I recall now because they get into the flour are are covered like Millers. 
I don’t recall mention of the ship’s cook ever baking bread-I assume that this would be impossible, as dried yeast didn’t exist in 1815. So I guess Captain Aubrey was stuck eating the rock-hard, weevil-ridden hardtack biscuits (that the sailors ate).
I believe the hardtack was hard enough to break a tooth on-many men would crush them up and mix them with water (their teeth were either gone or too painful to chew the biscuits).
Of course, the weevils were fresh meat! The salted beef that formed the main rations-was it also infested with bugs ?
They talk about eating “soft tack” – I assume they’re talking about bread. Could the cook not keep some starter going, like for sourdough bread?
They get the soft tack when within range of land. In the subsequent books, Killick makes sure they are provisioned when the captain is in funds, and bullies lesser officers when the captain is broke.
Most of the cooks are formerly able-bodied seaman who lost a leg–they are just in charge of steeping and boiling everything. When you can carve the preserved beef like whale tooth, there isn’t much time for the fancy work.
Except when they capture a French ship and keep the chef.
I’d really like to see the inside of one of the ships (brigs, frigates, sloops, whatever). It’s hard to imagine how they made space for a few hundred men and their provisions, and powder and cannon balls, wood, tools, canvas, etc. In Desolation Island, Mrs. Wogan talks about having a ton and a half just for her use.
I had to laugh at what Jack said about the woman giving everyone the pox: that they should put her in a barrel without a bunghole. 
This is as good a place as any to ask a question I’ve been mulling over. Traditionally, at noon the ship’s longitude position is fixed and entered in the log. Local noon is easily determined with a sextant and compared with the ship’s clock showing Greenwich Mean Time. IIRC in the movie. Aubrey is shown instructing his midshipmen how to do so. The bells chiming, though is determined by a half-hour sand glass. When the glass runs out, it is inverted, the proper bells struck, and the process begins anew. (This was also shown in the movie) Now, if you’re sailing west, even at two hundred miles a day it’s going to take a couple minutes for the sun to catch up to the ship’s position come noon. It would be simple to let the glass run out, wait a bit until noon is indicated, and start the afternoon watch.
If you’re sailing east, though noon is reached a couple minutes before the glass has reached eight bells of the forenoon watch. If it is inverted, it won’t be a full half hour before first bell of the afternoon watch, although the rest of the bells through the day would be a half hour each. One solution would be to have the glass be just a tad short of a half hour. Five seconds a turn would be 240 seconds – four minutes – short by the end of the day, probably enough to ensure the glass runs out before noon even sailing east at all the speed you can muster.
Or are the sand glasses just not that accurate?
The sand glasses relied on somebody monitoring them and turning them over right at the moment they ran out. This has to happen 48 times a day. Even if the glasses were perfectly accurate to the half hour, which I doubt, I think before too long the lag from people not paying perfect attention would throw them off a fair bit. There are a few times in the series when things are going on and the glasses are ignored for an unknown amount of time before somebody notices that they’ve run out, when they notice they just flip them over without much fuss. I think they’re more for a vague sense of what hour it is than for anything exact.
Oh, also, something I’ve been wondering about. O’Brian often describes the guns behaving differently after they’ve been worked hard. For example, “…the guns were fired so fast they soon heated and grew skittish, leaping high and recoiling with frightful force.” I can understand a hot gun firing prematurely but is there any reason they would jump higher or recoil harder?
It would have been a strangely hasty, agitated meal had he ate it before.
The half hour glass is really just for watches. It doesn’t have to be very accurate. For accurate navigation timekeeping, they had the ship’s & captain’s chronometers, which were expected to keep accurate GMT for months. In the books, don’t they say something like “ring the bell and make it noon”, indicating that the glass is in fact reset every day they can get a noon sighting?
3 things I can think of - as the gun gets fouled and not cleaned, the effective bore shrinks resulting in more recoil (since less gas can leak around the cannonball). Also, hot powder will combust faster than cold, leading to higher gas pressures. Third, and I’m not sure about this one, as the gun heats, the metal expands, leading to the bore shrinking. I’m not sure about the last, because I don’t know if heating a thick tube expands or shrinks the inside diameter of the tube.
The inside diameter expands as the tube is heated. That’s the basic principle behind shrink-fitting–heat the hoop, slip it over the rod, let it cool, nice tight fit.
I visted the USS Constitution in Charlestown, MA-it is a US Navy ship, still in comission. The crew and officers are very knowlegable about 18th century ship life, and I remember the quatermaster telling me that the food was quite good (by the standards of the time). Sailors ate about 6000 calories/day-which they needed because of the hard physical labor. As for weevils and other vermin-they generally were a problem at the end of a long voyage-a ship like the Constitution stayed close to the American coast, and had better access to fresh food.
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I’m currently cruising through my fourth (?) reading of The Fortune of War, and have just reached
The ill-fated battle with the U.S.S. Constitution.
I’ve got to admit, though, that a bit of ancestral pride cannot help but be pleased with the outcome of the encounter.
If you ask them “Why is it called the dog-watch?” they do NOT know the correct answer. But bringing a WWII Navy vet with you on the tour gets you special treatment.
It’s weird, isn’t it – rooting for “the enemy”.
I’m about halfway through The Fortune of War and this one might be my favorite so far. I like that Stephen appears to be coming to his senses (unless he’s deluding himself again), I like Mr. Herapath, and I like the espionage plot. Not that the sea battles aren’t awesome, but sometimes I need to spend time on land.
Hmph.
[spoiler]
The famous line “Don’t give up the ship!” was exclaimed by a loser.
Man’s lucky to have lasted that long, and not even fighting Jack, merely his wimp cousin.[/spoiler]
There are also a few references to the Marines and seamen privately nudging the glass to shorten their watches. Can’t think of the particulars off the top of my head, but I know I’ve read that a couple of times.
As someone mentioned upthread, the glasses just define the length of the watch. Local noon is determined every day.
Some serendipity over the past few days connected with the books. TCM showed The Sea Wolf and Mutiny on the Bounty over the weekend, so I got to look at some sailing ships. Yesterday on Antiques Roadshow (BBC) they had a writing desk owned by a relative (daughter, I think) of Commander Cochrane (Admiral Cochrane?), and today the History Channel had some Bonaparte. !! I’m half expecting McDonald’s to start offering duff.
And another question, what’s the “sludge” they get from the galley? They’re not eating it, it sounds like they’re using it for sanding and/or polishing, and once they mentioned using it to somehow improve the canvas.
Slush. It’s the fat/tallow boiled off when the cook boils the salt beef. Sometimes spread like butter.
Slush, that’s it. I wonder why they don’t call it grease. Maybe grease is a newer word?