Hammocks

Towards the end of the fifteenth century, European trading ships had developed to the point where they were weatherly enough to embark on oceanic voyages. At first these were tentative. The Portuguese and Spanish ventured into the Atlantic, discovering and colonising places like the Canary Islands, the Azores and Madeira. Then bolder expeditions were sent further afield. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias reached the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. In the following decade, Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, Vasco da Gama navigated his way to India and an English expedition under John Cabot crossed the Atlantic to reach Newfoundland. The age of sail had truly begun.

The ships that these early explorers used were called caravels, and were tiny by later standards. The Matthew that Cabot used to cross the Atlantic was only 50 tons burden, for example. Caravels needed a lot of crew, to provide the manpower for handling the ship and also to supply enough armed men to protect explorers when they landed on an unknown shore. It was also wise to set off with a larger crew than necessary, to provide for the deaths and injuries that would inevitably accompany a voyage of any length. The result was that these small ships were very crowded.

But with a hold crammed with all the water and provisions required for a long voyage, and the stern cabin allocated to the captain, there was often little accommodation space left for the crew. Some more senior members had hard wooden berths, but the majority had to sleep on deck, often in the open. If they were lucky, they might be given straw-filled pallets to lie on, but this was very unsatisfactory. In poor weather they would soon get soaked and begin to rot, becoming very unhygienic and lice-ridden; while in rough weather, sailors could easily be rolled off them, occasionally injuring themselves.

Fortunately, a solution to this accommodation problem was found on Columbus’s first expedition. When he reached the Bahamas, he encountered the Taino people, who used an unusual type of sleeping arrangement. He described it when he wrote in his journal that “many Indians came to the ship to-day for the purpose of bartering their cotton, and hamacas, or nets, in which they sleep.” Later Spanish explorers discovered that hamacas or hammocks were used throughout Central America and the Caribbean, particularly for use outside. They could be strung between two convenient trees, and held the occupant clear of the ground and the many insects or snakes that might be found there.

It was unsurprising that Spanish sailors decided hammocks were the solution to the accommodation problem on board their ships. They could be made from canvas and rope, both readily available at sea, and promised a better night’s sleep by keeping sailors suspended above the hard, often wet deck. They could be washed and dried easily, making them much more hygienic than a pallet of straw. But best of all, they would swing with the motion of the ship, keeping the occupant vertical (and so safe from tumbling out) no matter how violent the weather. And on a crowded ship, they could be packed into a tight bundle and stowed away when not in use. So obvious were the benefits of hammocks, that there use spread through Europe until, in 1597, they were adopted by the Royal Navy.

Warships were much larger than the caravels and carracks of the early explorers. Not only did they need plenty of sailors to handle them, they also carried lots of heavy cannon that had to be manhandled across the deck in action. As a result, they needed very large crews. A modern Royal Navy Type 26 frigate displaces 8,000 tons and has a crew of 157. By comparison, an 18th century 74 was a fifth of the size but had a crew four times as large. These six hundred men had to be squeezed into a lower deck that was165 feet long, 40 feet wide and full of thirty-two pounder cannons. The solution was to accommodate the men in a continuous swaying carpet of hammocks suspended above the guns. In time, sailors got so used to hammocks that many took them on leave and continued sleeping in them on shore.

Hammocks had other uses on board, besides sleeping. During the day they were neatly trussed up into a bundle and packed into netting troughs that lined each side of the quarterdeck and forecastle to provide protection from small arms fire when the ship was in action. Should a sailor die at sea, his hammock became his last resting place. His body would be placed in it, with a round shot at his feet, and the hammock would be sewn shut over him. By tradition, the last stitch was passed through his nose, to ensure he was indeed dead, after which he would be buried at sea.

In the 19th century, sail was slowly replaced by steam, but warships still needed to accommodate large crews as stokers and artificers replaced sailors, and so the hammock continued in use. Even when coal was replaced by fuel oil early in the twentieth century and a ship’s armament was mainly powered, ships still needed large crews. New threats emerged, such as that of aircraft, requiring plenty of anti-aircraft guns to be fitted and manned. As a result the hammock remained in service right up to the end of the Second World War.

But then time was finally called on the 350 years of service the hammock had given the navy. Automation meant that machinery took over much of the work men had done before, and ship-borne missile systems required a lot less men to operate than the numerous guns they replaced. A smaller crew meant lot of space was freed up, and some of this was used to provide modern accommodation, including comfortable, permanent bunks. Today use of the hammock is mainly confined to the leisure sector, although it is still widely used in Central America among the descendants of those who first introduced Columbus’s sailors to them.