I’vw always been fascinated with movies about the age of sail. Long John Silver, Horatio Hornblower, etc. Watching now Master and Commander on DVD it occurs to me that I don’t know how they fit so much stuff on one ship.
At the beggining of the movie a crawl tells us that the HMS Surprise holds 197 men as crew. When you look at the ship in the movie you have to wonder where is the space for that many men? Does it take that amount to man her? I’m sure the common sailor in those days shared a cramped berth with the others, but still. They have to have supplies for long sea journeys, equipment and ammunition, and I’m guessing a bit of room in the ships hold for storing anything else.
2 years ago in Amsterdam I went aboard a repilca of an old sailing ship. It was scaled to make more room for the hold. etc. But even then the Captain’s quarters were tiny. (ridiculously so, it destroyed the illusion. You cpouldn’t stand up in it…at least I couldn’t and I am just under 6 feet tall). As i said itb was scaled in a way to make the exhibits more accesible, but still I found it pretty cramped for a crew of 200 or so folks.
My question is: We have a romantic vision of the age of sail, but it must have been miserable for the men on those ships. Was it miserable or is there a glimmer of truth in the happy, carefvree seamen we sea in those movies.?
Also, as I am not in the Navy, how do modern ships stack up. They are larger, but do they have more room for the sailors? Surely their quality of life is better without the brutal 17/1800’s version of sea justice, but do they live incramped uncomfortable conditions?
(an aside: As a soldier I know that I live in better conditions than my forebearers. But then I’m not stuck on a ship in the middle of the ocean.)
If you are interested in ALL the details of life aboard a man-of-war during the age of sail, I would strongly recommend “Life in Nelson’s Navy”, back in those days. And it’s very well written, to boot. Would almost guarantee that you would like it. It can be found at the following site.
That got a little garbled - it looked fine in the preview but was attacked by Evil Spirits on the way to the Board. The sentence that got screwed up was:
It goes into ALL the details of what a sailor’s life was back in those days.
Check out the Mystic Seaport Jolly, you can look around their whalers and farfarers. I’ll tell you this, those sleeping quarters were very much tight, and if you weren’t hanging from the rafters on a bivy you were bunked in stacked 4 high on a lot of those old whalers, sloops, schooners and ketch’s.
I grew up next to a ship yard and seaport and many of the stories out there of romantic trips abroad are hogwash. The quarters were cramped on a whaler and once you started catching whales it must have stunk to high heaven!
The army ships were similar and I’m ure it went in order of rank, any officer or OIT would be above the deck hands…not called Swabby’s for nothing!
I’ve seen the accommodations on ww2 vessels, and it made my 2x2x6.5 box on the boat seem like a penthouse. I had a curtain!
No… the accommodations on those sailing ships were abysmal. Poor food, nasty water, lots of hard work in all sorts of inclement weather, in a cramped space with hundreds of other guys with little or no hygiene other than infrequent swims in the ocean.
The mortality rate for sailors serving in the Spanish armadas in the 17th and 18th centuries was around 30 per 1000. I know that might not sound like a lot but the bulk of these sailors were young men who were in the prime of the lives. (Off hand I can’t remember the mortality rate of Spain as a whole during this same period but it was lower.)
Constipation and diarrhea were big problems aboard ship. The sailor’s diet included a bunch of salty foods that were very low in fiber, which, combined with the poor nutritional value of this fiber free salt fest, often resulted in sailors becoming constipated. It might sound a bit funny but this could develop into a very serious problem and as John Woodall writes in The Surgion’s Mate, an instructional manual for young surgeons at sea, once the patient begins to vomit fecal matter he is most likely not long for this world.
Dysentery was also a big problem. Clean healthy water was in short supply once a ship was away from land for extended periods of time. We’re not usually accustomed to the ravages of diarrhea in the U.S. but it can be a serious symptom of a bigger problem.
Then there’s the risk of accidental and malicious violence. Woodall’s treatise includes all sorts of instructions on how to treat broken bones, gunshot wounds, burns, head wounds, cuts, etc.
For a moment let’s talk about the psychological side to going at sea. If sailors were on a particularly long voyage then they might be away from their families for years at a time. Most of them were illiterate and couldn’t write letters, though, on rare occasion, and informal postal type system might bring a package from home but this was not the norm. Some sailors would return home to find that a loved one had been dead for more than a year.
Women Sailors and Sailor’s Women by David Cordingly is a great look at gender and the sea. This book has some chapters that will give you some ideas of the psychological toll a life at sea could take on a sailor.
The Surgion’s Mate by John Woodall was first published in 1617. You might have a hard time finding it (a reproduction of course not an original) but if you can find one you won’t be disappointed. It provides a fascinating glimpse into medical technology of the day.
Odesio
Highly recommended is Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, a true firsthand account of a voyage to California in 1834 from an ordinary sailor’s point of view.
When you read Two Years Before the Mast, which Dana hilariously wrote to expose the conditions of the men at sea and which accidentally convinced a crapload of kids to run off to sea, recall that on a fighting ship, they had the men that Dana’s ship had to, you know, run the ship… plus the men to run the guns. In other words, a fighting ship was a hell of a lot more crowded once you factor in the gun crews. And Dana’s ship was plenty crowded.
Your replica ship in Amsterdam may have been accurately sized. Usually there really wasn’t much room, and having to duck to avoid hitting your head on the overhead beams was the norm.
Sailors of the age of sail had a few centuries of experience in packing as much as possible into a limited amount of space, and also were quite used to regularly shifting a few tons of stores around to access stuff packed under or behind them. Another factor to bear in mind was that water, much of the food, and a lot of other stuff was stored in barrels. Once the barrel was empty, it could be knocked apart and the bits kept until they were needed again and it was reassembled by the ship’s cooper. This would free up additional space as the voyage progressed, so there would be some improvement in conditions.
Submarines in WW2 (and probably WW1) had similar problems. Not only was there limited space, so that “hot bunking” (where, as one sailor rolled out of the bunk to go on watch, a sailor from the previous watch was waiting to get into it), was the norm, but at the beginning of a cruise food and supplies would be stuffed into any available nook and the deck level was often raised by a layer of supply boxes for the first couple of weeks.
That (hot bunking) was what I was coming in to mention : the living space didn’t need to be able to house the whole crew, since roughly half of them were awake at all times, in shifts.
The WW2 submarine movie Das Boot is a great visual for this, as well as the “cramming food wherever you can” thing. Early in the movie, the officers are giving orders from a command room fitted with salamis hanging everywhere :).
Some good non-fiction books have been recommended but I would suggest reading the Patrick O’Brien Aubrey/Maturin books on which the film Master & Commander was based. Extremely well researched - based primarily on the contents of various ships’ logs - they do a brilliant job of getting you inside the life of a period (beginning of the 19th century). From our point of view, the conditions; food, space, discipline, etc. were dreadful but they have to be compared with life on the land (including in the army!) to get a fair comparison.
On the specifics of HMS Surprise, most of your questions have been answered. The numbers were needed to fight the ship as well as sail her, mess space for the ordinary seaman was tiny (nominally 14 inches per hammock but, as noted, at sea, half the crew would be on watch at any time), decks were low such that a tall person would not be able to stand up straight, it was amazing how much could be fitted into the hold of a frigate but at the start of a voyage stores would have been stacked everywhere - including livestock: sheep, goats, maybe even bullocks and a milk cow!
I don’t have any references with me at the moment but I think you would find conditions with regard to the seamans’ health had changed a bit between the writing of book Odesio recommends and the period of HMS Surprise. Mostly the technology of the ships were the same but during the Napoleonic period effective means of preventing scurvy were introduced to Royal Navy ships which made an enormous difference on long voyages.
In addition to the Aubrey-Maturin series itself, there are a number of companion books to the series which have been published. See the bibliography to the Wikipedia article on the series:
for a listing.
The “livestock onboard ship” may not be exclusively an Age of Sail thing.
Back when I was serving in the US Navy (as a JAG; I wasn’t a real sailor ) I heard that the Kidd class guided missile destroyers had an extra room towards the fantail which the crews (at least the crew of the USS Callaghan, on which my infomant had served) used as a weight room (i.e., weight training machines and free weights–an exercise room). The Kidd class ships had originally been built for the Shah of Iran’s navy, but that order was cancelled by the US when the Shah was overthrown and Khomenhi took over. By that time the ships were too far along to scrap, and Reagan was building his vaunted 600 ship Navy, so the USN took them over. According to the story I heard, the weight room would have been used, had the ships been delivered to the Iranian navy, to keep live goats for milk and meat.
Supposedly those ships were known in the fleet as “the goat boats”.
(Any USN veterans who can confirm or deny, please do. I’ve always been a bit skeptical of that story, myself, but can’t seem to find any information to confirm/disprove.)
In a modern day warship “the men that… had to… run the ship” and “the men [that had] to run the guns” are pretty much the same men. There’s a degree of duplication of crewmen with necessary skills among a ship’s crew, given that a ship has to run 24 hours a day and you need to give people a rest, so you have to have several “shifts” (“watches” in nautical terms, IIRC) worth of crew to cover all those functions all the time. ISTR (it’s been a while) that when a modern warship is at general quarters (“battle stations”) the guns and other combat systems are manned by the crewmembers who aren’t standing other, more “important” watches (like, you know, driving the ship).
I can’t imagine that a sail warship would be so wasteful of manpower as to embark a separate “fighting crew” along with the “shiphandling” crew. If they did can you cite some sources I can go to so that I can read up on that?
**bcg **you’ve already been given the references. The Aubrey Maturin series is a great read as well as a good place to start. Don’t forget that as well as firing the guns, they had to maneouvre the ship. Indeed this was crucial. On a sailing ship, changing direction wasn’t usually just a matter of turning the wheel like on a screw vessel. A major course change took dozens and dozens of men to handle the sails, and they couldn’t be the gun crews because aiming the guns involved (to a significant extent) aiming the whole ship.
Conditions on sailing ships were pretty grim. The food was revolting, but not actually bad (in comparison with landmen’s food). At least (in the tropics) the men could keep reasonably clean (with salt water showers). I alway’s remember Samuel Johnson’s comments (regarding life as a sailor) “it is like being in jail, with the added possibility of being drowned”
**Princhester **- 14 inches is the figure I remember. I’ve found one on-line referencebut I don’t know how authoritative it is. One point to support the 14 inch figure is that 2 x 21 inches = 42 inches would be the width of a modern single bed. Not that cramped!
You are right of course that Napoleonic era warships did not have separate fighting and shiphandling crews, that’s not what we meant. But a wooden sailing ship is different from a modern warship, if you are not in a hurry you don’t need a massive crew for shiphandling on a sailing ship - you just do one thing at a time! On a warship you need a lot more people to sail the ship if you want to be able to make sail, tack, or generally maneuver rapidly. You then need even more people to operate the guns.
Each cannon needed 8-10 people to operate effectively - mostly to reload and run it out quickly. If I remember righly HMS Surprise in M&C was a small 28 gun frigate which - nominally - meant 14 guns to a side and at least 112 people manning the guns (only one side was manned at a time). You also needed teams bringing powder and shot to the guns, the specialist warrant officers (carpenter, bosun, etc) and their crews, marines, plus midshipmen and officers to direct operations. If the ship had to maneuver and the sails be trimmed designated men would fall out from each gun - this would not stop the firing but would slow it down.
Apologies if I have any of the details wrong - I’m doing this mostly from memory as I do not have much time to seach for sources!
Even modern submarines are very cramped, especially when compared to surface warships (which are also fairly cramped, but much less so than subs).
I was an officer on a Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine back in the 1990s, and junior sailors still routinely “hot-racked.” Typically, three sailors on different watches shared two racks (i.e. bunks). U.S. submarines operate using three 6-hour “watches” (i.e. three rotating shifts), so one of the three sailors will always be on watch, and the other two can sleep.
Some of the racks even had curved adaptors on the bottom so that they could be strapped on top of stowed torpedoes!
As for food, during normal weekly ops, we had a walk-in refrigerator and a walk-in freezer, as well as numerous holds to store food. On an extended deployment, both walk-in reefers were converted to freezers. All of the food storage holds were filled. Finally, all available deck space, including passageways, excepting only the reactor compartment, control room, and most of the engineering spaces, were covered with large No. 10 cans and boxes. Sheets of rubber matting were used to overlay the cans, so you had to duck your head when walking around until these food stores were used up.
We also kept crates of eggs back in the engineroom lower level near the bilge where it was pretty cool.
Although the quarters were cramped, conditions were generally not too bad. Sailors got hot meals, hot (though short) fresh-water showers, heating and A/C. The biggest quality of life problems were the unending work/drills and lack of sleep, in my experience.
You need a lot more men to run the guns than you would if you were just sailing the ship. It wasn’t “extra” people in the sense that the gun crews were obviously sailors, but you didn’t actually need that many sailors to sail the thing. There was a lot of busywork invented to keep all those guys out of trouble - the decks didn’t really need quite so much holystoning, I don’t think.
Also there’s the space taken up by the guns themselves. They were completely inside the ship until they were run out in preparation for firing them.
) I heard that the Kidd class guided missile destroyers had an extra room towards the fantail which the crews (at least the crew of the USS Callaghan, on which my infomant had served) used as a weight room (i.e., weight training machines and free weights–an exercise room). The Kidd class ships had originally been built for the Shah of Iran’s navy, but that order was cancelled by the US when the Shah was overthrown and Khomenhi took over. By that time the ships were too far along to scrap, and Reagan was building his vaunted 600 ship Navy, so the USN took them over. According to the story I heard, the weight room would have been used, had the ships been delivered to the Iranian navy, to keep live goats for milk and meat.