{"id":43389,"date":"2020-07-29T01:00:26","date_gmt":"2020-07-29T05:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=43389"},"modified":"2020-07-28T08:24:30","modified_gmt":"2020-07-28T12:24:30","slug":"qotd-grog-in-the-royal-navy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2020\/07\/29\/qotd-grog-in-the-royal-navy\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Grog in the Royal Navy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>More generally, though, do we have any historical evidence of groups whose alcohol consumption was documented with any confidence, to see how they fared?<\/p>\n

Actually, we do, at least as a floor: we know the quantity of the Royal Navy’s spirit ration, which until 1823 was based on half a pint of rum (284 millilitres in foreign) per man per day. We also know its minimum strength, since it was tested by trying to ignite gunpowder soaked in it: it had to be over 57% alcohol by volume (“proof strength”) to pass. That’s sixteen units<\/em> of alcohol \u2013 not per week, but per day \u2013 or north of a hundred units a week, just for the issued ration before sailors bought any extra from the purser. (No wonder Jack Tar was jolly back in those days!)<\/p>\n

But clearly, we would expect a body of men consuming such suicidally destructive quantities of booze to be physical wrecks, raddled by cirrhosis and disease? As Dr James Lind (he of the discovery that citrus fruits were a sovereign remedy for scurvy) put it,<\/p>\n