istorians to paint
the condition of the navy in the time of the Commonwealth in
glowing colours, yet Mr. Oppenheim cites many occasions of
well-founded complaints of the victuals. He says: 'The quality of
the food supplied to the men and the honesty of the victualling
agents both steadily deteriorated during the Commonwealth.' Lord
Howard's principal difficulty was with the beer, which would
go sour. The beer was the most frequent subject of protest in
the Commonwealth times. Also, in 1759, Lord (then Sir Edward)
Hawke reported: 'Our daily employment is condemning the beer
from Plymouth.' The difficulty of brewing beer that would stand
a sea voyage seemed to be insuperable. The authorities, however,
did not soon abandon attempts to get the right article. Complaints
continued to pour in; but they went on with their brewing till
1835, and then gave it up as hopeless.

[Footnote 72: See 'The Mariners of England before the Armada,' by
Mr. H. Halliday Sparling, in the _English_Illustrated_Magazine_,
July 1, 1891.]

One must have had personal experience of the change to enable
one to recognise the advance that has been made in the art of
preserving articles of food within the last half-century. In
the first Drury Lane pantomime that I can remember--about a year
before I went to sea--a practical illustration of the quality
of some of the food supplied to the navy was offered during the
harlequinade by the clown, who satisfied his curiosity as to
the contents of a large tin of 'preserved meat' by pulling out
a dead cat. On joining the service I soon learned that, owing
to the badness of the 'preserved' food that had been supplied,
the idea of issuing tinned meat had been abandoned. It was not
resumed till some years later. It is often made a joke against
naval officers of a certain age that, before eating a biscuit,
they have a trick of rapping the table with it. We contracted
the habit as midshipmen when it was necessary to get rid of the
weevils in the biscuit before it could be eaten, and a fairly
long experience taught us that rapping the table with it was
an effectual plan for expelling them.

There is no more justification for accusing Queen Elizabeth of
failure to provide well-preserved food to her sailors than there
is for accusing her of not having sent supplies to Plymouth by
railway. Steam transport and efficient food preservation were
equally unknown in her reign and for long after. It has been
intimated abov