HOW OUR BLUEJACKETS ARE FED.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 2742, 8 February 1890, Page 6 (Supplement)

HOW OUR BLUEJACKETS ARE FED.

The great British Public looking at the scale of diet as laid down by the wisdom of their lordships of the Admiralty (ages ago), seeks, that Jack gets salt pork and pea soup, salt beef and plum duff, or preserved meat and potatoes or rice; cocoa for breakfast, tea and biscuit for supper. He looks, we say, at the scale, the dear inaocent, and he says it is good. Is it ? Turn we to the first, best, and most frequent diet of the British sailor at sea. After scrubbing decks in the

healthy, appetising sea air at 6 a.m. (different ships different hours, but nearly all are before 7 a.m.), he partakes of cocoa and hard biscuit. Six hours later, 12 noon, dinner. Pork and pea soup. Very filling if you can eat it the soup. But the pork— frjtearly all fat, and what little lean there

"Wa.s salt as Lot's wife, or the brine it has been soaking in for the last two or three years. On one certain station, in a particularly out-of-the-way place, the opening of a pork or beef cask was known all over the ship. It hummed so. But no other provisions could be got. At the same place all the biscuits were brought on the upper deck in the fresh nir, to get those little black insects—weovils—out of it. An hour after the quarter deck was black with them, and thousands had climbed as high or higher th.in the hammock nottiaga. This wo can substantiate, as also can we that largo whito mafTsote, over half an inoh in length, wereservodiout in the flour. At 5 p.m. supcer. Jack sets one pint of stewed tea made in the same copper as his pork was boiled in, and, consequently, with a nice layer of grease op the top of it, and the remainder of his biscuit. Just think, biscuit and cocoa at 6 a.m. after keeping night watches. At work till noon, then pork and soup. Work till 4or 5 p.m., then tea and biscuit. Watch and watch all night, theu da capo. Then again, the lower deck cookery is execrable. The cooking ranges were never large enough, and being so small were necessarily hedged up about with " musn't do this," and " can't do that," that Jag,k cannot, in nine ships out of ten, cook himself a herring for breakfast or tea without laying himself open to punishment; "chancing his arms," is the naval term. Students of naval history well know that the greatest crime of Jack's conduct sheet—the mutiny at the Nore—was principally caused by bad food. Yet, in their day, the same procrastinating tactics were pursued—with what awful consequences !—Naval and Military Review.