Victory by Susan Cooper Page A

bread, which was really a baked round biscuit as hard as wood, was kept near each mess table in a box called a “barge.” Each mess had a keg of vinegar too, which was issued every two weeks. The water we drank was kept in casks in the hold and tasted worse and worse as it got older and older; it was a little bit better if you added some vinegar. And vinegar was useful for covering up the taste of the nastier kinds of food, too—like the brined cabbage, called “sour krout,” that smelled so bad when a cask of it was first opened that men ran away if they saw one rolled out onto the deck. Mr. Smith made me eat the cabbage, though; he said it was an Admiral Nelson rule, to prevent scurvy, the disease which killed many seamen on long voyages.
    I was used to horrible smells, from working in the galley—not to mention the pigsty. The first reek of the day came from the thin sticky gruel called “burgoo,” that Mr. Carroll made every morning by boiling nasty oatmeal in stale water. It was a regulation breakfast, but the men in our mess hated it so much that they wouldn’t eat it. Like a lot of other messes, they bribed the cook instead to blacken ship’s bread over the galley fire, then grind it to a powder and boilit in water. We called this dark goop “Scotch coffee” and drank it with a little sugar, if we had any—and that, with a piece of the hard bread, was breakfast.
    It could have been worse. On the farm we had often had no breakfast at all.
    All morning, for the four meat days of the week, the galley stank of boiling salt pork or beef. When they first came out of their barrels, those fatty, gristly, bony chunks of meat were white with grains of salt, and as hard as rock, and even their overnight soaking didn’t change them much. As they boiled away in the big coppers over the galley fire, the fat would rise to the top in an evil yellowish layer that Tommy had to skim off. Mr. Carroll didn’t trust us boys to do it, because the fat, called “slush,” was very valuable to him. Half of it was used to grease the ship’s rigging, but the other half belonged by tradition to the ship’s cook. He wasn’t supposed to sell it to the men, but a lot of them were greedy for it, so of course he did. They spread it on their bread, or mixed it with flour to make a boiled pudding. Mr. Smith always made sure to buy some for our mess, but I wouldn’t touch it; I’d spent too many hours scrubbing the coppers after Tommy had scraped out the last yellow layer of the awful stuff.
    Almost every minute of every day on board ship was regulated, from the wake-up shake before dawn that sent Stephen and me to the galley, to supper before dusk and lights out four hours later. I was beginning to learn the strokes of the ship’s bell, struck every half hour, that divideda day and night into six four-hour watches, but I still got muddled sometimes. The rhythm of each day was so much more exact than on the farm.
    At weekends, everything was focused on Sunday morning inspection, before the church service. Every morning of the week we had to parade on deck in divisions, but on Sunday the inspection was truly fierce. You had to be shining clean and in a fresh shirt and trousers (and freshly shaved, though I didn’t have to worry about that) or your name would be taken for punishment. So on Saturdays, we were given an hour after dinner to wash and mend our clothes, and the sailors with long hair plaited each other’s pigtails smooth and neat. I was planning on a pigtail, but all I could do so far was tie my hair back in a little stub.
    One Saturday I was mending a hole in my uncle’s clean shirt, while he scrubbed his chest at a barrel of seawater shared with a group of others, and William Smith the sailmaker stopped to watch me.
    â€œHo,” he said in his round Devon accent. “Look at thee, now. Middling good, for a rope-maker’s