Fourteen inches and fug

I’m currently researching naval life in the Regency period for a series of books I’m starting to write. So a trip to Portsmouth was absolutely essential. We are so lucky that HMS Victory has been preserved, essentially as she was. Writers can get a real feeling for what life on board might have been like. The only thing that hasn’t been preserved is the chaos of war — and the smell. Sailors apparently preferred to have the gunports closed, and to live in the dark and the fug!

Life on board was exceedingly cramped, unless you were the Admiral, or the Captain. Nelson’s cabin, on the upper gun deck, occupied about a quarter of the length of the ship. In his dining cabin, you can see the polished mahogany table laid for 20, with room to spare. The Captain’s cabin, on the quarterdeck above, was about half that size. There were guns everywhere and the sailors’ quarters, in particular, were dominated by them. Everything else — eating, sleeping in a hammock in 14 inches of hanging space — had to be squeezed in between.

Photography isn’t allowed on board HMS Victory, but here is a shot of an officer’s cabin on board HMS Warrior, launched in 1860, which was actually much more spacious than HMS Victory. In HMS Victory, officers’ cabins were smaller and the guns took up far more of space. When a ship cleared for action, everything was dismantled and stowed away, leaving guns and crews.

The museum at the historic dockyard includes some interesting exhibits of the reality of warfare. I’d learned at school about how the young Napoleon Bonaparte dispersed a Paris insurrection in 1795 with a “whiff of grapeshot” but I didn’t actually know what grapeshot was. Given the name, I’d imagined shot about the size of a grape. Wrong! This is grapeshot as used in naval canon. Each of the balls is about the size of a tennis ball and as the shot is fired, the canvas bursts and the balls fly in all directions. Terrifying. No wonder the Paris mob was dispersed.

It’s all grist to the writer’s mill and I am thoroughly enjoying becoming immersed in naval life. Though I really don’t think I’d have enjoyed living it! Would you?

Joanna
http://www.joannamaitland.com

Research takes you to some interesting places!

As part of the research for the book I’m currently writing, which is set in the Arctic during the age of exploration, I have been researching life in the British Royal Navy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In doing so I came across the Royal Hospital, Greenwich, (the naval equivalent of the army’s Chelsea Hospital) and a recent archaeological excavation there that threw light on the lives of the pensioners living there.

The Royal Hospital was a retirement home for “seamen worn out or become decrepit by age and infirmities in the service of their country.” At least 93 men who served at the Battle of Trafalgar lived there. Interestingly one of the facts about Trafalgar that I had not realised before was the number of different nationalities who fought alongside the British, including 28 Americans. Veterans became in-pensioners at the Royal Hospital only in old age or if they had no family to care for them. Hospital food was plentiful if basic. Each man had 1lb of meat a day, boiled or sometimes roast beef on three days of the week, mutton on two days a week, 4oz cheese a day, 1lb bread a day and half a gallon of beer a day. On Wednesday and Fridays they were given pease pottage, a stew with peas and bacon, 8oz cheese and 2oz butter. Tea joined the rations in the early 19th century, as it did in the Navy; also chocolate at breakfast, potatoes, and other improvements. Even then, cabbage was the only green vegetable, for two months in summer so maybe there was scurvy on shore as well as at sea!

Archaeological excavations at the site bear out the suggestion that life in Nelson's Navy was tough. Work was hard, discipline brutal, accommodation dark, cramped and unhygienic and food often uneatable. Disease was rife. The Navy tried to keep its ships clean but with so many men in such cramped and fetid conditions, fever could spread fast and only the strongest survived. 60% of the bodies examined by the archaeologists had broken noses, either from falls – or fights! Fractures were common, from falling out of the rigging to being crushed by the proverbial “loose cannon.” However the Greenwich Pensioners were a hardy lot. Many survived into their 70s, eight of the Trafalgar veterans were over 80 and one was over 90 years old!

Nicola Cornick
www.nicolacornick.com