Page 61
Aaaand that’s all for now folks…
↓ Transcript
Panel 1 [Lawrence picks at his bug-laden food with concern as Ezra walks up to him. Ezra is turned from the camera, cropped at the hips. He's carrying a plate of food]
Panel 2 [Ezra sits down next to Lawrence, nudging his arm with his elbow]
EZRA:
How’s your guts?
LAWRENCE:
Well, the food isn’t helping their recovery.
Panel 3 [Lawrence looks down at his duff again. Ezra is following his eyes too. Josué glances over from where hes leaning against a beam in the background, laughing slightly.]
LAWRENCE:
I’ve never seen such a wealth of cockroach diversity. It’s...pairing well with the centipede.
JOSUÉ:
Heh heh heh. He’s funny.
Panel 4 [Ezra points at Lawrence with his fork, amused and good natured]
EZRA:
Year or two in, you’ll be so sick of the cook’s duff that the bugs will better the flavor.
Panel 5 [Bastien Addo leans over into the frame, grinning. Lawrence, Ezra, and Josué are all looking over at him.]
BASTIEN ADDO:
Cap's the one with the fine suppers. Sure if you bring your troubles to ‘im like he asks he’ll have you sit at the table with his woman and everything. You should go on and try it.
Panel 2 [Ezra sits down next to Lawrence, nudging his arm with his elbow]
EZRA:
How’s your guts?
LAWRENCE:
Well, the food isn’t helping their recovery.
Panel 3 [Lawrence looks down at his duff again. Ezra is following his eyes too. Josué glances over from where hes leaning against a beam in the background, laughing slightly.]
LAWRENCE:
I’ve never seen such a wealth of cockroach diversity. It’s...pairing well with the centipede.
JOSUÉ:
Heh heh heh. He’s funny.
Panel 4 [Ezra points at Lawrence with his fork, amused and good natured]
EZRA:
Year or two in, you’ll be so sick of the cook’s duff that the bugs will better the flavor.
Panel 5 [Bastien Addo leans over into the frame, grinning. Lawrence, Ezra, and Josué are all looking over at him.]
BASTIEN ADDO:
Cap's the one with the fine suppers. Sure if you bring your troubles to ‘im like he asks he’ll have you sit at the table with his woman and everything. You should go on and try it.
They’ve just left port. For the first part of the trip, the food should be passable if not good, until the fresh vegetables and livestock gets used up and it’s on to stockfish, salted meat, oatmeal, dried peas and ship’s biscuit.
The Captains that provided the best food usually got the best sailors applying and ended up making the most profit.
Cutting corners on food might have saved a little money up front, but in the end it lost more.
It’s after a few months that the weevils and other ‘protein supplements’ start to become more noticeable, just when you need the extra bits 😉
I’ve read a lot about ship’s life in the age of sail lately, that’s one reason I like this comic, it seems very accurate and the detail in the artwork is so indepth.
Oh certainly it’d be better in the beginning! Though I am taking creative liberties to make a centipede pairing joke, and to use this to set up contrast with the much more pleasant captain’s table that’ll make an appearance some time later.
While it’s true that food would be at its best on first leaving port, in many a whaler’s journal complaints about the food and the cooks’ duff featured almost immediately. Whether a ship had just left port or not, the vermin were already there and would have the run of the place despite folks’ best efforts to smoke them out. Within the first night whalers would have commentary on the cockroach brethren they share their home with. While fresh provisions would be in good condition at this point, captains would also break out older barrels of more shelf-stable things like flour or molasses from a previous voyage to get them out of the way before moving on to the new stuff, and within those barrels were often a bunch of old dead roaches that would end up being indifferently pulverized into the mixture and served up in the duff. The 1850s diary of greenhand William Abbe is one of my favorite primary sources for focsle life in this period since he was a man of…visceral detail when it came to his early experiences on board.
As usual, so excited to see an update! These pages are so DENSE with stuff! All the characters, the Ship’s Cat, the music in the back, the outfit change for the 2nd mate… it’s so good. Dialogue is funny, love the centipede pairing joke, I can really just hear these character’s voices in my head.
Thank you so much, I’m glad you like them! I’m really trying to make them feel lived-in. It’s been an exercise composing these pages to try to bring home the claustrophobia and sensory overload of the space while still having it be readable as an image. As such, my lads are lucky in that they’re getting a more spacious focsle than what was historically typical!
The one standard in life is that when you gather a group of men together they’ll find something to complain about, if they can’t then keep a very close eye on them because they either don’t have a cle what’s going on or they’ve already plotted something 🙂
The most common one is food. If it’s nothing but beans and biscuits they’ll complain and if it’s five star meals, they’ll complain that the money for that could have gone into their wages instead 😉
The difficulty of storing food onboard ship for extended periods was a reality that had to be dealt.
Things like water needed to be replenished regularly and anything that could be found locally would be taken along too.
Love the details, I’d think a ship that size would have several cats (in case one broke down at sea)
Captains and other Officers were known to have their personal dogs as pets and for use either as ratters or large ones to intimidate some crewmembers.