Salt beef, sea biscuits and the occasional weevil; the food endured by
sailors during the Napoleonic wars is seldom imagined to be appealing.
Now a new chemical analysis technique has allowed archaeologists to find
out just how dour the diet of Georgian sailors really was. The team’s
findings, published in the American
Journal of Physical Anthropology also reveal how little had
changed for sailors in the 200 years between the Elizabethan and
Georgian eras.
The research, led by Professor Mark Pollard from the University of
Oxford, focused on bones from 80 sailors who served from the
mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries and were buried in Royal
Naval Hospital cemeteries in Plymouth and Portsmouth.
“An isotopic analysis of bone collagen from the recovered skeletons
allowed us to reconstruct average dietary consumption,” said Dr Pollard.
“By comparing these findings to primary documentary evidence we can
build a more accurate picture of life in Nelson’s navy.”
In the late 18th century the Royal Navy employed 70,000 seamen and
marines. Feeding so many men was a huge logistical challenge requiring
strictly controlled diets including flour, oatmeal, suet, cheese, dried
pork, beer, salted cod and ships biscuits when at sea.
The team’s analysis shows that the diet of the sailors was consistent
with contemporary documentary records such as manifests and captain’s
logs. As well as validating the historical interpretation of sailors’
diets, this finding has implications for the amount of marine protein
which can be isotopically detected in human diets.
The bones in Portsmouth were also able to show where the sailors had
served. The team’s results show that even when serving in naval theaters
ranging from the UK and English Channel to the West Indies or the
Mediterranean, the sailors converged in dietary terms into a ‘naval
average’, due to the strict consistency of diet.
The results also showed that sailors buried in Plymouth spent more time
off the American coast than those buried in Portsmouth, which is
consistent with the sailing records.
Finally, the team compared the isotopic data with research on 18
individuals from the Mary Rose, a 16th century royal flagship that sank
just outside Portsmouth harbor in 1545. The results revealed that the
naval diet was virtually unchanged in 200 years.
“This is one of the first studies to use this technique to examine human
populations in the historic period,” conclude Pollard. “Our findings
demonstrate the benefits of using forensic methods to complement
documentary records.”
