Men-Of-War: Life in Nelson's Navy by Patrick O'Brian

Author:Patrick O'Brian [O'Brian, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393089165
Google: mErYX9bjkksC
Amazon: B007K3JT9S
Barnesnoble: B007K3JT9S
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1995-11-16T23:00:00+00:00

The ship’s purser, by Rowlandson.

Tom Allen, an example of the best kind of seaman. He was Nelson’s coxswain and if there had not been many more like him in the fleet, Nelson would never have won his famous victories.

I have spoken of other officers in the ward-room, the master, the surgeon and the purser: they messed in the wardroom and they had the right to walk the quarterdeck, but they were not commissioned officers—they held a warrant from the Navy Office and they never had quite the standing of the others. The master was a relic from the times when sailors sailed the ships and soldiers did the fighting, and he was still responsible for the navigation; he usually began as a midshipman, became a master’s mate, and then, having few social advantages and no influence, gave up all hope of a commission, accepted a warrant and so reached the highest rank that he was ever likely to attain. The surgeon was the ship’s medical man, of course; and the purser looked after the ship’s provisions and the slops, or clothes that were sold to the men at sea; he had almost nothing to do with pay. The purser was not often a popular officer, and “pusser’s tricks” meant any kind of swindle with food, drink, tobacco and clothes, the most notorious being “purser’s eights”, or his habit of receiving food at sixteen ounces to the pound and serving it out at fourteen, keeping the odd two for himself.

There were other warrant officers, such as the boatswain, who looked after the rigging, sails, anchors, cables and cordage, and who hurried the men to their duty, and the gunner and the carpenter, who were of great importance in the life of the ship: they usually rose from the lower deck, and they messed by themselves, not in the ward-room.

The lower deck itself was made up of the great mass of the ship’s people—all the ratings from boy, third class (the lowest form of marine life) to able seaman. The captain appointed the petty officers such as the quartermasters, ship’s corporal, boatswain’s mate and so on from among them, but it made little difference to their sense of being the same kind of men. They nearly all lived and messed together on the lower deck between the guns, slinging their hammocks from the low beams overhead. They were allowed fourteen inches a man, but as they were divided into two watches, larboard and starboard, each on duty in turn, they usually had the luxury of twenty-eight inches to lie in: some 500 men packed into a space about 150 feet long and 50 at the widest. Their life was very hard, often dangerous, and always ill-paid; what is more, their meagre pay was invariably kept six months in arrears, in the hope that this would prevent them from running away. If their food had been good in the first place and if it had been honestly served out and decently cooked, it would not have been too bad by the standards of the time; but generally this was not the case.

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