A brief history of booze at sea
From Viking raids to Napoleonic war – behind every great battle is a time-honoured tipple
The cruising season is upon us, and there will come a time when you find yourself sitting back in the cockpit watching the play of the light on the water and wondering what the hell to do next.
Some people can answer this easily, by saying ‘racing,’ if still afflicted with testosterone, or ‘rewinding the alternator,’ if the testosterone has run out. Both these activities, and many others, are assisted by some sort of beverage.
Many swear by cups of tea, and they have a point. Others, myself included, reckon that the banana daiquiri is a sine qua non. We have a point too. But there will come a night when the ship’s batteries do not feel up to driving the inverter that drives the blender. When this happens, it will be necessary to revert to a less sophisticated age.
The Vikings took care of things by swigging a fermented brew that could not make up its mind whether it was thick beer or thin porridge, and under the influence of this mephitic slime discovered America and burned quite a lot of monks. I have tried it, and can vouch for the fact that after a couple of pints, battle seems like an excellent notion, the bloodier the better.
The same went for Navy rum, under whose influence the navies of Napoleon took a bit of a battering. In home waters this was replaced by a gallon of beer, which for the benefit of post-metric humans is eight pints, or, er, several litres. Rum continued into the Second World War, and even recruits who hated the stuff discovered its virtues when the Stukas moved in.
The officers of the Navy tended to drink gin, frequently with Angostura bitters and a slight admixture of water.
There was no concept of drunkenness as such, though the medics probably felt that a bit of drinking was a good thing, as it prevented the consumption of untipped cigarettes from increasing from the usual 60 a day to a marginally unhealthy 80.
The Royal Navy’s rum ration was abolished in 1970 by do-gooders who reasoned that guided missiles and ardent spirits were uneasy bedfellows. This health and safety tendency has continued. Many sailors like to demonstrate their piety, seamanship and personal superiority by saving their alcohol consumption (if any) for the marina and eschewing sharpeners on the water.
I am not in sympathy. Most of the well-run boats I have sailed on, including my own, value an attitude-adjuster in the evening – particularly when you are miles offshore and the crew have been four hours on and four hours off for so long that without some sort of social activity they will forget each other’s names. One drink is enough, size being a matter of individual preference. I have happy memories of a trip back from the Azores when the single sundowner consisted of a pint mug containing half gin and half tonic. Inspirational was not a strong enough word.
Wine, though. In the days when the Customs were on the qui vive, brave souls would nip over to France and fill the water tanks with rough red – post Brexit, watch this space. Posher vintages are harder. For one thing, bottles roll around in lockers unless padded with bubble wrap – cardboard always goes soggy. For another, the nasty stuff in the bottom of the bottle tends to get mixed into the nice stuff in the top, producing a grim magenta sludge. Short of a gimballed cellar or buying a huge boat in which bottles can be stored upright there is no real solution.
White wine is better, and can be drunk even on boats without refrigeration. To cool wine: take 50m of light line, sail into 60m of water, attach line to neck of bottle with a bottle-sling knot, but perhaps that is a bit too decorative, or a ground line hitch – otherwise a sack knot, bag knot or miller’s hitch – and lower over the side. Or you could use a common whipping, relying on the bulge at the top of the bottle’s neck to stop the turns sliding northward and the premier cru heading south to sleep with the fishes...
Choices, choices. The pages of the Ashley Book of Knots riffle as the sun crosses the yardarm and plunges into the western sea. The knot debate may even take so long that the moment passes, and we will retire with a nice cup of cocoa, ready to face the next watch clear of head and eye.
‘Do-gooders reasoned that rum rations and guided missiles were uneasy bedfellows’