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 above that, even had she wished to, she could not possibly
have made any money out of bad provisions. The victualling system
did not permit of her doing so. The austere republican virtue of
the Commonwealth authorities enabled them to do what was out of
Elizabeth's power. In 1653, 'beer and other provisions "decayed
and unfit for use" were licensed for export free of Customs.' Mr.
Oppenheim, who reports this fact, makes the remarkable comment
that this was done 'perhaps in the hope that such stores would
go to Holland,' with whose people we were at war. As the heavy
mortality in the navy had always been ascribed to the use of bad
provisions, we cannot refuse to give to the sturdy Republicans
who governed England in the seventeenth century the credit of
contemplating a more insidious and more effective method of damaging
their enemy than poisoning his wells.
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