Life Below Decks on an 18th-Century Royal Navy Ship

On the twentieth of May, 1747, a Scottish surgeon named James Lind fed two oranges and a lemon to a pair of dying sailors aboard HMS Salisbury and watched them walk within a week while ten others continued to deteriorate. The Royal Navy took forty-two years to act on his findings. That gap between knowledge and action tells you everything about what an eighteenth-century warship considered a human life to be worth. Below the waterline of a Georgian man-of-war, men slept in hammocks fourteen inches wide, pressed against strangers in air thick with bilge stench and the sound of rats in the hold. They ate biscuit so infested with weevils that experienced hands learned to chew in the dark, and salt beef so thoroughly preserved it could be carved into decorative boxes. The daily gallon of beer turned to vinegar within weeks of sailing. Scurvy killed more sailors than combat, storms, and shipwrecks combined, dissolving collagen until old wounds reopened and healed bones fractured along forgotten lines. Discipline was maintained through flogging with the cat-o-nine-tails, every stroke logged in the ship's books with the same clerical detachment applied to the provisioning of cheese. Wages had not increased since 1653, and pay arrived in arrears sometimes measured in years. During the Seven Years War the Navy enlisted nearly 185,000 men and lost over 133,000 to disease and desertion. The dead had their clothing auctioned to surviving shipmates under a system called Dead Men's Clothes, the proceeds theoretically forwarded to widows who might never receive them. This is the history that lived below the waterline, in the dark, where the empire was actually built.