Watching Pirates of the Carribean last weekend made me wonder - how did people purify salt water on long voyages across the ocean hundreds of years ago? What about thousands of years ago when Vikings visited North America, or the Romans sailed the Meditterranian?
They carried it with them
In wood barrels.
Next question.
I expected they carried it with them, but the voyage from Europe to America took a month or more, correct? With dozens of men on a ship, and each man needing a liter or two a day, wouldn’t they need a lot of water? I’m curious if anyone invented/used a backup method in case they lost their supply.
Rain caught in tarps rigged for that purpose during showers.
Very early navigators did their best never to leave sight of land. Later on, they carried water in wood casks. (Much later on, iron tanks.) After a few months, the water was green, stinking, and nasty. One of the reasons for grog rations – mixing the water with rum made it slightly more palatable.
Water could be collected (using sails) and stored during rainstorms, although it was not a good idea to rely on this. In the doldrums, ships would run low on water and the water rations would be severely reduced – torture to men who did hard labor and ate salted meat. When they ran out of water, they pretty much died.
BTW, your numbers are wrong. Large sailing ships had hundreds of men, and they needed much more than a liter a day.
I believe the supplemented their supply by stopping at whatever islands looked big enough to have fresh water. IIRC, that was part of Captain Cook’s reason for putting into Hawaii (but that’s a dusty memory with no cite).
Columbus’s first voyage included a layover in the Canary Islands. After departing from the Canaries, his transatlantic voyage to the Bahamas took 37 days. Columbus’s second voyage went across the Atlantic in a speedy 21 days.
In the 1770s, the British Royal Navy allotted 1 gallon of beverage (usually beer) per man per day. There are 31 gallons per barrel.
God. Every thing posted so far is just scuttlebutt…
Beer.
The Pilgrims had to put in to shore because the beer was runing out; they still had plenty of water but they preferred to drink the beer.
I am proud to maintain the tradition whenever I am afloat.
I always assumed that there was some means of boiling water. A metal plate or large stone on the deck with a fire on it would be able to boil water add in a tarp/sail to collect the steam and drip off into a container.
This is more of an educated guess than any real knowledge.
I know what your getting at, but I’d say the risk of losing too much vapour in the wind would have off set any inclination to boil what they had.
Anyway, distillation wouldn’t really have been necessary, just a good boiling of the water to clean it… or do you mean with the salt water ??
That would have worked with salt water, but I’m not sure that they knew how to distill water…
Some acidic waters, like the Dismal Swamp waters, apparently remained potable for long periods and were prized by early sailing ships.
I don’t think distillation was a secret process (how do you make rum, after all?), but what exactly would they use for fuel? You couldn’t just chop down a few trees for firewood in the middle of the ocean, and if you’re going to carry along tons of firewood or coal, why not just carry tons of fresh water? Which is what they did, mostly.
Absolutely. I just meant that I’m not sure that they understood that distilling would have cleaned the water.
Read any of C.S. Forester’s sea novels – having sufficient water (slong with other supplies) was a major concern. You carried it with you.
As noted, distillation with fuel would be a problem – you’d exhaust the fuel in short order. Solar distillation would probably be way too slow, and a difficult proposition before the invention of plastics (I can just see someone trying to make a big solar tarp out of intestines or isinglass – not likely). Reverse Osmosis hadn’t been invented yet.
You’d think that catching rainwater would be a reasonable alternative, but I never heard of anyone trying that, or any apparatus for it. Too easy to contaminate with salt water, would be my guess.
As noted by several others, they carried it with them. This was a major problem with sailing vessels, and huge amounts of water were carried for any long voyage. Careful captains made sure that the water barrels were carefully scrubbed out and refilled with fresh water at every opportunity, but even so the water would often be green with algae and very unpalatable by the end of a voyage. Remember that this was before the discovery of bacteria and the consequent need for purifying the water and its container.
One option was to carry beer in place of some of the water (usually “small beer” with a low alcohol content), as the alcohol kept the liquid fresh for a longer time. Wine or spirits such as rum could also help eke out the water. A lot of water was needed for purposes other than drinking, however. Meat and much of the other food carried on board was heavily salted to preserve it, and needed to be soaked in tubs full of water before cooking. Ships also commonly carried fresh food in the form of chickens, pigs, sheep, goats, and even cows, to provide eggs, milk and fresh meat (mostly privately purchased by the officers, but sometimes by groups of seamen), and all of these animals also needed water.
Sailing ships, especially naval vessels, exploration ships, and pirates/privateers, which spent long periods away from port, were always on the lookout for good places to water (a good freshwater supply with nearby anchorage and easy access for the ship’s boats to tow the empty water casks in and full ones back). Royal Navy ships on blockade duty off enemy coasts would often make quick landings on deserted beaches just to water.
Catching water in a tarp or sail during rainstorms was an option, but chancy, and you had to wait until the encrusted salt had been rinsed off of the cloth before starting to fill your barrels, else the result would be salt water and undrinkable.
Large ships now have machinery to distill fresh water from seawater as needed (originally a side benefit of the requirement of steam engines for fresh water to prevent corrosion). Water is still a problem for smaller vessels, despite the use of metal or plastic tanks in place of wooden barrels, and can still be a problem with larger ships if mechanical problems prevent the use of the distillers.