We all, however, agreed, that the Yankee sailing ship was driven as hard as any ship afloat, and that the grub, in port at least, was the best fed to sailors on any sea.
"Say, if our grub is good, what in thunder do you call bad grub?" I asked one day, after one of our learned discussions.
"My boy, bad grub," and Hitchen, to whom I had put the question, dwelt lovingly on the words, "bad grub"! "Bad grub is Act of Parliament rations of so much, or I should say, so little, meat, either salt pork or beef taken from the pickle in the harness casks and weighed on a rusty scales by the second greaser each day, and given out to the crew. So much flour, so much pease, and so much hard tack. All rationed out with the whack of water, and carried to a filthy galley where the unappetizing slops is cooked up in some tropic region, and served to the British merchant sailor with a regulation dram of lime juice, just calculated to keep the scurvy out of his knuckle joints. That is bad grub. Yes, we have about the same scale here, but you don't see them follow it so close. The American shipowner knows better, he wants to get a lot of work out of his crew, to keep his ship up and to make fast passages; he knows he must feed the gang to make them do it without chucking overboard a lot of corpses. I tell you, lad, bad grub is a rotten dish, but not a rare one. When your meat sours, and the filthy flour is full of blue mold, say, you are getting it rich then. Did you ever drink sour goat's milk? No? Well, bad grub is as bad as that."
"That sounds bad, but how about the weevils?" I asked, thinking he had forgotten our white worms.
"Weevils! Why, weevils are a sign of good grub. Grub fit to feed weevils is tip-top fodder. See how nice and fat they get. A mess of fresh weevils is simply another way of getting your game with the taste of white plump meat."
"You make me sick, Hitchen," I burst out, as I dropped over the edge of the top and down onto the futtock shrouds. I gained the deck fairly nauseated—a near seasickness, a malady that otherwise never troubled me. My stomach was as empty as the famous cupboard, and with the keen sea air and the healthy appetite of a boy of eighteen, I was famished as I went forward to supper, but Hitchen's philosophy of food values so upset me that I could eat nothing but a piece of selected tack, one free from holes that I was fortunate enough to find in the bread barge.
After that I steered clear of food discussions, and tried to forget the whole subject; it was hardly worth while talking about anyhow. We confined ourselves to talk about timenocles, catharpins, and of the best way to thoroughfoot a rope. Frenchy, who had sailed in the Mediterranean a good deal, told us of the strange craft called a ybeck, her mainsail having a large button in the belly of it, to hold in the bulge of the sail, somewhat after the manner of our midship tack.
We talked of bonnets, and of Jimmy Greens, and of the ancient curse of stunsails. These men had sailed in the East, and knew the queer rigs of the great junks and seagoing sampans of the Yellow Sea and the Inland Sea of Japan, places I was later on to visit, and to verify the stories told me on the Fuller. There were tales of paper flareups, and on the part of Frenchy, who had chased them in a frigate, of Chinese pirate junks armed with stink-pots, and smooth-bore carronades.
Of our own rigging, and of what went before it, we were of course amply reminded by our work. In the older ships, when tophamper was not as refined as on the Fuller, the royal yards, and higher, if crossed, would be sent down on the approach of heavy weather. In some ships, men-o'-war especially, the sending down of royal yards at night was a regular custom. In some of the old Dutch East Indiamen, it was also the custom to shorten down for the night, and make all snug; a comfortable way of doing things in keeping with large well-fed crews, Edam cheese, and waistlines of ample proportions.
On the later ships, the Yankee sailers of the day whereof we write, nothing was ever sent down. Yards might blow down, but they never came down by the free will of the master. The extensive use of wire in rigging, and the more secure type of metal fittings, bands, etc., made the old precautions unnecessary. Besides, time had to be considered as an important element in the profits of the voyage. As freight rates became lower, the rate of driving increased, and speed was more and more necessary to success.