Nova Scotia (29 page)

Hardtack, Potatoes and Putrid
Pork

In
the chain of command, the captain would give a directive to his
first mate, who would carry out whatever the task might be – this
regularly included physical punishment involving kicking,
brass-knuckle beatings or something worse. Stanley Spicer in his
book
Masters of Sail
argues that the physical punishment
was often necessary and usually handled in a “fair” manner. Why was
it so necessary? Well, sometimes a crew had been mustered in a port
where men were conned into signing up while they were drunk or even
drugged. Sometimes men signed on to escape punishment for crimes.
So if a captain ended up with a rowdy lot of losers, then there was
only one thing to keep them in line – or so the logic went. No
captain was going to turn his ship around and head back to port to
get rid of a deckhand who had changed his mind about the long
journey. Sometimes, however, a captain found his own amicable crew
from people in his own community. Men might be selected for their
“character” rather than out of desperation in a foreign port, and
there would be little need at all for discipline.

   
The second mate was a kind of deputy to the first mate. He
might be a young man expected to give orders to sailors twice his
age. If he failed to gain their respect, then he’d lose his job.
The bo’sun or boatswain was third in rank and assisted the second
mate. A ship required a carpenter aboard to fix things when they
invariably broke and a cook played the vital role of keeping
everybody fed. A bad cook would inevitably lead to an unhappy
voyage, so a captain picked his cook with care. Many meals were
made up of salted pork and beef, potatoes and onions. There was
dried fruit, hash, soup, molasses and fresh food like baked bread
for as long as it lasted. Unfortunately, voyages often lasted much
longer than expected. You can’t always count on the winds doing
what you want them to do. Food supplies would dwindle and rationing
would be necessary. If the planning had been poor or the winds
unkind, men might have to finish a voyage surviving on nothing but
hardtack, potatoes, cabbage or whatever was left. Needless to say,
morale suffered and everyone was unhappy.

   
Meals, in general, were quite often dismal
events aboard sailing ships. Benjamin Doane was a young seafaring
Nova Scotian aboard the brig
Reindeer
in 1843 who
was having a truly rotten time on his voyage to Alexandria,
Virginia. His writings were collected in a volume called
Following the Sea
in which he detailed this trip.
While the captain supped plentifully from a ten-gallon keg of
brandy and ate fine food at his table, exotic refreshments and
culinary delights were not to be savoured by the crew. When theb
cook opened a barrel of beef and found it rotten, he boiled it
anyway for dinner and most of the men tossed it overboard. “The
pork was a little better,” Doane reports, “although it was rancid
and rusty. The only bread we had was hardtack which had been in the
bread locker two voyages, and it was black and hard and full of
great fat weevils nearly as big as centipedes.” The peas and beans
were too hard to eat even after cooking all day and the coffee was
too bitter to swallow. The cook admitted that if the crew weren’t
satisfied with the fare, they didn’t have to eat it. But what was
the alternative?

   
For some reason, cooks were almost always foreign – either
Canadian men were thought to be notoriously bad at shipboard
cuisine or the job was not considered manly enough for a sailor
from a Nova Scotia port town. The cook was usually assisted by a
stewardess (sometimes the cook’s wife) or a
steward.

   
Seamen were of all ages, origins and colours. Some might have
come from the home ports but others were enlisted along the way.
For all the glamour and seduction of sea life, it seems odd that
drastic means were necessary to put together a crew. The “crimp”
was the man who had the job of rounding up sailors in any way
necessary. The situation was not unlike the early days when the
British Navy “impressed” sailors by beating them unconscious and
hauling them aboard. A crimp might scour a port town and kidnap a
healthy-looking young man or get him drunk and carry him aboard or,
like his predecessors, simply pound the poor sod into senselessness
and drag *him aboard ship. Having a crew pieced together by
coercion would sometimes backfire into violence and mutiny or a
captain might just end up with a bad bunch of lazy landlubbers who
knew nothing of the ways of the sea. Even for the honest,
well-intentioned sailor, life aboard ship was often simply too
taxing or too dangerous. Many a port town had a hospital for sick
or disabled sailors. Sailing was a job that took a heavy toll.
e

   
Running a vessel at sea was a twenty-four-hour-a-day
business, so the labour was divided into “watches,” usually four
hours at a stretch. The crew could be divided into two groups who
would work four hours on, then four hours off, throughout the day.
One of the toughest watches of the day was the eight p.m. to
midnight watch. Tradition deemed that the captain would take this
shift on the way out from home port and the first mate would handle
it on the return voyage. Sailors of the day were fond of putting it
thus: *“The Captain takes you out like a man, the mate brings her
back if he can.”

   
While not on watch a crewman might doze, play music or cards,
loaf, carve, dream of home or faraway ports, or scheme trouble for
the captain. Or he might worry over what a damn dangerous job he
had volunteered for, if indeed he had volunteered at
all.

   
Accidents were plentiful and danger was all
around. You could fall from the rigging and be maimed or swept
overboard by a wave. One of the luckiest of sailors that the men in
the nineteenth century might talk about was cPeter Carrol, who on
the 1789 voyage of the
County
of Pictou
was swept overboard
by one wave, pulled twenty-five metres from the ship and then
picked up by another wave and deposited back on deck. Not all hands
would be so fortunate.

   
Men sang sea shanties while they worked – songs with stories
or songs of protest – to make the hard labour go more easily.
Singing saved the sanity of many homesick or overworked men aboard
ship.

   
Despite the necessary wisdom and knowledge that it took to
sail a large ship, men of the sea, including captains, tended to be
a superstitious lot. For Nova Scotians, it was bad luck to launch a
ship on a Friday or to name a ship for a fish. Whistling would
conjure up bad fortune as would putting on a hatch cover upside
down. Tomorrow’s wind could supposedly be determined by the
direction of a shooting star. Other portents were also used to
predict the weather from day to day.

“Hard Squalls” and Hard
Labour

Colin McKay (1876-1939) was one of the great story writers
and commentators interested in the Age of Sail and, unlike other
authors who might have referred to the harsh life under the rule of
a tyrannical captain as mernely “the school of hard knocks,” McKay
was willing to expose the downright abuse and exploitation of the
men and boys who went to sea. In an article titled “Windjammers and
Bluenose Sailors,” first published in the p
Dalhousie Review
, McKay masterfully describes life aboard one of the
smaller sailing ships that continued to ply their trade from many
Nova Scotia ports right on into the time of the new
steamships.

   
The men sailing these ships encountered frostbite and frozen
sea spray turning to rock-hard ice that threatened to capsize a
boat. There were also tropical hurricanes to endure and malaria as
they sailed from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean, Brazil, Spain,
Portugal and Greece. There was money to be made but a very high
price in lost ships and lost men. McKay notes that in one year,
Yarmouth lost thirty-one ships and more than a hundred men who
sailed from her wharves.

   
Nonetheless, the windjammers were considered a healthy and
vital part of the commerce going and coming from dozens of Nova
Scotia ports. Building the ships provided a considerable number of
jobs. Fish and wood were sent to foreign markets aboard the
vessels. Young people grew up with employment to look forward to
and a life of “adventure” at sea. On the way back to Nova Scotia,
the ships were filled with coffee, molasses, sugar, rum, coconuts
or any combination thereof. Sometimes they didn’t return home
directly but carried mahogany from Central America or tropical
fruit from the islands to U.S. ports. On other trips they might
have shipped coal, flour or oil to Canadian
ports.

   
Whatever the cargo, McKay assures us, it was a life of hard
labour. The crews were amazingly small and, of necessity,
efficient. Four to six men might be all it took to keep a ship
moving from port to port. Obsessive attention was paid to keeping
the vessel in perfect working order. On both the outward and
homeward leg, men aboard would occupy their time scraping,
painting, repairing rigging or, of course, simply wrestling the
sails annd the sea in an effort to survive. With a small crew,
fourteen- to sixteen-hour work days, divided up into watches, were
not uncommon. If an emergency occurred in the middle of the night –
like a ripped or lost sail – everybody aboard would have to help
fashion a new one and get it into place no matter what the state of
the sea. When the waves began to pound against the sides of the
ships, loosening the oakum in the seams or cracking the boards in
the hull, sea water would flush into the ship. Then the men would
have to spend hours, days, even weeks taking turns at the dastardly
job of pumping, pumping, pumping.

   
If a mate aboard ship was satisfied to be leaving behind a
cold November Nova Scotia gale, he might be less than pleased to
find himself in the Gulf Stream with “hard squalls of wind and
streaming rain swooping down from a heaven-filling wrack of gloomy,
low hung clouds.” If a calm occurred, the sails had to be worked
meticulously to milk every tiny bit of energy from whatever puff of
air was in the neighbourhood. Then there might be more rain and
another squall after that. The trade winds further south provided
some respite from the snarly Atlantic to the north. These winds
tended to be “orderly” and useful, pushing the ships on with
considerable speed toward their destination.

   
Once in a tropical port, however, the scene grew grim again.
The thrill of walking about an exotic seaport town might quickly
wear off as a sailor tried to sleep in a deathly hot and
mosquito-infested cabin. If it wasn’t the mosquitoes, it was
another flying insect too tiny to be kept out by mosquito netting.
To avoid the bugs, men would sometimes sleep aloft in impromptu
hammocks among the rigging, only to be drenched periodically byre
thunderstorms.

   
If the wrong mosquito took a sample of your blood, it also
left something in return: malaria, which brought on fevers, chills,
madness and agony. McKay notes, however, that Canadian men “Mostly
abstemious with the bottle enjoyed a surprising immunity from
tropical diseases.” What he means is that fewer died from sickness
than from the multifarious other hazards of life on the high seas.
If your voyage ran into problems, for example, and your captain and
cook had not fully counted on the thirty or fifty extra days, you
might simply starve at sea or, worse yet, die from
dehydration.

Chapter 26

Chapter 26

To Kill a Captain

If
it wasn’t the weather and waves, then it just might be an unruly
crew that created disaster at sea. While Nova Scotian captains had
considerable skill at harnessing the power of natural forces to
propel their ships,  they were not always able to govern the
greed, jealousy and bloodlust of some of the men who sailed on
their ships. Some Nova Scotian sea crimes of this century happened
close to shore and others far away. One of the most notorious
shipboard crimes of the nineteenth century took place on the
Saladin
. The story begins in October of 1842 when Captain
George Fielding left Liverpool, Nova Scotia, on the
460-ton
Vitula
, headed for
Buenos Aires with a small crew, including his fourteen-year-old
son, George Junior. Business didn’t look so good for the return
journey, so he sailed on to Valparaiso, looking for a profitable
cargo and later on to the Peruvian island of Chincha where he hoped
to spirit away a full load of guano. That’s right, he was hoping to
steal a shipload of bird droppings and sell it in some northern
port. Odd as it may sound, this bird poop was worth a lotl of money
and it was owned (and protected!) by the Peruvian government, which
would not want to let it go without payment of a hefty
tax.

   
George figured he’d cut through the red tape by sneaking in
and stealing the valuable smelly stuff and then hightailing it back
to sea. But he got caught and shot in the shoulder in the process.
He was held in custody in the town of Pisco and his ship
confiscated. George was subsequently caught in a plot to escape and
free his ship and that landed him in prison. Cloaked in a poncho,
however, he succeeded this time in escaping and he fled to
Valparaiso. By now it was July of 1843 and Fielding, though free,
considered himself a ruined man.