Life aboard a 1600s ship was cramped, dangerous, and monotonous. Sailors spent months at sea in spaces barely tall enough to stand in, eating the same rotation of salt meat and hard crackers, surrounded by rats, and facing a real chance of dying from disease before ever seeing combat. For ordinary crewmen, a voyage was an endurance test where boredom, hunger, and illness were constant companions.
Where Sailors Slept and Lived
Most crew members lived and slept on the same decks where they worked. The lower decks of a 1600s ship had ceilings roughly five feet high, forcing all but the shortest men to stoop as they moved around. Hundreds of sailors shared these dim, airless spaces with cannons, cargo, livestock, and each other. Privacy did not exist. Officers had small cabins at the stern of the ship, but ordinary sailors had no personal space at all.
The hammock transformed shipboard sleeping during this century. The Royal Navy’s first official mention of hammocks came in 1597, when they were called “hanging cabbons or beddes.” Over the course of the 1600s, hammocks spread to most Western European navies, replacing the practice of sleeping directly on the deck or on thin straw pallets. Hammocks swayed with the ship’s motion, which actually helped sailors sleep in rough seas, and they could be rolled up during the day to clear deck space. Each man was allotted only about 14 inches of width, so sleeping quarters were packed tight, with rows of hammocks slung from beams just inches apart.
What Sailors Ate and Drank
A sailor’s diet was built around preservation, not nutrition. The daily staple was ship’s biscuit, also called hardtack: a dense, dry cracker baked multiple times to remove all moisture. Each man received about 14 ounces of it per day, every single day of the week. It bore no resemblance to bread. Sailors often had to soak it in water or stew just to make it chewable, and after weeks at sea, the biscuit frequently became infested with weevils.
Twice a week, typically Sunday and Thursday, each sailor received about a pound and a quarter of salt beef. The meat had been packed in barrels of brine months or even years earlier, and by the time it reached the table it was tough, gray, and intensely salty. Other days might bring salt pork, dried peas, or oatmeal, but variety was limited. Fresh fruits and vegetables were consumed in the first days after leaving port and then disappeared entirely until the next landfall.
Water stored in wooden casks turned green and foul within weeks, so alcohol was a core part of the diet. Sailors received half a pint of spirits several days a week, often mixed with water to make grog. Beer was preferred when available because it spoiled more slowly than water. These rations weren’t generous, but they were reliable. Missing a meal was rare; eating anything appetizing was rarer.
Rats, Lice, and Constant Infestation
Rats were a ubiquitous part of life at sea. They gnawed through food stores, chewed ropes and wood, and even nibbled at sailors’ toes while they slept. A single ship could harbor hundreds of them in the dark spaces between decks and inside cargo holds. Controlling them was a losing battle. Crews kept cats and dogs aboard as ratters, and professional ratcatchers were sometimes hired in port. When infestations grew severe, ships were fumigated with burning charcoal, sulfur, or mercury, or even submerged partially underwater to drown the rats below decks.
Rats were far from the only pests. Lice and fleas thrived in the close quarters, spreading from man to man through shared sleeping spaces and unwashed clothing. Cockroaches infested food stores alongside weevils. There was no realistic way to keep a wooden ship clean in the modern sense. Bilge water, a foul mixture of seawater, waste, and rot, collected in the lowest part of the hull and produced a stench that never fully went away.
Disease and the Threat of Scurvy
More sailors died from disease during the age of sail than from storms, shipwrecks, and combat combined. The single greatest killer was scurvy, caused by a lack of vitamin C. Without fresh fruits or vegetables for weeks or months at a stretch, sailors’ bodies began to break down. Symptoms started with fatigue and swollen gums, then progressed to bleeding under the skin, loosening teeth, reopening of old wounds, and eventually death. On long voyages, scurvy could kill a quarter or more of the crew.
The cause wouldn’t be properly understood until the mid-1700s, so 1600s sailors had no reliable way to prevent it. Some captains noticed that citrus fruits or fresh greens seemed to help, but this knowledge was anecdotal and inconsistently applied. Dysentery, typhus (spread by lice), and various fevers also swept through crews regularly. The combination of poor nutrition, contaminated water, and impossibly close quarters made ships floating incubators for infectious disease.
Medical Care on Board
Ships carried a surgeon, but his tools and knowledge were crude by any standard. A ship surgeon’s chest was built primarily for one purpose: dealing with traumatic injuries in battle. It contained amputating knives, a bone saw with a spare blade, tourniquets, bullet forceps, a scoop designed for extracting musket balls from flesh, and large quantities of ligature thread and needles for sewing wounds shut. There was no anesthesia beyond alcohol and no understanding of infection. Surgeons worked fast because speed was the only mercy available.
For gunshot wounds, treatment typically meant cleaning the wound, applying simple dressings, and setting splints and bandages. If a limb was shattered beyond repair, amputation was performed on the spot. The surgeon also carried lancets and cupping equipment for bloodletting, which was considered a legitimate treatment for nearly every ailment. For the everyday illnesses that killed far more men than cannonballs, surgeons had little to offer. Medicines were limited to herbal preparations and compounds that were largely ineffective against scurvy, dysentery, or fever.
Discipline and Punishment
Keeping order among dozens or hundreds of men in miserable conditions required harsh discipline. The primary tool of enforcement was flogging with a cat-o’-nine-tails, a whip made of nine knotted cords. Minor offenses like spitting on the deck, shirking work, petty theft, or drunkenness could earn a sailor 6 to 12 lashes at the commanding officer’s word alone, with no trial or formal proceeding. A captain who wanted to inflict more severe punishment could break a single offense into multiple charges, assessing 12 lashes for each, allowing him to order 36 or 48 lashes on his own authority.
More serious crimes went before a court-martial, which could impose 12 to 100 lashes. For capital offenses like mutiny or murder, over 100 lashes could be given as an alternative to execution. Flogging was public, carried out on deck in front of the assembled crew, and served as both punishment and deterrent. While keelhauling (dragging a man under the ship’s hull) and marooning appeared in popular accounts, these were far less common in organized navies than the routine brutality of the lash.
The Daily Routine
A sailor’s day was structured around watches: shifts of four hours on duty followed by four hours off, rotating around the clock. This meant no one ever got a full night’s sleep. During a watch, sailors climbed the rigging to adjust sails, scrubbed the decks, maintained ropes and woodwork, manned the helm, and kept lookout. Sail handling was physically demanding and genuinely dangerous. Working on the yardarms dozens of feet above a rolling deck, often in rain or darkness, was one of the most common ways sailors were killed or injured.
Off-watch hours were spent eating, sleeping, mending clothes, or finding small entertainments. Sailors gambled with dice or cards, told stories, sang, and carved objects from bone or wood. But the dominant experience of a long voyage was tedium. Weeks could pass with nothing but open ocean, the same faces, the same food, and the same work. The combination of boredom, exhaustion, bad food, and the ever-present risk of disease or accident made a 1600s ship one of the harshest working environments in the world.