Grog
What does one do with a drunken sailor? In centuries past, warships often carried more alcohol than water. Until recently every fit sailor in Her Majesty's Navy was rewarded for a good day's work at sea with a hearty drink of rum mixed with water - grog, a fine, gruff word sounding of a frigate breaking the waves off Jamaica, where the idea began. The grog ration, once thought a sacrosanct part of every sailor's due, was for hundreds of years one of the virtues of being on board a man-o'-war for months on end, in climates as brutally hot as the Indian Ocean or as fearsomely bone-chilling as the shores of Nova Scotia.
Seafarers have tolerated alcohol consumption in large quantities since time immemorial, perhaps to face cold, heat, dampness, danger, rigid discipline, heterosexual deprivation, geographic dislocation, and meager sailor's pay, as well as their inner restlessness. Alcohol softens, blurs, distorts, and ultimately obliterates the awareness of these and other realities.
The distillation of alcohol is credited to Jabir ibn Hayyan, an Arab alchemist of the late 8th century, whose name survives in our term gibberish. The Dutch seafarers of the West Indies Company settling New Amsterdam built one of the first distilleries in North America around 1640 on Staten Island to manufacture aqua vitae and gin. Along with other Dutch possessions in North America, the distillery passed to the British in 1664, who converted it to the distillation of rum.
The story or the grog ration begins in 1655 with the British Navy's invasion of Jamaica under Vice-Admiral William Penn who sought to wrest control of the island from the Spanish. It was there that rum was first issued to the ship's crew, not merely to celebrate a well-fought victory but as a way to use the local product - Jamaican rum-to slake the thirst of sailors who by custom had had nothing but soured beer and fetid water to drink after their transatlantic journey.
By 1740 seamen were gulping down their straight dram of rum each day with glee. Perhaps too much glee, for sobriety, never considered much of a virtue among sailors, was becoming more than a small problem. Out of concern for his men's welfare, Vice-Admiral Edward Vernon took up the problem of drunkenness and issued an order to his captains to mix the sailors' half pint of rum per day with a quart of water, and suggested that the mixture be further flavored with fresh lime juice and sugar, both abundant in the Caribbean. This Vernon did because of the "ill consequences arising from stupefying [the men's) rational qualities. which makes them heedless slaves to every passion."
Vernon was also up on his medical research, for the addition of lime to the rum and water made it an effective preventative of scurvy, a disease that was rampant among sea-bound men without access to a wholesome, vitamin-C-rich diet. The Vice-Admiral even suggested that the"scuttled butts" of rum be opened to the air so as to sweeten their water. So appreciated was Vernon's dictate that the new mixture came to share his nickname - grog - so-called for the grogram coat [a garment made of coarse fabric of silk and mohair] he always wore.
Sixteen years later the British Admiralty ruled that the rum ration was always to be mixed with water, and grog thereby became the official Navy drink. Sailors spoke of their grog in terms of the compass: in his wonderful little book, Nelson's Blood (another nickname for grog) James Pack (1982) notes one mariner's explanation of the code as a glass of rum: "north is raw spirit, due west is water alone; thus although they may ask for more northing, they are rarely known to cry for more westing in their spirited course."
It is not possible for any one who observed, intelligently, the effect of the rum ration in warding off exhaustion and its results, to deny the beneficial effect of the spirit. Like every other thing which contains a potency for good and evil, it had to be given with care and discretion. A spirit ration at the beginning of a march, or early in the day, would not only be useless, but a positive evil ; kept in reserve, as it were, to be used at the critical moment, it was undoubtedly one of the very best preventives, not only of exhaustion, but of those diseases which seize upon all those who have fallen into a state of exhaustion, the result of continued exertion in trying climatic conditions.
The men themselves, who in every way showed a determination to follow and carry out all the advice given to them, soon found out the value of rum when taken at the proper time. Even men who had been total abstainers for years, and had no wish to change their principles or custom of life in ordinary circumstances, saw the good effect of the rum ration, and took it daily until they returned to the transport ships, when they gave it up. One and all, they felt it had done them good, and in all probability prevented serious illness, and they took it just as they did the quinine, as a medicine. There was a strong concensus of opinion on the subject, if not, indeed, a universal agreement. Bovril, beef tea, strong soup, and also chocolate or cocoa, had not the same reviving effect, though their value as preventives of exhaustion were fully recognised.
Not so quickly, however, did the tradition expire in England, where the moralists of the Temperance Movement held little sway. The Queen's Regulations for the Army (1889, sec. xv. paragraph 82) forbid the sale of spirits in canteens at home, but permit it in foreign stations at the discretion of the commanding officer.
Sir Victor Horsely, in a paper ["The Rum Ration in the English Army"] printed in the British Medical for February 1915, inveighed in forcible language against the continued use of the rum ration of ages past in the British army of today as now fighting on the continent. He claims that no less than 250,000 gallons of rum were sent across the channel in November of 1914, and asserts that it produces loss of moral sensibility, drunkenness, decadence, loss of endurance, loss of efficiency in loading, aiming and firing and hitting the mark. He also claimed that out of total abstainers, it tended to make drunkards by telling the men that rum was good for them and that the surgeons had ordered it (by compulsion of the government).
The rum ration was, in his opinion, an inheritance from the days of ignorance. When ships were obliged to stand off and fire at one another at 500 feet the worst tipsified sailor could hardly fail to hit the mark, but now that they fight sea combats at miles distant, great skill is needed and the clearest hands and brains to see and to aim and to hit the mark which, in its turn, is doing its best to blow you out of water. So, too, in the land campaigns of today, the greatest temperance and sobriety are essential to a good result against a skilful enemy.
Although Sir Victor's vigorous protests were backed up by other writers, one, in particular, knew how to talk back, for he claimed that nobody could get drunk on the rum ration of 2-1/2 ounces of rum, exposed to the open air of winter. He concluded his paper with this remarkable vitriolic verbiage. “The violence of a man who is drunk on 21/2 ounces of rum, if it be possible at all, is unpleasant to witness, but I do not know that it is more distasteful than the verbal violence of an Habukkuk Mucklewraithe inebriated with the exuberance of his own fanaticism."
It was not until the 1960s that the British Admiralty even considered doing away with the honor-bound custom of the grog ration. One of the killjoys of the day was Admiral Sir Frank Twiss, who felt the grog ration was "outdated". It was not long before sailors saw the handwriting on the wall, and in January of 1970 the House of Commons took up the debate, resulting in the abolishment of the grog ration in the British Navy on the stroke of midnight of August I, 1970. On the HMS Jufair in the Persian Gulf, a rum barrel was interred while a sailor read its epitaph: "For as much as it hath pleased the Lord High Admirals to take away from us the issue of our dearly beloved tot, we therefore commit its cask to the ground, sip to sip, splashes to splashes, thirst to thirst, in the sure and certain knowledge that it will never again be restored to us, but with the glorious hope that it might be according to the mighty working whereby (the Navy] is able to accomplish all things to itself."
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