The LEAGUER and NELSON’S BODY

Nelson was not the only senior officer to return to England in a barrel.
“The large barrel standing at the ship’s side represents the original water leaguer in which Nelson’s body was contained for its journey back to England for burial.
To preserve the body, Surgeon Beatty had the leaguer filled with brandy. Although carried in the ship as an alcoholic drink, brandy was the best available spirituous solution suitable for this purpose.
Under tow by the 98 gun ship ‘Neptune’, the ‘Victory’ finally anchored at Gibraltar one week after the battle.
Beatty used this opportunity to dilute the brandy with preservation fluids comprising spirits of wine and myrrh. The leaguer was then placed in the steerage and lashed secure to the mizzen mast.
The ‘Victory' sailed home Monday 4th November and anchored off Portsmouth Thursday 5 December. Arriving off Sheerness 18 days later, Nelson’s body was transferred into its coffin and taken up river in the Chatham yacht to Greenwich where Beatty found the body in a good state of preservation.
The idea of preserving a body in a cask of brandy was not just done for Nelson but was the accepted common practice for preserving senior naval officers who dies at sea.”

HMS Victory - Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.

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

The George - Portsmouth

THE GEORGE HOTEL - When I visited Portsmouth a few weeks ago (from Australia), I made a special point of booking into The George Hotel – mentioned by Nelson in his letters and POB in his books. Located only a stone’s throw from the entrance to the Portsmouth Dockyard, I was disappointed to find this 18th century building was not the lodging house in question.
The original George Hotel, where on Se
pt 14, 1805, Nelson spent his last hours in England, fell victim to the WW11 bombings of Portsmouth. The inn, from which the Royal Mail and ‘Regulator’ left daily for London, was situated on High Street and backed onto Penny Lane. It was a stone’s throw from the Cathedral and only a few hundred yards from the Sally Port and Saluting Platform.
Today it is the site for a small block of flats but a plaque on the pavement and two gas lamps mark the entrance to the old George which was so popular with senior naval officers.

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.

The Trafalgar sail - from HMS Victory

 

 

Note: This post was published in 2012. I have now updated it (Oct 2014) and the revised and improved post is at the link "Trafalgar Sail - a legacy of the Battle". 

Thank you
Margaret Muir

 

The Trafalgar Sail – Britain’s most important maritime textile – the fore-topsail from Nelson’s HMS VICTORY’s
For me the most poignant artefact held at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is this immense sail. Damaged at the Battle Trafalgar (1805), it reveals the holes made by French cannon balls during the famous sea battle.
It is enormous - the size of a tennis court and weighs more than a third of a ton. Taking up the whole top floor of one of the buildings, perhaps only a third of the sail is visible. Unfortunatley, photography was not permitted, so I can only show a copy of the poster describing it – but I stood within a meter of it and was awe-inspired at its sheer size and history.
For 100 years during the 19th century it was displayed at Chatham but for 30 years of the 20th century it was stored and ‘lost’.
In 1993, however, conservation work began which lasted 12 years. Today it is regarded as Britain’s most important maritime textile which provides information on sail making in the Nelson era.