Going to the loo on a ship of the age of sail was a real adventure. Depending on the seaway, a sailor even risked his life to poo. This is because the latrines for the crew were located on the outside of the ship and—as you can see in this clip from the film Master and Commander—were exposed not only to prying eyes but also the elements.
In this video, we venture deep into the smelly secrets of seafaring to explore the toilet situation aboard ships of the age of sail. How sailors went to the loo in the age of sail The hygienic conditions on the sailing ships of the 15th to 19th centuries were questionable, to put it mildly. There were facilities for relieving oneself, but usually far too few.
The Batavia, for example, which sailed from North Holland to India in 1628, had a crew of 350 men but only four latrines, two of which were reserved for officers. The rest of the crew had to queue for the other two. These “toilets” were simple seats with holes in the bow or head, the forward part of the ship.
The heads were anything but a private place, as there were no cabins or anything similar, and the excrement simply dropped into the water through a short wooden boarding. According to historian Mike Dash, there was at least a way to wipe one’s bottom: “The only additional amenity was a long, dung-smeared rope that snaked through the hole in the latrine. The frayed end of the rope dangled in the sea, and could be hauled up and used to wipe oneself clean.
” Perhaps it was better to refrain from this “luxury. ” This unpleasant situation became really nasty in bad weather. In heavy seas, using the toilets at the bow was far too dangerous, and the crew had no choice but to do their business below deck.
This was worsened because all hatches and gun ports were closed in heavy seas to prevent water from getting in, which also cut off any fresh air circulation. In this situation, the more well-mannered men resorted to chamber pots, while the less well-mannered simply squatted over one of the ladders leading into the hold of the ship to relieve themselves or pissed in a quiet corner. Even if they used a chamber pot, the contents usually didn’t stay put until the following day—the swaying of the ship and the poor lighting below deck made accidents almost inevitable.
Then the excrement dripped through cracks and gutters from one deck to the next like in a birdcage until it finally collected in the bilge, the lowest part of the ship. When water leaked in, which was the case with almost all ships sooner or later because the wooden hulls were rarely 100% watertight, this cesspool had to be pumped out with a bilge pump. Eugenio de Salazar, who traveled to the New World in 1573, described what the pumps disgorged as “unfit for tongue and palate to taste, or nostrils to smell, or even eyes to see, for it comes out bubbling like Hell and stinking like the Devil.
” This underworld river of feces often could not be pumped directly into the sea but only onto the next higher deck, where it slowly drained through hatches and sluices. When the weather improved, the crew cleaned the ship as best they could and tried to mask the inhuman stench with vinegar and incense. But the effect of these measures was short-lived at best, and it wasn’t long before the ship’s hull once again stank as if the plague itself was residing there.
These unhygienic conditions were a real problem, especially because they provided an ideal breeding ground for all kinds of diseases. For this reason, sailors and shipbuilders developed various solutions to get rid of human waste as elegantly as possible (table p. 66).
If you wanted to go number two on a ship in the age of sail, you had various options. All of them were outside the ship, so the feces fell directly into the water. Therefore, smaller boats would do well to keep a little distance.
Otherwise, the euphemism “to drop a bomb” could become an unpleasant reality. Toilet options were not the same for everyone. Officers and wealthy passengers had access to the best latrines.
They were located at the back of the ship, where the captain and the most affluent travelers had their quarters. Initially, they only benefited from the fact that certain privies were reserved for them, but by the late Middle Ages, most ships also had more comfortable seating for people of higher status, called garderobes. These box-shaped annexes, which can also be found in medieval castles, were attached to the back or side of the aftercastle.
The seat was still only a simple board with a hole, but at least the user had it to himself. When ships received side galleries in the 17th century, the officers’ latrines were moved there. This meant that the highest-ranking travelers now enjoyed a separate room as a luggage store, washroom, and lavatory.
The toilets there offered a luxury that was extremely rare on the ships of the time: privacy. The latrines at the ship’s bow, where the ordinary sailors did their business, were an entirely different matter. The seats of ease on the bow were spartan.
Until the 16th century, people usually simply squatted over wooden gratings or holes in the floor planking or even just sat on a railing. Later, simple seats appeared on either side of the ship, for example here on the Swedish galleon Vasa. In the 17th century, these were gradually replaced by free-standing seats, which were usually fitted with some boarding or plumbing to direct the fall of the feces.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, rows with several seat holes were added to reduce waiting times. In stormy weather, the toilets on the Galion were virtually unusable because they were exposed to wind, weather, and, above all, waves. In addition, sailors were expected to only use the open-air toilets on the side of the ship facing away from the wind.
Landlubbers who did pee against the wind usually learned after one attempt never to repeat the mistake. After a few weeks at sea, we’d rather not imagine what it looked like under the latrines. There was a good chance that the hull had received a malodorous coat of paint.
According to the Naval Tracts of Vice Admiral William Monson, the British Navy had its own way of deciding who had to clean up this mess: “He that is first taken with a lie upon a Monday morning is proclaimed at the main mast with a general cry, ‘A liar, a liar, a liar’; and for that week he is under the swabber, and meddles not with making clean the ship within board, but without. ” Starting in around 1700, the simple seats of ease at the bow were usually supplemented with one or two roundhouses for the noncommissioned officers and the sick. The semicircular toilet stalls were located at the rear end of the heads and were closed, so unlike the other latrines, they offered some protection from splashing water and unwanted observation.
Often, there were additional toilets amidships. From the 17th century onward, piss dales built into the sides of the ship provided a simple solution for taking a pee. These were simple funnels made of lead or wood with a pipe to the outside.
If a bowel movement was on the agenda, there were so-called steep tubs or side shelves, which were hung on the bulwarks near the main chains, similar to flower boxes on the balcony. When a sailor needed to lay a brick, he climbed into one of these tubs and squatted over the keyhole-shaped opening in the floor. When steamships with steel hulls appeared in the 19th century, which had to be much more pointed to slide efficiently through the water, the bow platform disappeared and with them their sanitary accommodations.
In order to still have enough latrines, the tubs amidships were replaced with platforms with several holes. Nevertheless, toilet capacity remained a problem, as the example of the British Duke of Wellington shows. Although the ship was equipped with a six-hole platform on either side in 1870, from “four A.
M. until long after pipedown at night there were queues of waiting men on each side of the upper deck struggling to reach the heads. ” The available seats were contested to the point that not everyone reached their destination in time.
“There were numbers of men daily who were in the report for offenses against decency. While every morning care had to be taken to remove the evidence of such offenses in scores of places. .
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