Rolling out the barrels and ship’s biscuits

he cliché goes that food for the ordinary sailor on board Nelson’s Navy was at best monotonous and at worst revolting. Tales abound of weevils and rot, of cheese so hard that sailors carved it into buttons, and rats with blackened flesh being baked in a pie to assuage hunger.

So much for the horror stories. What about the facts?

The logistics were formidable. At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy had to feed some 150,000 men on board 1,000 ships. There were 821 men on Victory and today’s nutritional calculations show they were fed 5,000 calories a day to cope with a hard and strenuous life hauling three-tonne guns at war.

What they ate can be learnt from ships’ logs, letters and the careful accounts and regulations of the Victualling Board in charge of supplies. We even know that Nelson’s body was brought back home preserved in a cask of brandy because Victory’s purser asked for it to be credited in his accounts.

Janet Macdonald, food writer, naval historian and author, is critical of the oft-repeated idea that crews were ill-fed. “You have to ask yourself how you can expect a crew of men working hard in cold, wet conditions to do it on bad food?” she argues.