Only one of his vessels was decked over all. It is to us wonderful that the daring expeditions of those days into unknown seas should have been undertaken in such vessels.
Those early navigators relate their adventures in the quaintest of language, in which there is scarcely ever a note of complaint.
They are cast away on inhospitable shores. They are cut off by hostile savages. Their ships are often charnel houses of disease and death. They lose their masts in Cape storms, and their rudders on unknown shoals. Their food and their water are often of the roughest kind. All these and a host of other vicissitudes common enough in those days are endured, and described without the slightest tinge of our modern every-day sensationalism.
Their ships, although small, were generally strongly built. They are depicted on old maps and charts with very bluff bows and high, square sterns, innocent of the least approach to what is termed run. Consequently, they were slow in turning to windward. The incessant buffeting of stormy seas and the dreadful calms of the tropics often caused them to leak badly. There were none of the preserved foods and medicinal aids with which to-day we ward off scurvy, that once fatal scourge of the sea.
It may be interesting to give here the bill of fare, or what is now termed the scale of provisions, for the seamen of that period. The particulars here, quoted apply specially to the vessels of a Dutch expedition, which sailed from the Texel, in 1643, bound for Chili, and other possible places, and commanded by Hendrick Brouer, whom the annalist characterises as a man of much experience. With possible slight differences, it would also doubtless apply to the English shipping of that time.
"To each man one good cheese for the whole voyage.
"Three pounds of biscuit, one quartern of vinegar, and a pound of butter a week.
"Sundays:—¾ of a pound of salt beef.
"Mondays and Wednesdays:—6 ounces of salted cod.
"Tuesdays and Saturdays:—¼ of a pound of stock fish.
"Thursdays and Fridays:—¾ of a pound of bacon and grey peas.
"At all times as much boiled oatmeal as they choose to eat." This scale of provisions contrasts not unfavourably with the present writer's experience of twenty-five years ago in the average British vessel. The amount of vinegar to the salt meat and salt fish is perhaps a little out of proportion, like Falstaff's ha'porth of bread to the intolerable two gallons of sack. John Davis, of Davis Straits fame, tells us particulars of his men's dietary, in one of his Arctic voyages. Each mess of five men was to receive four pounds of bread daily, twelve quarts of beer, six stock fish, and an extra gill of peas on salt-meat days.
