Page:Once a Week Jul - Dec 1859.pdf/443

432 be provided. Lighting, drainage, and ventilation could be carried on as ashore, and sailors would no longer be fed on salted provisions to the injury of their health. The resources of modem art can provide against this. The only motive for salting meat in the sailor fashion, called by the names of “junk,” “old horse,” and so on, is to prevent it from putrefying. It might be tanned to produce this effect, and possibly without rendering it much more indigestible. What is really needed, is to dry the meat. Putrefaction will not take place without the conjunction of three conditions — moisture, low heat, and stillness. What part heat plays we know by the late condition of the river Thames, a condition now applying to most tidal and some non-tidal rivers, where population thickens on their banks. In fact, the three conditions have been present, and putrefaction has taken place. Hot sun and wind will abstract moisture, and putrefaction does not take place then. In Southern America, people without our pretensions to civilisation understand this, and when they kill a food animal which is not intended for immediate consumption, they cut the flesh into thin strips or flakes, and hang it on lines in the hot sun, when it gradually takes the consistence of glue, and will no longer putrify, unless soaked in water. In course of time it may become mity, like cheese, but does not cease to be edible nourishing food. The Spanish name is charqui, probably a corruption from the French chair-cuit, and thence by English sailors transformed, Anglo-Saxon fashion, into Jerked Beef. The Boucaniers of the Tortugaa whose occupation as an honest industry — ere the Spaniards molested them, and forced them into practice as freebooters (filibusteros)—was killing and drying hogs and other cattle, were literally bacon-makers, Chaircoutiers, and from them no doubt the custom spread to the Spanish main.

But not everywhere on the Spanish main can the drying process be carried on naturally. In the hot, moist regions, the favourite soil of liver complaints, charqui cannot be made. Even in the Pampas of La Plata, the coast of which the Spaniards christened by the style and title of Good Airs, charqui proper is not made, though the abundance of cattle induces a bastard substitute. In Chili and Peru, and on the table-lands of the Andes, when the stars at night seem pendent from strings, so that you seem to look round them in the pellucid atmosphere, there is the land of indigenous charqui, where moisture flies away before the drying winds, where a mule lost in a snow-drift comes forth in the spring a grinning statue of leather, couchant, disembowelled, and with his eyes picked out by the condors, but with his hide impregnable, gradually getting to look like an old and worn leathern trunk after a hard campaign.

Now what is done by nature, can be done by art. For the sun and wind can be substituted the modern desiccating processes, in which air, warm or cold, medicated or otherwise, can be forced through moist substances, and thus flesh-meat may be dried at pleasure, without undergoing any process mischievous to digestion. Yet more, with steam-power at command on board, meat-safes may be so fitted, that dry cold air might be passing through them continuously, worked by the air-pumps, and fresh meat might thus be kept any length of time, of which processes we have an indication in the meat hung at the mast-heads of vessels when departing on a voyage. Passages by steamers are now so rapid, that provisions last fresh, and these processes are disregarded. But for the mariners of our water fortresses, with all means and appliances at their ruler’s disposal, almost without extra cost, this simple process should not be neglected. Flesh-meat, in the present condition of sailordom, is the staff of efficiency; and we ought not to waste fifty to seventy-five per cent., in processes diminishing its nutritious properties.

Vegetable preparations are now so common that the old processes of curing scurvy by sauer-krout, by oranges and lemons, and so on, may fairly be abandoned in favour of the better food that will not suffer scurvy to commence. The marble and conglomerate-looking blocks which the Crimean war first popularised, give out all the original qualities of the vegetables from which they are made, and the cook can have at sea all the essentials of his art as on land.

In such a craft the bathing of the men would not need the dipping a foresail overboard. Currents of water could be kept constantly pumped through, and if we get to water propulsion, a running stream of salt water would be accessible to all on board; and the sleeping space might easily be a gentle air-current, cooled in summer and warmed in winter. The great steam engine, the heart of the whole machine, would furnish the pulsile force, driving health through all its arteries, and making every single man the equal of two men by increased energy.

The intelligent man, viewed merely as a weapon of offence and defence, is worth six ignorant men; and we could afford therefore to expend on him the cost of three, and thus have double the efficiency at half the price. All employers of skilled workmen understand this: and surely a first-class seaman should be a skilled workman, who, risking life by sudden ending rather than by long process, should be highly prized and carefully nurtured. There is no reason why every good seaman should not be a good mechanic. All good seamen are so in the processes of sailing-vessels, and, in a steam fortress afloat, mechanical operations would be a relief from ennui. Turning and fitting would be an amusement, which “polishing shot” is not. The steam seaman, properly trained, should be as competent to all the processes of the engine and propellers as is the sailor to his propellers of sailcloth and cordage. In the class of vessel before described, he would be better protected, have a better chance of becoming a veteran, and, up to a certain point, would increase in value with his years. Such men, properly paid, would have no tendency to desert their ship, any more than a highly-paid workman has a tendency to desert his workshop. The very best men would volunteer for such a service, in which most of, and more in some respects than all, the comforts and conveniences of a house on shore, might be obtained. Permanent work is always a strong inducement to the best men to work for moderate