble to make this coarse food palatable by
varying its treatment, such cooks would be astounded, indignant, at the
revolutionary idea. Then, when in port the fare is changed to that of
fresh meat and vegetables, the only thing that the cook seems capable
of doing is to make one kind of soup. That is usually good, but soon
becomes monotonous. As to roasting meat or cooking potatoes nicely,
such a thought is not to be entertained; or, if the cook does try to
do such a thing, the meat is usually so hard as to be uneatable by any
one but a sailor or a savage.
Now, I am aware that these statements of mine will be met with
indignant denials in some quarters. I shall be told that things have
altered so much for the better since my day (sixteen years ago) that
I should hardly recognize them. Unfortunately for the makers of such
remarks, I have taken pains to find out whether this is really the
case, ready and eager to rejoice in the fact, if it were a fact. And
I have found to my sorrow that among sailing ships the improvement
is practically _nil_. When I was going to sea there were good-living
ships, where plenty of preserved meats were carried, and the crews
treated periodically to fresh messes; ships where abundance of potatoes
and turnips and onions were put on board, and served out liberally to
the crew forward as well as the officers; where a regular allowance of
butter and pickles was made, and in cold weather oatmeal porridge was
served out for breakfast. And there were lines of sailing ships where a
scale of provisions such as these was drawn up on generous lines, and
incorporated in the ship's articles instead of the shameful Board of
Trade scale. There are such ships to-day, but their proportion is no
greater than it was then. And if any will speak of official inspection
of provisions, in order to ensure a high standard of quality, I would
respectfully call their attention to the innumerable statements made
and uncontradicted this present winter of the abominable condition of
the food supplied on board many of the transports to our troops on
their way to South Africa. Not that I believe such food would find its
way into the kids of the crews of those transports in the ordinary
course of things. No; but such food as that is in the ordinary course
of things carried by sailing ships, the majority of them for the supply
of their foremast hands.
Now, in these days such behaviour on the part of those whose business
it is to supply ships with food is unpardonable, not only because
it is cruel, but because it is unbusinesslike. It would be cheaper
to supply preserved fresh meat than salt, cheaper to vary the food
instead of giving hapless men the infernal monotony of beef and duff,
pork and pea-soup, every other day for a matter of a hundred to a
hundred and fifty days on end. There is really no reason why every ship
afloat should not have a pound of butter per week served out to each
sailor, or why a sufficient quantity of such easily kept vegetables
as potatoes, turnips, and onions should not form a regular portion of
a sailor's dietary. It is also very well to talk of the healthiness
of sailors; but you will very seldom find a hale, deep-water sailor
over fifty years of age. Nor is this due to volcanic outbursts of
intemperance and other forms of vice while on shore. It is due to
privation of vegetables, and bad, highly-salted meat as the only flesh
food for long periods. Dried peas can never make up for the want of
fresh vegetables, although apparently they are expected to do so,
even when flavoured by the boiling with them of pork so salt that if
allowed to remain in the soup for more than half an hour the latter is
rendered uneatable. And then so many cooks are fond of an over-dose
of carbonate of soda in the soup in order to ensure the peas bursting.
No one ashore can have any idea of the craving which seamen on long
voyages feel for fresh vegetables, the thought of them at times being
almost maddening.
It may be said--although, from the real importance of the subject just
touched upon in the few preceding paragraphs, I sincerely hope it
will not be--that I have been making a purely gratuitous digression
from my text. At any rate, I will now drop the subject-matter of
cookery, and proceed to deal with the cook himself as fairly as I may.
Unfortunately, my experience has been so unhappy that it is rather
difficult for me to remember that there must be many good cooks in
sailing ships, even if I have not had the good fortune to be shipmates
with them during my sailing-ship voyages. However, I will do my best to
be impartial.
In the first place, the routine of a cook's duties in a sailing ship
is fairly fixed; there is not much room for variation. We will suppose
that it is Monday morning in the middle of a long passage. At 4 a.m.,
when the middle watch is relieved, the cook is called. Going at once
to his galley, he lights his fire with a handful of tarry yarns and
a little wood, and pops the kettle on. Then a grating noise and a
pleasant smell are manifest; he is grinding coffee. While the water is
boiling he will attend to the mixing of the sponge set overnight for
bread or duff, whichever it is his custom to make out of the half-pound
of flour which every man is entitled to on that day of the week. At
two bells (five o'clock) he puts his head out of the galley door and
cries "Coffee." On the word every man of the watch on deck, except the
steersman, brings his pannikin to the galley door and receives a little
more than half a pint of--well, we'll call it coffee; but really, when
you come to think of it, the name is somewhat misapplied. For the daily
allowance is half an ounce of green beans, which, by the time they are
roasted and ground, are hardly capable of yielding sufficient caffeine
to make a pint and a half of drinkable infusion, or rather decoction,
since the cook must boil it to get any flavour at all. But that is a
detail. At any rate, the liquid is hot, and it may be sweet, if the
drinker is economical with his twelve ounces of sugar, careful enough
to make it last him the week.
This morning coffee is a great institution. However unsavoury it may be
as a beverage, it is looked forward to as no other meal of the day is,
for it breaks up the long and sleepy morning watch, it ushers in the
day, and its medicinal effects are undoubted. After it has been drunk,
the man at the wheel relieved for his share, and a smoke indulged
in, the cry of "Wash decks" is heard, and the day's work begins. The
cook's duties are light. He has nothing to prepare for the men's
breakfast--that is, in eight ships out of ten--except another jorum of
questionable coffee, about a pint for each man. In most ships breakfast
for the men is the grimmest farce imaginable. A few fragments of dry
ship-biscuit, and a pint of coffee, cannot by any stretch of courtesy
be called a meal. A little butter would go far to make it one. A few
potatoes wherewith to make dry hash or lobscouse with a few remaining
fragments of meat left from the two preceding meals, and an onion to
flavour it with, would cause the ship to be gratefully regarded as a
"good-living" packet. In American ships this is the rule; few indeed
of them are to be found where a good breakfast is not provided for
the men, and, what is quite as important, the quality of the bread
(biscuit) supplied is usually superior to that found in the cabins of
British sailing ships. Not so in Canadian vessels. It is a profound
mystery to me, the way in which Canadian sailors, or, for the matter
of that, longshoremen in Canadian coast villages feed. The fattest of
fat pork, potatoes, and salt cod seem to be the staple food in the
coasters, and as often as not "coffee" is made with burnt bread, and
sweetened with exceedingly dubious molasses.
Lying in a Nova Scotian harbour once, loading lumber from a large
schooner, I went on board at breakfast time. I found the skipper
preparing breakfast for all hands--four of them. They did not muster
a cook. He unearthed a mass of cold cooked potatoes and a block of
pale pink fat, got out a big square tin, which he put on top of the
hot stove, and, carving up the lump of fat into dice, sprinkled them
over the bottom of the pan. He then peeled his potatoes, and dropped
them into the pan on top of the hissing fat, stirring them round with
his knife. As soon as the mass was warm through, breakfast was ready.
The "coffee" was warmed up from yesterday, and its aroma was enough to
kill a mosquito. I should think it would have made a fine disinfectant.
Yet in that splendid country there is no want of the best food. There
is a serious lack of cooking ability. I stayed in a "hotel" in one
coast village for nearly two months one winter, where at least thirty
always sat down to meals. Those meals never varied. Fried blocks of
meat, potatoes boiled in their skins, soggy bread, and "pies," a sort
of stew of cranberries or dried apples, spread over a dough-covered
plate, and indurated in an oven, always formed the menu: never a bit
of green vegetable, or any suggestion that even the same kind of meat
might be made just as palatable, if not more so, by being treated in
a different kind of way. I suppose these strong men look down with a
certain contempt upon any careful treatment of food as being effeminate.
But to return to the British sailing-ship cook getting ready for
breakfast. As I have said, the men's repast does not burden him. He may
have in the oven a panful of "cracker-hash," a mess of pounded biscuit,
chopped beef or pork mixed with water, and plentifully anointed with
grease skimmed from the cook's coppers. This will have been got ready
overnight by the younger members of the forecastle crowd. In many
ships, however, this form of filling is strictly forbidden; that is to
say, the cook is not allowed to have it in his oven, because it is well
known to be most unwholesome, producing various intestinal disorders,
and covering the men with boils. But the temptation to invent some
means of distending the craving stomach is great, so most men break
up the biscuit into their coffee, and shovel it down soaked, to the
ruin of their digestions. Meanwhile the watch on deck are getting a
razor-keen edge on their appetites. The strong, pure air, and the
vigorous exercise of thoroughly cleansing the decks with a flood of
water and much scrubbing, from stem to stern, is enough to do this,
even if it were not aided by an occasional appetizing whiff from the
galley of frying bacon or cunning stew, which is being got ready for
the officers' morning meal. Those who have been sleeping in the crowded
forecastle are naturally not so sharp set; they can do with a drink
of coffee and a smoke. But when at eight bells (8 a.m.) the watch is
relieved, and those who have been at work all the morning come below to
the mockery that awaits them, there is much bitterness and bad language.
No sooner has the cook cleared off the cabin breakfast than he turns
his attention to the duff or bread. The former curious compound is
peculiar to British Merchant sailing ships. It is really boiled bread.
It is made, like bread, with hop yeast, but a certain quantity of
grease is mixed with it, and it is not put into the bags dry, like
dough, but slack enough to run. The bags are made of canvas, conical in
shape, to allow of the duff being turned out easily. Before the mixture
is poured into them they are dipped in hot water--salt, of course; you
cannot afford to use fresh at sea for such cooking purposes, except in
steamers, where a condenser is always at work. When the due amount is
poured into each bag it is loosely tied to admit of its rising, and
plunged into a boiling copper, whence, if all be well, it will emerge
at seven bells light and spongy. Usually a modicum of molasses is
provided, to give it some flavour; but I have been in ships where even
that poor adjunct was wanting.