te Meats as they are called"
for the heavy, and innutritious pork and beef. Sailors were always great
sticklers for their "Pound and Pint," and Boteler tells us that in the
early seventeenth century "the common Sea-men with us, are so besotted
on their Beef and Pork, as they had rather adventure on all the
Calentures, and Scarbots [scurvy] in the World, than to be weaned from
their Customary Diet, or so much as to lose the least Bit of it."

The salt-fish ration was probably rather better than the meat, but the
cheese was nearly always very bad, and of an abominable odour. The
butter was no better than the cheese. It was probably like so much
train-oil. The bread or biscuit which was stowed in bags in the
bread-room in the hold, soon lost its hardness at sea, becoming soft and
wormy, so that the sailors had to eat it in the dark. The biscuits, or
cakes of bread, seem to have been current coin with many of the West
Indian natives. In those ships where flour was carried, in lieu of
biscuit, as sometimes happened in cases of emergency, the men received a
ration of doughboy, a sort of dumpling of wetted flour boiled with pork
fat. This was esteemed a rare delicacy either eaten plain or with
butter.

This diet was too lacking in variety, and too destitute of
anti-scorbutics to support the mariners in health. The ships in
themselves were insanitary, and the crews suffered very much from what
they called calentures, (or fevers such as typhus and typhoid), and the
scurvy. The scurvy was perhaps the more common ailment, as indeed it is
to-day. It is now little dreaded, for its nature is understood, and
guarded against. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries, it killed its thousands, owing to the ignorance and
indifference of responsible parties, and to other causes such as the
construction of the ships and the length of the voyages. A salt diet,
without fresh vegetables, and without variety, is a predisposing cause
of scurvy. Exposure to cold and wet, and living in dirty surroundings
are also predisposing causes. The old wooden ships were seldom very
clean, and never dry, and when once the scurvy took hold it generally
raged until the ship reached port, where fresh provisions could be
purchased. A wooden ship was never quite dry, in any weather, for the
upper-deck planks, and the timbers of her topsides, could never be so
strictly caulked that no water could leak in. The sea-water splashed in
through the scupp