An impressive attempt to redress this balance is made in a new book, Jack Tar: Life in Nelson’s Navy, by Roy and Lesley Adkins. They have drawn on unpublished diaries, letters and other material to create a grimly absorbing picture of life for the ordinary seaman in the late-18th to early-19th century Royal Navy.
With the British Empire expanding at such a rate, crews were subject to huge climatic extremes of heat and cold, as warships patrolled from the Orkneys to the Caribbean and southern Africa.
To sail these ships meant going aloft in treacherous conditions on swaying, dizzying, slippery rigging.
Deck work was little easier with the strain causing torn ligaments, ruptured muscles, hernias and exhaustion. Although the British kept their warships cleaner than other nations, sanitation was dire, with no proper washing facilities.
Toilets were holes with a drop into the sea: Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory had only six such seats for 800 men. Diet was a dreary rotation of hard sea biscuits, salted pork and beef, pea soup and burgoo (boiled oatmeal).
As fresh water rapidly stagnated, daily drink was two pints of grog (rum, water, lemon juice and sugar). And all this ghastliness had to be overcome before even engaging with the enemy.
Yet weather was often worse than war.
In a Grand Banks storm off Newfoundland, during 1782, three warships were lost and 1,000 men killed, compared with Britain’s loss at Trafalgar, in 1805, of 449 men (including Nelson) and no ships.
Because Britain’s Navy spent so long at sea, it became much better than all rivals and this led to its long-term global supremacy.
As we benefit from living in one of the world’s wealthiest countries, we should all feel a deep debt of gratitude to those forgotten men whose sweat and suffering greatly helped to make it so.
* JACK TAR: Life in Nelson’s Navy, by Roy and Lesley Adkins, published by Little, Brown; £20.
