Cooking on wooden sailing ships in the 1700s and 1800s

Feeding the sailors in the 18th and 19th century sailing ships - especially during voyages of discovery or times of fighting such as the Napoleonic Wars - was on eof the most important jobs ob board ship.
But what were the cooking stoves like? Ad was the fire a danger on a wooden ship?

On HM Bark Endeavour (c1770)
The fire for cooking was contained in the fire hearth and the smoke went up the chimney through a funnel to the weatherdeck. Cooking could be done in the oven but the pork and beef was boiled in large round pots which sat in large round holes on the top - next to the hanging net bags into which each mess-table put its 6 pieces of meat and each bag was labled with the table’s name. To prevent heat descending to the wooden deck, beneath the fire hearth was a layer of sand with bricks, slate or stone slabs.
Kevin Boatman Foster offered this description of the firehearth: The fire was contained in a sheet-iron patent galley stove. The stove usually had a hot water tank, several ovens with sheet or cast iron doors, heating surfaces for pans and kettles surrounded by iron pipe railings, and an iron and copper smoke pipe equipped with a damper. It rested in an open-topped sandbox capped with bricks. The galley stove was one of the most complicated machines on board a sailing ship. Small vessels had smaller sheet-iron stoves, capable of baking inside and cooking on top. The simplest version of galley on a sailing ship was an open topped sand box atop bricks for an open fire to heat cook pots. Those were found on larger dhows and other vessels in the Indian ocean as recently as the last hundred years.

The Galley - HMS Warrior 1850 - Portsmouth Historic Dockyard – here the galley had to cater for hundreds of men every day.

Fireheath - HMS Victory (c1770) - replica - Portsmouth Historic Dockyard

HMS Victory’s ballast – pig Iron and shingle

To counteract the weight of 100 cannon on her gun decks, 257 ton (259 tonnes) of pig iron ballast was laid in the bottom of Victory's hold. This was overlaid with loose shingle which formed the base for storage of water butts and leaguers. When fully provisioned for a 6 month voyage she carried 300 tons of water.
While Victory now rests in dry dock, only a facsimile of the layer of pig iron can be shown, however, two real pig iron ballast blocks, bearing the mark of an arrow, are presented.

The pig-iron ballast also played an important role in Cook's ship.
Apart from forfeiting the guns, it was blocks of pig-iron ballast which were thrown overboard on the Great Barrier reef from Captain Cook's Bark Endeavour.
This allowed the vessel to float free of the coral and sail to Batavia for repairs. A piece of the original pig iron, recovered from the sea at Endeavour Reef in recent years, is now a permanent exhibit on HMB Endeavour.

Firehearth links to Captain Bligh

When the replica of Captain Cook’s bark ENDEAVOUR was built, the fireplace in the Great Cabin was based on one recovered from the wreck of the PANDORA – a ship built in the eighteenth century.
Following the court martial of Captain William Bligh for loss of his ship BOUNTY, Captain Edward Edwards sailed on the PANDORA in an attempt to find the mutineers made famous by the Mutiny on the BOUNTY (in which Captain Bligh was set adrift in a small boat and remarkably managed to navigate the boat 4000 miles to safety).
After surviving both the mutiny and the court martial, Bligh was determined to find the BOUNTY and its remaining survivors. At his insistence, the Admiralty despatched the PANDORA to search for it but was unable to find any trace and was wrecked in the process.
A few survivors of the mutiny were picked up in Tahiti and confined on the ship in what is now referred to as 'Pandora's Box'. Those men survived the shipwreck only to be returned to England to face trial.
Today the wreck of the PANDORA (discovered in the 1980s) is regarded as the most significant wreck in the South Pacific, and extensive archaeological and recovery work is being done on the site, including recovering the bones of some sailors who went down with the ship.
Pic: Great Cabin on the ENDEAVOUR replica with the open fireplace. The design is based on one from the Pandora (see pic centre left).

HM Bark ENDEAVOUR - an ignominious end

After her voyages under Captain Cook, ENDEAVOUR was used as a Navy store ship, and in 1775, she was sold and her name changed to LORD SANDWICH. When the British occupied the city in the American Revolution, she became a transport vessel carrying German troops to Newport in 1776. In 1777 and 1778 the LORD SANDWICH was used as a prison ship to secure American patriots.

In July 1778 when the French fleet arrived at Narragansett Bay to support the American army, in order to avoid capture and protect Newport, Rhode Island, from the French fleet, the British burned and/or sank 10 Royal Navy vessels plus 13 transports (including the LORD SANDWICH ex ENDEAVOUR).

The Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP) is engaged in a multi-year process to locate and identify the 13 British transports scuttled in1778. One of its aims is to positively identify the LORD SANDWICH.

http://www.rimap.org/

PS: I'm looking forward to spending 3 days as a tour guide on HMB ENDEAVOUR replica in Hobart, and hope to learn a little more of the ship's eventual demise.