Cooking Occupied much

Time During the Voyage

THE emigrants divided themselves into messes of roughly six persons — the average size of families travelling. Someone in each mess took it in turns to collect issues of food and do the fortnight’s cooking. But there was a long and weary pilgrimage from the storeroom to the meal laid out ready on the long table between decks. At breakfast the mess cook had to take his pot of porridge along to a galley which accommodated only three or four persons. As there might easily be more than a dozen messes with porridge to cook, it would be quite possible to spend more than an hour waiting a turn at the galley stoves. Hot water was issued to each mess for making coffee. Delay with this item did not matter, as it had to be taken in tin mugs that could be put to the lips only when cold. Ship’s biscuits, the ‘ hard tack’ which so often figured in wry jokes, filled up the corners.

Midday dinner, the main meal, was cooked in a common pot. Each mess had a numbered metal or wooden token attached for identification to its particular lump of meat, and also to its net of preserved potatoes. Plum duff or boiled rice was the pudding. The evening meal consisted of biscuit and butter, with tea to drink; but since there was seldom any shortage at the mid-day meal, there was often cold meat left over for tea.

Though the second cabin was treated in prac­tically the same way as the steerage, the fortunate inhabitants of the cabin had a good deal of fresh food shipped for them at the beginning of a voyage, and often a milch-cow.

The narrow decks were cumbered with a pen of squealing pigs, another of sheep and an array of poultry hutches. Occasionally this livestock, killed and consumed on board, was supplemented by a pedigree ram or bull or one or two valuable dogs which passengers were bringing out for use on their farms