I am guilty. I write this nonsense far earlier than I should, sometimes without the necessary caffeine coursing through my brain. And my fact-checkers are inept creatures, old pensioners in worn Naval tunics, kahki ones with the giant pockets that can accomodate a whole carton of Camel Straights. I don’t know why I keep them on. All I get from them is a “Looked good going by here, Boss” and then they go back to sipping the dark liquid that might be coffee from cups, reminiscing about ports of call from long ago. “Now, listen up” I hear them say in the long dusty office with the piles of papers and unfiled folders. I hear the creak of a stool as one of them moves behind a tall writing desk. “This really happened. It is a no-shitter�.”

Which is how you can tell the difference between a fairy tale and a sea-story. I got caught yesterday in a complete melt-down in the rigorous industrial process that produces the top-quality Sea Stories that veteran Socotra readers have come to expect. Normally, a story is hammered laboriously by hand out of plate iron and bombast, the hammer ringing in the silence of the Arlington pre-dawn. Sparks fly, and the sound of the grinders rasps against the words of the far-fling web of correspondents whose contributions provide the inspiration for the manufacturing process. Teh entire resources of the BBC and the New York Times are mobilized to support the effort, all with minimal credit. The big industrial clock ticks past five and sweeps majestically toward six and the frantic labor commences. Synapses fire and neurons respond in chaotic order. On the wall near the frosted glass of the door with faded gold leaf are pictures of great moments in the Socotra Enterpirse Saga. A group of officers at the Lowest Point on Earth. A young Socotra in beret at a sidewalk cafe in Marseilles, perhaps the only human wearing one in all France. A picture of Vicki Barker confronting a Palestinian or an obdurant Isreali, it is hard to tell which.

Normally the manufacturing process takes about the time it took Henry Ford’s Germans and Hungarians to put together a Model T, right around ninety minutes from iron ore and rubber to a shiny black Tin Lizzy.

But as in all skilled processes there is an occasional glitch. Sometimes a conveyor belt does not deliver the correct idea at the appointed minute, or a bon mot slips off the sling and crashes onto the ship floor. Sometimes, with the eport models, anyway, le mot just just isn’t. Sometimes the wrong engine is delivered to the moving assembly line, hamster wheels for sleek racing models, or sixteen cylider concepts to econo-boxes.

And the pensioners are no help whatsoever. “I remember that a little different, It was at the New Jolo Club. Remember? The place up by the water buffalo statue where Magsaysay Boulevard turned into dirt again? There was a girl there, this a no shitter, she could�..”

It happened to me not long ago when I confused the anniversary of the surrender of Von Paulus and his Sixth Army to the Red Army at Stalingrad and the Battle of Midway. Oh, did I get a tongue lashing on that one! On the positive side, I had to do penance and read the saga of Colonel Luck, the Panzer leader who slogged through the entire war in al theaters and landed, lucky to be alive, in a slave-labor camp in soviet Georgia.

The pensioners were chagrinned for a minute when I fulminated at them for not checking something so easy. Then they went back to their sea-stories. They don’t pay a great deal of attention to me sometimes. “What are you going to do to us?” they say. “Send us to Vietnam?”

It happened again yesterday. I was at the computer and simultaneously at Trafalgar with Nelson, and I was at the Maritime Museum at Greenwhich, looking at the fine cloth of the clothing he wore that day and the distressing brown residue of his blood near the hole where the ball entered his abdomen, marveling that it had been persevered intact for nearly two hundred years.

The Brits are like that. I have written about walking around Wellington’s house in London, the way the place looks as though the great General had just stepped out for a cheroot. I knew that he hadn’t, of course. I always go to St. Paul’s Cathedral when I am in town and visit the General and the Admiral of their Age. Wellington’s monument is upstairs, in the western end of Christopher Wren’s soaring tribute to God and Man. Looking up you notice that they have not got around to fixing the decorative trim up there in the vastness. I think they left it that way to remind us of the flames that raged around the church in the Blitz and nearly destroyed it all. Like the Church of St. Clements Dane in the middle of the street not far away. The Authorities gave the gutted shell to the Royal Air Force to fix up after the war as their very own chapel. Hitler never figured out the soul and spirit of the people of London.

Horatio Nelson is in the crypt, under the floor and smack in the center of the Cathedral. He is in a great monument shaped like a gravy boat twice the size of a man. Still human scale, not like Napoleon’s grandiose resting spot in Les Invalides in Paris. I was hoping to balance the very real accomplishments of Nelson and his flagship Victory with something from our side of the pond. The Model T of my tale was very near complete at that time. The thin October dawn was coming up and I needed to get in the shower and head off to the day job that interferes with my passion. I opened the engine compartment of the story and inserted a whimsical account of the USS Constituion’s first cruise that I remembered well. You will see it again, below, cut out of Nelson’s tale and presented for what it is.

Now I realize that letting you into the Socotra assembly line is a risky piece of business. You probably imagine a vast and gleaming plant where these things are shrink-wrapped for your privacy and personal enjoyment. To actually show you the down-at-the-heels second floor sweat shop located above Whitlow’s on Wilson is to risk the very credibility of the industry. But so be it. Rash measures are called for. Late in the day I had a chance to queue up for the unclassified e-mail at the office where I am masquerading as a skilled laborer. I had the usual exhortations there to increase my mortgage and minimize my sexual prowess, or perhaps it was the other way around. There was a personal note from a very good friend who I admire and respect. He was blunt. Socotra Enterprises had been had. The fact checkers were drunk or AWOL. He appended an article he wrote, and I blush to include it below.

Careful readers will note that I normally grind all the last names off the characters in this ongoing Roman a Clef. It is the only way to protect both the innocent and the guilty. But this article is from Dr. David Alan Rosenberg, MacArthur Fellow emeritus, Historian, occasional Talking Head and the man who stands alone in trying to save us from the likes of me.

I’m using it without permission, since this is a Socotra piece, after all. Here is what he wrote in the Alumni Magazine of the Naval War College in 2000.

HISTORY LESSON

This is a naval lesson (long ago, of course) on priorities for sustainment, from one of our faculty members. The tale is from the history of the oldest commissioned war ship in the world, the USS Constitution. It comes by way of the National Park Service, as printed in “Oceanographic Ships, Fore and Aft,” a periodical from the Oceanographer of the US Navy.

On 23 August 1779, the USS Constitution set sail from Boston, loaded with 475 officers and men, 48, 600 gallons of water, 74,000 cannon shot, 11,500 pounds of black powder, and 79,400 gallons of rum. Her mission: to destroy and harass English shipping. On 6 October, she made Jamaica, took on 826 pounds of flour and 68,300 gallons of rum. Three weeks later, Constitution reached the Azores, where she provisioned with 550 pounds of beef and 6,300 gallons of Portuguese wine. On 18 November she set sail for England where her crew captured and scuttled 12 English merchant vessels and took aboard their rum. By this time, Constitution had run out of shot. Nevertheless, she made her way unarmed up the Firth of Forth for a night raid. Here, her landing party captured a whisky distillery, transferred 40,000 gallons aboard and headed for home.

On 20 February 1780 the Constitution arrived in Boston with no cannon shot, no food, no powder, no rum and no whiskey. She did, however, still carry her crew of 475 officers and men and 48,600 gallons of water. The math is quite enlightening: length of cruise: 181 days; booze consumption: 2.26 gallons per man per day (this does not include the unknown quantity of rum captured from the 12 English merchant vessels in November).

US Naval historians, we understand, estimate the re-enlistment rate from this cruise to have been 100%.

REBUTTAL:

I am afraid that I cannot allow this story to once again be passed without noting its obviously false nature and its apocryphal pedigree. I am a practicing naval historian who holds the Navy civilian chair of Maritime Strategy at National War College and has served since 1995 as Chair of the Secretary of the Navy’s Advisory Committee on Naval History. In my work, I have unfortunately noticed the US Navy has a tendency to embrace 225 years of legend and tradition but often misses the facts.

First, the story is historically wrong on the face of it. It tells of USS CONSTITUTION’s cruise from Boston to the Caribbean and England from August 1779 to February 1780 to raid English shipping. The story clearly refers to the frigate CONSTITUTION, our Navy’s oldest commissioned warship, still in service in Boston. Unfortunately, there was no USS CONSTITUTION during the American Revolution! In fact, the very concept of “constitution” was not something revolutionary Americans prized enough to name a first line warship after. They did not seriously contemplate living under a constitution until they held the great Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 following the failure of the Articles of Confederation.

The real USS CONSTITUTION, first and only US Navy commissioned warship of that name, was authorized by Act of Congress 27 March 1794, launched on 21 October 1797, and set sail on her trials for the first time on 22 July 1798. CONSTITUTION protected US shipping off the East Coast and Caribbean in the Quasi-War with France in the late 1790s, and fought the Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean from 1803 to 1807. During the War of 1812, she ran the British blockade of Boston on seven occasions, made five cruises ranging from Halifax, Nova Scotia, south to Guiana, and east to Portugal. She captured, burned or sent in as prizes nine merchantmen and five ships of war including the British frigates GUERRIERE, JAVA, CYANE and LEVANT. While she did operate in the West Indies, she never made port in Jamaica (a British possession) much less the Firth of Forth on the East Coast of Scotland (nor, in accordance with other versions of this story, the Firth of Clyde on the Northwest Coast of Scotland.) (The closest an American Navy raider made it to the Firth of Forth or [Firth of Clyde] was John Paul Jones. As captain of sloop of war RANGER on a raiding cruise from November 1777 when he left Portsmouth, New Hampshire to May 1778 when he sailed into Brest, France, Jones raided the West Coast of northern England and southern Scotland across Solway Firth in April.)

CONSTITUTION never seemed to have a problem with manpower retention in the War of 1812, by the way. Her great successes in battle and the fact that most US merchantmen were being blockaded in US ports or taken by the British on the high seas. This meant that US seamen who wanted to go to sea stood a better chance of getting out of Boston and coming home again on CONSTITUTION than on almost any other ship. In addition, since there was no career-enlisted force in those days, sailors usually enlisted in the Navy for the ship’s immediate cruise, and had to reenlist for the next one. Enlisted retention did not have the same meaning, as we understand it today.

There is a slim core of facts in this story, in that distilled spirits were a standard part of a seaman’s fare in the 18th and 19th century in the American Navy. The daily grog ration of a half pint of pint of rum mixed with a quart of water, begun under the Royal Navy’s Admiral Edward Vernon in 1740, carried over into the Continental Navy of the American Revolution. The same act of Congress that authorized CONSTITUTION in 1797 provided for a daily ration of a half-pint of spirits or quart of beer. Beer was omitted by the act of 3 March 1803 that set up the peacetime establishment of the Navy. By 1805, the annual consumption of rum in the US Navy was 45,000 gallons. In 1806, President Thomas Jefferson’s SecNav, Robert Smith, decided whiskey was cheaper and more wholesome for sailors, and in 1806 whiskey became the basis of the US Navy’s grog or spirit ration in the same proportion to water as rum had been. After the War of 1812, a growing temperance effort across the US led to congressional debates and resolutions favoring abolition of the spirit ration. In 1842 the spirit ration was cut in half, and no officer, enlisted or midshipman under 21 was permitted to draw grog. On 14 July 1862, Congress passed an act stating “the spirit ration in the Navy of the United States shall forever cease” and President Abraham Lincoln signed it. Finally, on 1 July 1914, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels proclaimed prohibition throughout the Navy making the service afloat officially “dry.”

Spirits had their place in the sailing Navy, however, and the best concise statement on it was made by British historian Nicholas Rodger in his 1986 book on the 18th Century Royal Navy, The Wooden World:

“Men at sea, like men on shore, did not drink water, which was unpleasant and unsafe. The ships carried a great deal of water, but if possible it was used only for cooking, and much of it occupied the ‘ground tier’ of casks in the bottom of the hold, which was part of the permanent ballast and only started in emergency. On long passages and on foreign stations, men drank watered wine (in the proportion of 8 to 1) or watered spirits (in the proportion of 16 to 1), but in home waters they drank beer alone, and the length of time a ship could stay at sea was effectively measured by how long her beer would last. This made the consumption of beer an important operational factor�”

The fact that the USN dropped the beer ration in 1803 indicates US sailors had less dependency on spirits than their RN brethren.

Interestingly, the RN continued their grog ration for a long time. They stopped the evening ration in 1824, cut the morning ration to one gill (a quarter of a pint) of rum in 1850, stopped the issue of rum to officers in 1881 (“the popularity of gin having replaced that of rum among them” according to one source), and ceased the issue to warrant officers in 1918. Chief and petty officers got their ration undiluted but all other ratings got their half gill of rum diluted with one and a half gills of water until the issue of rum was discontinued altogether in the Royal Navy in 1970.

As far as I have been able to ascertain, this story has been around for a very long time. Professor Jon Sumida of the University of Maryland, who is one of the leading authorities on the history of the Royal Navy (and is this fall a visiting Prof. at National War College) confirms that the story was published in the UK in the early 1970s in a publication from the National Maritime Museum without any footnoted attribution. It is thus likely that the most recent origin of this shot of liquor across our bow came from across the water. The Director of Naval History, Dr. Bill Dudley, (quoting the former Senior Historian of the Navy, Dr. William Morgan, who passe away in 2003) informs me that the origins of this egregious piece of false data go all the way back to World War II. An officer writing a ship’s newspaper on board a carrier, running out of real news, made this story up out of whole cloth and printed it. Dr. Morgan, renowned historian of the Navy in the Revolution, and Dr. Dudley, our best authority on the War of 1812, have tried to kill this story for years. Unfortunately, like a tough forest fire it seems to keep breaking out in other locales despite the best efforts of those in the know. Even the Secretary of the Navy was taken in. SecNav’s speechwriters have told me that John Dalton used to tell this story–minus the dates–as a joke opening his speeches during his tour from 1993 to 1998.

Isn’t the truth more interesting?”

So that is the truth. You can trust us. We are professionals. It is a no-shitter�..

Copyright 2000 and 2003 Vic Socotra and David Alan Rosenberg