Sea-Power and Other Studies

by Sir Cyprian Bridge

[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.'