Yo-ho-ho, and duty to be done

I REMEMBER once sailing past Dead Man’s Chest Island  in the British Virgin Islands, where 15 men are reputed to have been stranded with one bottle of rum. I remember it because I’ve often thought that one bottle of rum wouldn’t have gone far among 15 sailors in the old days. They were mighty topers in those days.

Sailors of the British Royal Navy were first officially supplied with a daily ration of rum in 1655, a privilege that lasted 325 years until the 1970s, and they drank prodigious quantities of it. In fact, a 20th-century British newspaper reporter revealed that Breathalyzer tests had shown that sailors could be legally drunk after drinking their rum rations.

Those rations amounted to 7 or 8 ounces of pure rum a day, the equivalent of about five cocktails for every man jack who claimed it, and I imagine there were very few who didn’t. I can’t imagine scrambling up the rigging, hanging upside down from the futtock shrouds, after five cocktails downed in one gulp. But it was quite normal procedure for them.

It didn’t necessarily make for more efficient ship handling, however, and this fact was not lost on the British Admiralty. But it took until 1740 for something to be done about it. That was when Admiral Edward Vernon ordered that the rum be diluted: one quart of water to every half-pint of rum.

Vernon’s nickname among the sailors was Old Grogram because he wore a coat of a material known as grogram,  a sort of waterproof foul-weather outfit.

So the new diluted rum ration became known as grog, and Old Grogram wasn’t too popular among the troops, even though the amount of rum was not reduced. It just didn’t have the same sudden shock value as raw rum.

When naval ships began to be run by computers, and carried missiles with nuclear warheads, it was inevitable that landlubbers would start worrying about the alcohol content of the people with their fingers on the buttons. On July 31, 1970, British navy ships around the globe stopped serving rum to the sailors. The sailors wore black armbands and organized mock funerals.

So it’s up to us, folks, it’s up to us amateur sailors  to resurrect the grand old tradition that will surely be forgotten and lost in the mists of time if we don’t do something about it. We don’t have futtock shrouds to worry about, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Grab your bottle of Pusser’s or Black Seal and do your duty. Cheers.

 Today’s Thought

The great utility of rum has given it the medical name of an antifogmatic. The quantity taken every morning is inexact proportion to the thickness of the fog.

— Unknown, Massachusetts Spy, 12 Nov 1789

Tailpiece

“Did you find a good math tutor for your son?”

“Yeah, he’s great. Even his teeth have square roots.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

The makings of tafia

SOME PASSING YACHT invited Old Wotsisname on board and gave a him a drink called tafia. Now he’s raving about it and wanting the recipe.

By a stroke of luck I have an old book that describes the makings of tafia, which is the West Indian Creole name for rough rum, often applied to any drink by the crews of old sailing ships.

Here’s the recipe from the French sailor and cook, Florence Herbulot, in that admirable book, Cooking Afloat.


“The first essential is a bottle of good white rum. Next, you need an empty bottle, an attractive-looking bottle, with a really good stopper.

“Each time you open a tin of fruit in syrup, pour any surplus syrup into the bottle. Do not waste a drop! When the bottle is half full of syrup, add the juice of a lemon (or two if they are small) and fill the bottle with rum.

“Do not worry that it will take too long to half-fill the bottle with fruit syrup; it is surprising how much you get out of one tin. The variety of flavors that go to make up a tafia in one of its great merits; it never turns out the same twice, but is always excellent. You will be proud of it, believe me!”

Well, thank you Florence. I suspect that it’s people living aboard yachts, especially passagemakers, who will be opening cans of pears and peaches preserved in syrup, but at least anybody who, like Old Wotsisname, is desperate for tafia now knows how to make it. Cheers!

Today’s Thought
Of all the wimming doubly blest
The sailor’s wife’s the happiest,
For all she does is stay to home
And knit and darn—and let ’im roam.


Of all the husbands on the earth
The sailor has the finest berth,
For in ’is cabin he can sit
And sail and sail—and let ’er knit.
— Wallace Irwin

Bad side effects
WE WERE TALKING the other day about the unfairness (for owners of small boats) of charging marina fees by boat length only, rather than by displacement. Now, reader Matt Marsh weighs in:

“Unfortunately, the negative impact of billing purely by length extends beyond simply making small-craft folk mad. It forces designers and manufacturers to use much shorter, deeper and beamier hulls than would be ideal. There are a lot of 10-ton, 35-foot powerboats that really should be 10 tons and 46 feet, but are crammed into a smaller, less efficient and far less seaworthy package so they can fit in a 35-foot slip. The logic behind length-based billing is hard to deny (the marina has to build and maintain X feet of dock to handle an X-foot boat, however wide or heavy she may be—catamarans excepted of course, since you can double-bill them—but it leads to so many bad side effects ...”

Boaters’ Rules of Thumb, #209
When to freshen up your varnish? Here’s an old rule of thumb:

Wash the work thoroughly. Wet a piece of old toweling cloth and drag it, dripping, across the surface of the varnish. If the water left behind forms beads, the varnish is still in good condition. If it forms sheets, or lies in flattish streaks, you’d better start looking for your sandpaper and varnish brush.

Tailpiece
A man playing at the local golf course hit a magnificent drive smack down the fairway. It went hurtling toward a couple playing ahead, so he yelled “Five!”
“Hey,” said his companion, “don’t you mean Fore?”
“Not at all,” he said, “this is a course of a different holler.”

(A new Mainly about Boats column every Monday, Wednesday, Friday.)