2 pints per week) . . 0 12 0 16
Oatmeal ( " 3 " " )[A] . . 0 13 2 18
Butter ( " 6 oz. per week) . . 0 2 1 3
Cheese ( " 12 " " ) . . 0 4 2 6
Water (in iron-bound casks) . . 7 0 0 0

[Footnote A: In lieu of three eighths of a fish.]

In 1690 flour and raisins were added, and an effort made to condense
water. Beer took the place of all forms of drink, and water was at that
time carried in casks.

The dress, from contemporary prints, can be easily made out, and the
allusions of Pepys and Evelyn supply the names and materials of the
garments. Pepys' diary and letters inform us how the pursers of the time
supplied the men with slops, and in _The British Fleet_ considerable
detail on this subject is given. Roughly it may be assumed that Dampier's
sailors wore petticoats and breeches, grey kersey jackets, woollen
stockings and low-heeled shoes, and worsted, canvas, or leather caps.
Canvas, leather, and coarse cloth were the principal materials, and tin
buttons and coloured thread the most ornamental part, of the costume.
Charnock says that in 1663 "sailors began first to wear distinctive dress.
A rule was that only red caps, yarn and Irish stockings, blue shirts,
white shirts, cotton waistcoats, cotton drawers, neat leather flat-heeled
shoes, blue neckcloths, canvas suits, and rugs were to be sold to them.
Red breeches were worn."

Smollett's pictures of the service in _Roderick Random_, written forty
years after Dampier's time, give us some idea of life on board ship, for
in the forty years between the two dates it differed in no essential
particulars. Pepys describes a sailor who had lost his eye in action
having the socket plugged with oakum, a fact which tells more than could a
volume of how seamen were then cared for. It was the days of the press and
of the advance-note system, which prevailed well into the present century,
and those seamen who went with Dampier of their own free will on a voyage
where nothing but the poorest pay and no prize money was to be got were
probably the lowest and most ill-disciplined rascals, drawn from a class
upon whose characters, save for their bulldog courage and reckless
prodigality, the least written the better.

[Illustration: A SIXTH-RATE, 1684. From Charnock's "History of Marine
Architecture" [London, 1800]. _To face p_. 32.]

The modern bluejacket,