The worst feature of rum, from the sailor's point of view, worse by far than dilution, was the fact that it could be so easily stopped. Here his partiality for the spirit told heavily against him. His grog was stopped because he liked it, rather than because he deserved to lose it. The malice of the thing did not make for a contented ship.
The life of the man-o'-war's-man, according to Lord Nelson, was on an average "finished at forty-five years." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 580—Memorandum on the State of the Fleet, 1803.] Bad food and strenuous labour under exceptionally trying conditions sapped his vitals, made him prematurely old, and exposed him to a host of ills peculiar to his vocation. He "fell down daily," to employ the old formula, in spotted or putrid fevers. He was racked by agues, distorted by rheumatic pains, ruptured or double-ruptured by the strain of pulling, hauling and lifting heavy weights. He ate no meal without incurring the pangs of acute indigestion, to which he was fearfully subject. He was liable to a "prodigious inflammation of the head, nose and eyes," occasioned by exposure. Scurvy, his most inveterate and merciless enemy, "beat up" for him on every voyage and dragged his brine-sodden body down to a lingering death. Or, did he escape these dangers and a watery grave, protracted disease sooner or later rendered him helpless, or a brush with the enemy disabled him for ever from earning his bread.
His surgeons were, as a rule, a sorry lot. Not only were they deficient in numbers, they commonly lacked both professional training and skill. Their methods were consequently of the crudest description, and long continued so. The approved treatment for rupture, to which the sailor was painfully liable, was to hang the patient up by the heels until the prolapsus was reduced. Pepys relates how he met a seaman returning from fighting the Dutch with his eye-socket "stopped with oakum," and as late at least as the Battle of Trafalgar it was customary, in amputations, to treat the bleeding stump with boiling pitch as a cauterant. In his general attitude towards the sick and wounded the old-time naval surgeon was not unlike Garth, Queen Anne's famous physician. At the Kit Cat Club he one day sat so long over his wine that Steele ventured to remind him of his patients. "No matter," said Garth. "Nine have such bad constitutions that no physician can save them, and the other six such good ones that all the physicans in the world could not kill them."
Many were the devices resorted to in order to keep the man-o'-war's-man healthy and fit. As early as 1602 a magic electuary, invented by one "Doctor Cogbourne, famous for fluxes," was by direction of the Navy Commissioners supplied for his use in the West Indies. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1464—Capt. Barker, 14 Oct. 1702.] By Admiral Vernon and his commanders he was dosed freely with "Elixir of Vitriol," which they not only "reckoned the best general medicine next to rhubarb," but pinned their faith to as a sovereign specific for scurvy and fevers. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 161—Admiral Vernon, 31 Oct. 1741.] Lime-juice, known as a valuable anti-scorbutic as early as the days of Drake and Raleigh, was not added to his rations till 1795. He did not find it very palatable. The secret of fortifying it was unknown, and oil had to be floated on its surface to make it keep. Sour-crout was much more to his taste as a preventive of scurvy, and in 1777, at the request of Admiral Montagu, then Governor and Commander-in-Chief over the Island of Newfoundland, the Admiralty caused to be sent out, for the use of the squadron on that station, where vegetables were unprocurable, a sufficient quantity of that succulent preparation to supply twelve hundred men for a period of two months. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 471—Admiral Montagu, 28 Feb. 1777, and endorsement.]
Rice the sailor detested. Of all species of "soft tack" it was least to his liking. He nicknamed it "strike-me-blind," being firmly convinced that its continued use would rob him of his eyesight. Tea was not added to his dietary till 1824, but as early as 1795 he could regale himself on cocoa. For the rest, sugar, essence of malt, essence of spruce, mustard, cloves, opium and "Jesuits'" or Peruvian bark were considered essential to his well-being on shipboard. He was further allowed a barber-one to every hundred men-without whose attentions it was found impossible to keep him "clean and healthy."
With books he was for many years "very scantily supplied." It was not till 1812, indeed, that the Admiralty, shocked by the discovery that he had practically nothing to elevate his mind but daily association with the quarter-deck, began to pour into the fleet copious supplies of literature for his use. Thereafter the sailor could beguile his leisure with such books as the Old Chaplains Farewell Letter, Wilson's Maxims, The Whole Duty of Man, Seeker's Duties of the Sick, and, lest returning health should dissipate the piety begotten of his ailments, Gibson's Advice after Sickness. Thousands of pounds were spent upon this improving literature, which was distributed to the fleet in strict accordance with the amount of storage room available at the various dockyards. [Footnote: Admiralty Records Accountant-General, Misc. (Various), No. l06—Accounts of the Rev. Archdeacon Owen, Chaplain-General to the Fleet, 1812-7.]
A fundamental principle of man-o'-war routine was that the sailor formed no part of it for hospital purposes. Hence sickness was not encouraged. If the sailor-patient did not recover within a reasonable time, he was "put on shore sick," sometimes to the great terror of the populace, who, were he supposed to be afflicted with an infectious disease, fled from him "as if he had the plague." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 2732—Capt. Young, 24 June 1740.] On shore he was treated for thirty days at his country's charges. If incurable, or permanently disabled, he was then turned adrift and left to shift for himself. A clean record and a sufficiently serious wound entitled him to a small pension or admission to Greenwich Hospital, an institution which had religiously docked his small pay of sixpence a month throughout his entire service. Failing these, there remained for him only the streets and the beggar's rôle.
His pay was far from princely. From 3d. a day in the reign of King John it rose by grudging increments to 20s. a month in 1626, and 24s. in 1797. Years sometimes elapsed before he touched a penny of his earnings, except in the form of "slop" clothing and tobacco. Amongst the instances of deferred wages in which the Admiralty records abound, there may be cited the case of the Dreadnought, whose men in 1711 had four years' pay due; and of the Dunkirk, to whose company, in the year following, six and a half years' was owing. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1470—Capt. Bennett, 8 March 1710-11. Admiralty Records 1. 1471—Capt. Butler, 19 March, 1711-12,] And at the time of the Nore Mutiny it was authoritatively stated that there were ships then in the fleet which had not been paid off for eight, ten, twelve and in one instance even fifteen years. "Keep the pay, keep the man," was the policy of the century—a sadly mistaken policy, as we shall presently see.
In another important article of contentment the sailor was hardly better off. The system of deferred pay amounted practically to a stoppage of all leave for the period, however protracted, during which the pay was withheld. Thus the Monmouth's men had in 1706 been in the ship "almost six years, and had never had the opportunity of seeing their families but once." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1468-Capt. Baker, 3 Nov. 1706.] In Boscawen's ship, the Dreadnought, there were in 1744 two hundred and fifty men who "had not set foot on shore near two year." Admiral Penrose once paid off in a seventy-four at Plymouth, many of whose crew had "never set foot on land for six or seven years"; [Footnote: Penrose (Sir V. C., Vice-Admiral of the Blue), Observations on Corporeal Punishment, Impressment, etc., 1824.] and Brenton, in his Naval History, instances the case of a ship whose company, after having been eleven years in the East Indies, on returning to England were drafted straightway into another ship and sent back to that quarter of the globe without so much as an hour's leave ashore.
What was true of pay and leave was also true of prize-money. The sailor was systematically kept out of it, and hence out of the means of enjoyment and carousal it afforded him, for inconscionable periods. From a moral point of view the check was hardly to his detriment. But the Navy was not a school of morals, and withholding the sailor's hard-earned prize-money over an indefinite term of years neither made for a contented heart nor enhanced his love for a service that first absorbed him against his will, and then, having got him in its clutches, imposed upon and bested him at every turn.