It appears that the first regulation on alcohol consumption was in 1794- 14 years later- limiting it to one-half pint of distilled spirits or one quart of beer.
If I remember my history- in those days water wasn’t trusted as a drink (for good reason- dysentery, etc). The food on the ships was awful spoiled and infested with bugs. The only preservatives were salt and alcohol. They probably cooked with wine and beer. The crew probably disinfected their water by mixing in about 50-50 with booze and refilled their water by catching it on sails in rain storms.
Perhaps this was also the reason for the old sea shanty- “What do you do with a drunken sailor?” Kind of hard to figure out when the whole crew is basically in the bag. The drunken sailors were probably the only ones who walked a straight line on a rolling deck.
I have read the story about the patrol of the USS CONSTITUTION previously.
Also if you want to read a good one, look up the story behind the toast: "We drink to Nelson's blood". Lord Admiral Nelson led the fleet during a victory over the Spanish, though he suffered a mortal wound during the battle. They wanted to ship his body home for burial, and in need of a method of preserving it, they put his body into a barrel of whiskey. The trip home was long and arduous, during which time the whiskey in Nelson's barrel became foul so they swapped it out with fresh whiskey. then a while later they ran out of fresh whiskey, so the crew began drinking the fouled whiskey [no sense in wasting 'good' whiskey].
I see a doctor every three months, and they routinely ask about my drinking. They asure me that a fifth of rum per week is well within the norm for any retired sailor, just dont exceed 2 fifths per week very often.
I went to an Army base in Oklahoma to visit our eldest son. while there we re-stocked and I had to notice that the base class-six [liquor store] was smaller than a 7-eleven and it only had one shelf of booze. The entire base had 6 gyms and only one club.
The difference I see in the Navy is that, here at Groton Subase [a tiny little base, 17 subs with 130 crew each. So it is a base to support approx 2200 sea-going sailors] We have an officer's club, an enlisted-mens club, the chief's club, and the bar at the bowling alley, plus a package-store the size of a large grocery [it is like a small warehouse]. The subase has one gym to 4 bars [when we ahd marines here we even had a mar-bar].
My wife recently experienced a 'cardiac event', during her stay in the cardiac ward a group of doctor's were asking her various quesitons about our lifestyle, etc. When alcohol came up, one doctor stopped and said that he noticed she was a sailor's wife, so he asked how much rum she drinks. Bonnie answered that she drinks coconut rum. They laughed, and agreed that yes that made sense and that she should limit her drinking to a fifth every two weeks.
I think that tradionally, as well as currently; the Navy views alcohol in a different manner than do the other services. I have been on-board British as well as French boats. 2 pints of beer with each meal [assuming your not going on-duty] is not a bad way of doing things. But man I hate limey-beer served in aluminum, gawd it tastes aweful.
I went onboard a Norwegian surface ship once to have lunch. Now that was a party ship. They were getting tanked. Co-ed crew, the girls all had long hair worn half-way down their backs and only those standing watch wore uniforms. It looked like 200 '20-something' college co-ed civilians having a BBQ and chugging rum-drinks. It is hard to imagine that they could ever safely navigate out to sea.
quote:I think that tradionally, as well as currently; the Navy views alcohol in a different manner than do the other services. I have been on-board British as well as French boats. 2 pints of beer with each meal [assuming your not going on-duty] is not a bad way of doing things. But man I hate limey-beer served in aluminum, gawd it tastes aweful.
There you go. I went in the Army straight out of high school. I ended up in Germany where I developed a lifelong taste for good, strong German beer. We had beer machines in the barracks in Germany and the beer was good, strong and cheap.
Melville speaks of beer and Dutch whaling ships in Moby Dick:
The quantity of the beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen, including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks' allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that ankers of gin. Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in a boat's head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But this was very far North, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with the constitution; upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his boat; and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.
"Galen, I heard a very similar story about General Packenham, a British soldier who was slain during the Battle of New Orleans (I think)."
Could be, though I dont recall ever hearing of him.
"I also wonder if Admiral Lord Nelson wasn't fatally wounded at the Battle of Trafalgar, with Napoleon's troops?"
Could be. It was before my time. :-)
Dmiller-
"tapping the Admiral"
Interesting site. Though while I have heard toasts along the lines of "to Nelson's blood" or "May Nelson's Blood give you courage"; I dont recall ever hearing "tapping the Admiral". Not to say that such is not a usage, but perhaps among other sailors than those with whom I have drank.
In case any of you are interested, Patrick O'Brian wrote a whole series of books (16-18?)which are not only interesting to read, but are full of extremely accurate details about life in the British naval services during the Napoleonic era. Yes, they drank... a lot. Apparently they mixed their daily ration of citrus juice, and some sugar into the alcohol, (this mix was called grog) to prevent scurvey. But as you say, they also had their ration of beer. Their blood must have been about 50-proof!
In one story the ship's doctor is upset at the amount of drink the men get every day and asks the captain to reduce it. The captain basically tells him he can whip his men, deprive them of sleep, deprive them of women, and deprive them of food, but if he deprived them of their drink or there would most definately be a mutiny.
By the way, these are the books they based the movie Master and Commander on, although I was disappointed in the lack of character development in the movie. Of all the wonderful stories to pick from they choose one that basically had no real beginning or ending. Trust me, the books are much better.
We have a phrase over here Booze Cruise which refers to people jumping on ferries to Europe to stock up on much cheaper drinks there which saves on UK excise duty.
This would appear to be something similar for the voyage of "Old Ironsides"!
Interesting to read about seamen getting pickled from Nelson's pickling! :D-->
quote: We have a phrase over here Booze Cruise which refers to people jumping on ferries to Europe to stock up on much cheaper drinks there which saves on UK excise duty.
Ha! :D--> We have a booze cruise here too, but that merely refers to a scenic boat ride on Lake Superior for a few hours, where the main pastime is imbibing drink, while sailing over the drink!
Our folks spend money, while you folks save it -- all in the name of alliteration. :)-->
We used to have torpedeos that ran on alcohol, thus we stored hundreds of gallons of pure alcohol labeled: "Torpedeo Fuel". The problem though was that each patrol a good portion of it 'evaporated'. Some boats the evaporation loses were high. [such was the offical reason for alcohol disappearing.] Then they shifted to Otto-fuel [a self-oxidizing gel that would absorb through your skin and poison you], so we did not carry so much alcohol on-board.
Then Defense Contractor's wrote into their tech manuals that electronic equipment [magnetic read-write heads, photo-sensors, and electrical contacts] had to be cleaned with pure alcohol. To perform this the Doc kept a few gallons locked up. Each week, I had to fill-out a request and give it to the Doc, who gave me 8 ounces [to be used only for cleaning equipment]. Fortunately the boats stocked a lot of V-8 and tabasco sauce on the mess-decks.
I also learned to flush out big bottles of lighter fluid and filled them with ever-clear. Once I was giving a lttle squirt of my 'lighter fluid' into everyone's bug-juice, when my chief walked in. He saw my 'lighter fluid' and wanted to re-fill his lighter. He did, without asking. But when he was done, he could not get his lighter to light again. He kept fiddling with it, and finally he burnt himself [the problem was that now his lighter burned with an invisible flame]. Eventually he threw out the lighter convinced that it was damaged.
Torpedeo-Men traditionally make wine in their bilges using: empty KOH bottles, raisins, sugar, yeast and bug-juice. Machinist-Mates often make wine into brandy with their Oxygen-generators [the internal parts are well suited to distilling alcohol. Each boat has two O2 generators, and so long as one is running well it makes all the oxygen tha twe need, so we dont need both running, so the 'off-line' unit is available for distilling.]
Galen -My dad was on the Ronquil- an old diesel boat in the early fifties- he told me the torpedoes at that time used denatured alcohol (part wood alcohol) and compressed air. He said that every once in a while some torpedo mate would filter it through bread to filter the wood alcohol out, drink it and become permanently blinded from wood alcohol poisoning
Krys -- check out THIS SITE, and I think number 3 (fifths of a quart) is the most correct. Fifth's are in smaller bottles, therefore the "fifths-of-the-quart" seems more plausible to me.
A "fifth, will fit in your back pocket, and is cheaper for one to buy, than an entire quart.
Having worked "downtown", I've seen lot's of "down-and-outer's" at the corner liquor store, choosing this size of bottle. Easier to carry, and cheaper to buy.
Well - I know about how much it is.....but I wish we didn't have to mix English and Metric units....I can work in either system....but don't ask me to convert!
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GeorgeStGeorge
The pay was lousy, but the perks were GREAT!
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ckeer
From the US Naval Historical Center website
It appears that the first regulation on alcohol consumption was in 1794- 14 years later- limiting it to one-half pint of distilled spirits or one quart of beer.
If I remember my history- in those days water wasn’t trusted as a drink (for good reason- dysentery, etc). The food on the ships was awful spoiled and infested with bugs. The only preservatives were salt and alcohol. They probably cooked with wine and beer. The crew probably disinfected their water by mixing in about 50-50 with booze and refilled their water by catching it on sails in rain storms.
Perhaps this was also the reason for the old sea shanty- “What do you do with a drunken sailor?” Kind of hard to figure out when the whole crew is basically in the bag. The drunken sailors were probably the only ones who walked a straight line on a rolling deck.
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Galen
I have read the story about the patrol of the USS CONSTITUTION previously.
Also if you want to read a good one, look up the story behind the toast: "We drink to Nelson's blood". Lord Admiral Nelson led the fleet during a victory over the Spanish, though he suffered a mortal wound during the battle. They wanted to ship his body home for burial, and in need of a method of preserving it, they put his body into a barrel of whiskey. The trip home was long and arduous, during which time the whiskey in Nelson's barrel became foul so they swapped it out with fresh whiskey. then a while later they ran out of fresh whiskey, so the crew began drinking the fouled whiskey [no sense in wasting 'good' whiskey].
I see a doctor every three months, and they routinely ask about my drinking. They asure me that a fifth of rum per week is well within the norm for any retired sailor, just dont exceed 2 fifths per week very often.
I went to an Army base in Oklahoma to visit our eldest son. while there we re-stocked and I had to notice that the base class-six [liquor store] was smaller than a 7-eleven and it only had one shelf of booze. The entire base had 6 gyms and only one club.
The difference I see in the Navy is that, here at Groton Subase [a tiny little base, 17 subs with 130 crew each. So it is a base to support approx 2200 sea-going sailors] We have an officer's club, an enlisted-mens club, the chief's club, and the bar at the bowling alley, plus a package-store the size of a large grocery [it is like a small warehouse]. The subase has one gym to 4 bars [when we ahd marines here we even had a mar-bar].
My wife recently experienced a 'cardiac event', during her stay in the cardiac ward a group of doctor's were asking her various quesitons about our lifestyle, etc. When alcohol came up, one doctor stopped and said that he noticed she was a sailor's wife, so he asked how much rum she drinks. Bonnie answered that she drinks coconut rum. They laughed, and agreed that yes that made sense and that she should limit her drinking to a fifth every two weeks.
I think that tradionally, as well as currently; the Navy views alcohol in a different manner than do the other services. I have been on-board British as well as French boats. 2 pints of beer with each meal [assuming your not going on-duty] is not a bad way of doing things. But man I hate limey-beer served in aluminum, gawd it tastes aweful.
I went onboard a Norwegian surface ship once to have lunch. Now that was a party ship. They were getting tanked. Co-ed crew, the girls all had long hair worn half-way down their backs and only those standing watch wore uniforms. It looked like 200 '20-something' college co-ed civilians having a BBQ and chugging rum-drinks. It is hard to imagine that they could ever safely navigate out to sea.
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Jim
There you go. I went in the Army straight out of high school. I ended up in Germany where I developed a lifelong taste for good, strong German beer. We had beer machines in the barracks in Germany and the beer was good, strong and cheap.
Melville speaks of beer and Dutch whaling ships in Moby Dick:
The quantity of the beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen, including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks' allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that ankers of gin. Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in a boat's head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But this was very far North, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with the constitution; upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his boat; and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.
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dmiller
Galen -- I found this site - "Tapping The Admiral" about Nelson.
Given it's content, this thread just might be moved to the Doctrinal Forum!
:D-->
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Watered Garden
Galen, I heard a very similar story about General Packenham, a British soldier who was slain during the Battle of New Orleans (I think).
I also wonder if Admiral Lord Nelson wasn't fatally wounded at the Battle of Trafalgar, with Napoleon's troops?
WG (The History Police)
;)-->
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Galen
Watered Garden:
"Galen, I heard a very similar story about General Packenham, a British soldier who was slain during the Battle of New Orleans (I think)."
Could be, though I dont recall ever hearing of him.
"I also wonder if Admiral Lord Nelson wasn't fatally wounded at the Battle of Trafalgar, with Napoleon's troops?"
Could be. It was before my time. :-)
Dmiller-
"tapping the Admiral"
Interesting site. Though while I have heard toasts along the lines of "to Nelson's blood" or "May Nelson's Blood give you courage"; I dont recall ever hearing "tapping the Admiral". Not to say that such is not a usage, but perhaps among other sailors than those with whom I have drank.
:-)
WG (The History Police)
;)-->
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TheHighWay
In case any of you are interested, Patrick O'Brian wrote a whole series of books (16-18?)which are not only interesting to read, but are full of extremely accurate details about life in the British naval services during the Napoleonic era. Yes, they drank... a lot. Apparently they mixed their daily ration of citrus juice, and some sugar into the alcohol, (this mix was called grog) to prevent scurvey. But as you say, they also had their ration of beer. Their blood must have been about 50-proof!
In one story the ship's doctor is upset at the amount of drink the men get every day and asks the captain to reduce it. The captain basically tells him he can whip his men, deprive them of sleep, deprive them of women, and deprive them of food, but if he deprived them of their drink or there would most definately be a mutiny.
By the way, these are the books they based the movie Master and Commander on, although I was disappointed in the lack of character development in the movie. Of all the wonderful stories to pick from they choose one that basically had no real beginning or ending. Trust me, the books are much better.
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Trefor Heywood
We have a phrase over here Booze Cruise which refers to people jumping on ferries to Europe to stock up on much cheaper drinks there which saves on UK excise duty.
This would appear to be something similar for the voyage of "Old Ironsides"!
Interesting to read about seamen getting pickled from Nelson's pickling!
:D-->
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dmiller
Ha!
:D--> We have a booze cruise here too, but that merely refers to a scenic boat ride on Lake Superior for a few hours, where the main pastime is imbibing drink, while sailing over the drink!
Our folks spend money, while you folks save it -- all in the name of alliteration.
:)-->
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Galen
We used to have torpedeos that ran on alcohol, thus we stored hundreds of gallons of pure alcohol labeled: "Torpedeo Fuel". The problem though was that each patrol a good portion of it 'evaporated'. Some boats the evaporation loses were high. [such was the offical reason for alcohol disappearing.] Then they shifted to Otto-fuel [a self-oxidizing gel that would absorb through your skin and poison you], so we did not carry so much alcohol on-board.
Then Defense Contractor's wrote into their tech manuals that electronic equipment [magnetic read-write heads, photo-sensors, and electrical contacts] had to be cleaned with pure alcohol. To perform this the Doc kept a few gallons locked up. Each week, I had to fill-out a request and give it to the Doc, who gave me 8 ounces [to be used only for cleaning equipment]. Fortunately the boats stocked a lot of V-8 and tabasco sauce on the mess-decks.
I also learned to flush out big bottles of lighter fluid and filled them with ever-clear. Once I was giving a lttle squirt of my 'lighter fluid' into everyone's bug-juice, when my chief walked in. He saw my 'lighter fluid' and wanted to re-fill his lighter. He did, without asking. But when he was done, he could not get his lighter to light again. He kept fiddling with it, and finally he burnt himself [the problem was that now his lighter burned with an invisible flame]. Eventually he threw out the lighter convinced that it was damaged.
Torpedeo-Men traditionally make wine in their bilges using: empty KOH bottles, raisins, sugar, yeast and bug-juice. Machinist-Mates often make wine into brandy with their Oxygen-generators [the internal parts are well suited to distilling alcohol. Each boat has two O2 generators, and so long as one is running well it makes all the oxygen tha twe need, so we dont need both running, so the 'off-line' unit is available for distilling.]
:-)
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krys
I am uneducated in lots of this stuff!
In volume - how much liquid is a "fifth of rum"...a fifth of what?
Thank you gents for your contributions to my education.
:)-->
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ckeer
Krys-One fifth of a gallon if I remember.
Galen -My dad was on the Ronquil- an old diesel boat in the early fifties- he told me the torpedoes at that time used denatured alcohol (part wood alcohol) and compressed air. He said that every once in a while some torpedo mate would filter it through bread to filter the wood alcohol out, drink it and become permanently blinded from wood alcohol poisoning
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krys
I believe you that it's a fifth of a gallon.
Now why would they sell it that way. A fourth of a gallon is a quart! And that's a bigger bottle....bigger volume = bigger bucks.
There must be a reason why it is sold that way!
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dmiller
Krys -- check out THIS SITE, and I think number 3 (fifths of a quart) is the most correct. Fifth's are in smaller bottles, therefore the "fifths-of-the-quart" seems more plausible to me.
A "fifth, will fit in your back pocket, and is cheaper for one to buy, than an entire quart.
Having worked "downtown", I've seen lot's of "down-and-outer's" at the corner liquor store, choosing this size of bottle. Easier to carry, and cheaper to buy.
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oenophile
WG,
I remember from my English history class that Nelson was killed at Trafalgar.
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oenophile
a fifth is roughly 750ml and a quart is roughly 1.0L
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dmiller
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krys
Well - I know about how much it is.....but I wish we didn't have to mix English and Metric units....I can work in either system....but don't ask me to convert!
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Linda Z
Check this out:
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/cannibal/tapping.htm
Galen, your stories about makeshift methods of booze production remind me of the good old M.A.S.H. 4077th.
Given the sailors' fondness for strong drink, maybe it's a good idea that they're out in the oceans rather than marching with the ground troops!
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George Aar
Linda,
"Given the sailors' fondness for strong drink, maybe it's a good idea that they're out in the oceans rather than marching with the ground troops!"
Yeah, access to nuclear weapons is fine, but we don't want a bunch of drunks marching out of step...
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Linda Z
Well, Geo, there is that.
:D-->
I guess I was thinking in terms of their well-being. Wasn't thinking of the citizenry!
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Trefor Heywood
I take it that this booze cruise on Lake Superior is possible because it qualifies "international waters" D Miller?
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