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Alcohol, Food and Water at Sea

The provisioning of ships and their men between 1690 and 1725: bread, salt meat and pulses, and the beer, wine and spirits issued as an entitlement rather than a treat. Fresh water was the hardest store to keep, and pirate ships took theirs out of other vessels.

Also writtenVictualling; The naval ration; Provisioning at sea; Drink at sea; Beer, wine and rum; Water and casks

Every vessel in this archive was a closed victualling system of fixed capacity. Three things governed whether a voyage could be made at all: the bulk of the provisions, the number of mouths, and the distance to the next fresh water. That arithmetic survives as administrative record. The Royal Navy's ration can be stated to the ounce; no pirate ration can be stated at all.

The ration as an entitlement

The naval allowance was a weekly cycle on a daily pound of biscuit and a daily gallon of beer, a gallon already named in Pepys's victualling contract of 1677. Instructions given as those of 1690 add beef on four days, pork or bacon with pease on the alternating days, and fish with butter and cheese on the other three, though a modern reconstruction puts oatmeal rather than fish on the meatless days. The allowance was owed, and short issue was a grievance with a legal form.1

The purser's measure and the eighth

The purser received stores by one measure and issued by another: sixteen ounces in, fourteen out for dry provisions, and a purser's quart of thirty-five fluid ounces for liquids, a customary shortfall of twelve and a half per cent. He kept a further eighth against loss and spoilage. Both measures are set down in a manual of 1761, a generation after these years. Nothing like the eighth is recorded for a pirate ship, where under the company's articles the quartermaster shared out plunder and provisions and could be voted out.2

Beer, wine and rum

Naval small beer was weak, sometimes under one per cent alcohol, which makes a gallon a day intelligible as a ration. It carried calories and did not harbour harmful micro organisms. The idea that all water everywhere was undrinkable is a myth. Where beer would not survive the climate it was replaced at fixed equivalences: wine in southern waters, rum in the West Indies, where it had begun to displace beer from 1655.3

Water, casks and the cost of running out

Water is the weakest link in the system. It travelled in casks, and the worst case of running out is a pirate one. Johnson's General History has Bartholomew Roberts's company running seven hundred leagues for Surinam with one hogshead of water for 124 souls, on "one single Mouthful of Water for 24 Hours", men drinking their urine or sea water and dying of it. Iron cask hoops are abundant on the Queen Anne's Revenge site.4

The pirate ship had no purser

A pirate company had no contract, no shore establishment, no credit. Its stores came from what it took, what it bought or extorted at a complaisant port, and what it caught or gathered ashore. Roberts's articles open on the point: every man "has equal Title to the fresh Provisions, or strong Liquors, at any Time seized ... unless a Scarcity (no uncommon Thing among them) make it necessary ... to vote a Retrenchment". Equality of access, seizure as the source, scarcity admitted as usual: only the first is remembered. Johnson, who printed them, gave them as taken from the pirates' own informations and not as a transcript. See prizes and fencing.5

Drink in the courtroom

Drink entered evidence from both sides. At the trials of Roberts's men at Cape Coast in 1722, a prisoner called Harry Glasby to witness that he had come among the crew so drunk that he was hoisted aboard with a tackle, without his consent; of another it was deposed that he was always drunk, and knew nothing of the action against the Swallow. In the gallows literature drink is the master sin: John Rose Archer named "my brutish Drunkenness" at Boston in 1724, in the formulaic manner the genre required. See forced men.6

Rackham's bowl of punch

The best known drinking story of all is a later inference: that Rackham's crew were too drunk to fight. Johnson has nine turtlers invited aboard John Rackham's sloop off Point Negril in 1720 to "drink a Bowl of Punch"; evidence that when Barnet chased, "some were drinking, and others walking the Deck"; the visitors going below when fired on, with Anne Bonny and Mary Read among the few who kept the deck; and the sloop taken "after a very small Dispute". He nowhere says the company were drunk, or ties the ease of the capture to drink. The trial print does not date the capture itself: its latest charged act falls on 20 October, the 22 October often given is the print's date for the turtlers' own charge, and Governor Lawes, writing on 13 November of an action "about a fortnight ago", points instead to the end of October.7

Two neighbouring traditions stand on the same footing. Roberts is remembered as a sober man on Johnson's word alone, though the same telling has his efforts against drink proving ineffectual, most of his company being drunk at Cape Lopez. That William Kidd was drunk at his hanging is repeated without citation by later writers; the Ordinary of Newgate's account dates the execution at Execution Dock to 23 May 1701, against 28 May in a repository blog, and that conflict stands.

The gaps are specific. No period ration of fresh water in English service was established, so the one quantity every voyage turned on is missing here, and no merchant scale of provisions was recovered for 1690 to 1725. Whether the printed Jamaica trial of 1721 carries that drinking evidence is untested, the only copy seen being too poor to read. Lorrain's half sheet of 1701 would settle the Kidd question, and has not been read. The weekly ration of 1690 survives only through a nineteenth-century printing and a later transcription of it; the Surinam passage, with its hogshead of water for 124 souls, rests on the one book of 1724; and no source sets the purser's eighth against pirate practice, so the contrast between them is an inference.

What the evidence does not settle

Fresh water ration

  • What fresh-water ration was prescribed or practised aboard period shipsUnverified

Purser's measures

  • The purser's fourteen ounce pound is evidenced only by an 1761 manualUnverified

Turtlers' drinking evidence

  • Whether the 1721 trial print includes the turtlers' drinking evidencePossible

Each line is one question with its own grade, taken from the register where a claim carries it. Nothing here is graded as a whole.

Sources for this record

Every statement above that rests on a checked claim carries a small number; the numbers lead here. Each entry gives what is claimed, how far the record supports it, and where it comes from.

  1. The English naval allowance of the period was a weekly cycle resting on a daily pound of biscuit and a daily gallon of beer, a quantity already specified in a victualling contract drawn up by Samuel Pepys in 1677, with instructions transmitted as those of 1690 adding beef on four named days, pork or bacon with a pint of pease in Winchester measure on the alternating days, and fish with two ounces of butter and four ounces of cheese on the other three; the 1690 scale reaches this record through a nineteenth-century printing and a later transcription of it, and a modern reconstruction of the same cycle puts oatmeal rather than fish on the meatless days. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Period administrative records in later transcription, with institutional and modern reconstructions: Victualling Instructions 1690, transcribed from Ancient Naval Records as printed in the Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle for 1848, pages 326 to 329 and 478 to 482; Smithsonian Libraries, Beer on Board in the Age of Sail; Naval Gazing, Naval Rations Part 1
  2. Royal Navy pursers received provisions by one measure and issued them by another, sixteen ounces received against fourteen ounces issued for dry provisions including butter and cheese and a purser's quart of thirty-five fluid ounces for liquids, a shortfall of twelve and a half per cent sanctioned by custom, and retained a further eighth of what was supplied against loss and wastage, though the evidence for the two measures is a manual of 1761, so their application to the years 1690 to 1725 is inference rather than a sourced statement. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Peer reviewed accounting and business history article: Karen McBride, Tony Hines and Russell Craig, "A rum deal: The purser's measure and accounting control of materials in the Royal Navy, 1665 to 1832", Business History 58:6 (2016), pages 925 to 946
  3. Naval small beer was weak, sometimes under one per cent alcohol, which is what makes a gallon a day intelligible as a ration rather than an indulgence, and where beer would not survive the climate it was replaced at fixed equivalences by wine in southern waters and by rum in the West Indies, where rum had begun to displace beer from 1655. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Institutional library essay: Smithsonian Libraries, Unbound, Beer on Board in the Age of Sail, 2 August 2017
  4. No period ration of fresh water in English naval or merchant service was established for this record, and the best documented instance of a water failure is a pirate one reported by Johnson's General History, which has Bartholomew Roberts's company running some seven hundred leagues for Surinam with one hogshead of water for 124 souls, on an allowance of "one single Mouthful of Water for 24 Hours", men drinking their urine or sea water and dying of it. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Period narrative of contested reliability: A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London, printed for and sold by T. Warner, 1724; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates
  5. A pirate company had no victualling contract, shore establishment or credit and provisioned itself from what it seized, and the articles Johnson prints for Bartholomew Roberts's company open by granting every man "equal Title to the fresh Provisions, or strong Liquors, at any Time seized" unless a scarcity, which the compiler notes in parenthesis was "no uncommon Thing among them", made it necessary to vote a retrenchment; Johnson presents those articles as taken from the pirates' own informations and not as a transcript. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Period narrative of contested reliability: A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London, 1724, articles of Roberts's company; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates
  6. Drunkenness appears in the pirate trial and gallows literature both as a defence and as a confessed cause of ruin: in the evidence Johnson prints for the Cape Coast Castle trials of 1722 a prisoner called Harry Glasby to witness that he had come among the crew so drunk that he was hoisted aboard with a tackle and so without his consent, and another was deposed to have been always drunk and to have known nothing of the action against HMS Swallow, while the dying declaration of John Rose Archer, executed at Boston on 2 June 1724, names "my brutish Drunkenness" in the formulaic manner the genre required. Possible Consistent with the evidence, not established. Period narrative of contested reliability printing trial evidence and dying declarations: A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London, 1724, trials of Roberts's men and the dying declarations of John Rose Archer and William White
  7. The General History has nine turtlers invited aboard John Rackham's sloop off Point Negril in 1720 to "drink a Bowl of Punch", trial evidence that when Jonathan Barnet chased "some were drinking, and others walking the Deck", the visitors going below when fired on with Anne Bonny and Mary Read among the few who kept the deck, and the sloop taken "after a very small Dispute", but it nowhere states that the company were drunk or attributes the ease of the capture to drink, so the popular claim that Rackham's crew were too drunk to fight is a later inference; the trial print does not date the capture, its latest charged act being 20 October 1720, the 22 October of modern accounts is in the print the date of the charge against the turtlers, and Governor Lawes's letter of 13 November, "about a fortnight ago", points to the end of October. Possible Consistent with the evidence, not established. Period narrative of contested reliability: A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London, 1724, chapter on Rackham