Posted on 03/20/2018 3:15:05 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
In 1619, a hurricane sank the English merchant ship Warwick in Bermuda's Castle Harbor. The struggling settlers of Jamestown, Virginia, were desperately awaiting the shipload of fresh supplies, and keenly felt the loss. Almost 400 years later, artifacts from the wreck are helping archaeologist Grace Tsai uncover if unrefrigerated food and drink remained edible and nutritious during long sea voyages.
Since 2012, Tsai, a doctoral candidate in nautical archaeology at Texas A&M University, has been studying archaeological records of provisions from three different shipwrecks from the 16th and 17th centuries and analyzing shipboard diets based on modern nutritional guidelines.
Now, Tsai and her colleagues are going one step further: for two months, they stored period-accurate provisions aboard the closest thing to the Warwick they could find -- the 19th-century tall ship Elissa, docked in Galveston, Texas.
"The whole premise is to see how things age aboard ships," Tsai says. Researchers, including her, have typically studied how to prepare food based on historical recipes, "but nobody has been testing how well they lasted on a transatlantic voyage."
(Excerpt) Read more at hakaimagazine.com ...
Nope, that’s just the way those Age of Sail scurvy dogs used to carry on. Wait, what? ;^)
Small world (wide web)!
I lucked out to find that page, it’s the perfect graphic to go with the article.
Odd, that, considering that was probably on the menu from time to time. Having one rat aboard could come in handy, because it would emerge from the lower bits if the water got excessive, canary in a coal mine.
Country folk (my roots) also preserved uncooked eggs with a barrel, straw, and salt. Ate ‘em for months. Pickled products also went a long way.
Weevils, the other protein snack.
:^)
And I'm not sure she used the right recipes. Salt beef was so heavily salted it had to be soaked in fresh water to leach out enough salt to make it edible.
Quite right. And wildly enough, the oceans are also swimming with food. :^) The good old ancestors who crossed during the Great Migration spent a month or more making the passage (the surname ancestors embarked in February and arrived in March, so the food wouldn't have spoiled anyway), and those boats were stuffed, given their size. No one would but a refugee would travel that way today.
Of course, the diet of the average lower class Englishmen in the 18th and early 19th Centuies was pretty wretched. A number of sailors joined the Navy because the food was better than that at home.
Yo ho ho and there’s a barrel of grog!
Per wikipedia, that’s the flag of the Kingdom of Great Britain, used 1606-1801 and in Scotland from 1707, it consists of the flags of England (red cross of St. George on white) and Scotland ( white cross/saltire of St. Andrew on blue) one overlaid on the other. If you look closely you’ll see it lacks the narrow red saltire for Ireland( “X” type cross ) superimposed on the Cross of St. Andrew which is present on the Union Flag or Jack.
So if the ship is bound for Jamestown, founded 1607, it could be correct.
Thanks for the recipe link. Ill give a few a tryout.
Made elk jerky yesterday, another batch tomorrow. Eating elk steak tonight for supper.
I have a freezer well stocked with elk and venison, but buffalo is hard to come by since I don’t hunt for that. And store prices are very steep.
I draw the line at eating dogs, which Lewis and most of the Corps of Discovery members preferred over elk and deer.
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