Livestock
See longer article on livestock on
clipper ships.
Clipper ships had to store a lot of food
since their trips involved being at sea with no way to get new provisions for 4
or more months at a time. A lot of the
food was in the form of livestock. For
example, one of the passengers on the Flying Cloud’s first voyage wrote the
following about the livestock on board in her diary:
"You don't
know how odd it seems of a morning when comfortably seated in my rocking chair
on deck -- when gazing over the broad ocean, to hear roosters crowing, hens
cackling, turkeys gobbling, pigs grunting and lambs bleating. There is an immense amount
of livestock on board and our icehouse is still well stocked with provisions --
so no danger but we shall fare well enough let us ever so long a voyage. We number, sailors and all, seventy-eight --
quite a village"
[1]
She also wrote about the fourth of July
dinner on board:
…
I must name the goodies which crowd our table.
Roast turkey and chicken with oyster sauce, roast pig, boiled ham, …[2]
Another Flying Cloud passenger, on
a different voyage, a writer named Charles William Stoddard, recorded
additional information about the livestock loaded onto the Flying Cloud
as follows:
"A
list of our live-stock: 17 pigs; 12 dozen hens and roosters; 3 turkeys; 1
gobbler; a cockatoo and a wild-cat."[3]
He also noted that the passengers
(and at least some of the crew) had “fresh eggs for breakfast, fresh pork for dinner, fresh chicken
for supper” and noted that the chickens on
board produced “a dozen
to two dozen eggs per day”[4]
A member of
the 1854 crew wrote “We were always well fed on the Flying Cloud. We had a
fresh meat dinner every Sunday and once in the middle of the week. There were plenty of live sheep, chickens,
ducks and pigs aboard.”[5]
The Flying
Cloud carried multiple chicken coops to house all those chickens and
turkeys. This is confirmed by a letter
from Dr. Stanley Coffin to Margaret Lyon, on June 15, 1988 about an incident
that happened on the Flying Cloud’s first voyage: "The Flying Cloud carried chicken coops to supply fresh meat for
the voyage which were, in fair weather, slung outboard over the gun'ls."[6] .
I have not found a source that shows the size or location of the Flying
Cloud’s chicken coops, but both the Cutty
Sark and Charles W. Morgan have chicken coops that are about 2.5’ x
2.5’ x 6’, so those coops may be a model, but I have not found a source that
says how much room one needs for 12 dozen chickens plus a few turkeys.
Cutty Sark chicken coop
There would have had to have been a pen to
hold the larger livestock, including the pigs and lambs. The Boucher 1916 model
in the Boston MFA includes a livestock pen over the forward hatch but the pen
does not seem big enough to hold 17 pigs plus a lamb or two. No other source shows a livestock pen but it
is clear from the above that there must have been one or more and it is hard to
image that the livestock was kept for long below deck due to the smell.
See Robert Leslie’s book Old Sea Wings
… for a description of food and livestock carried by sailing ships of the
time, including “turkies, geese, ducks,
hens, sucking pigs, sheep, goats,” and, occasionally, a cow.[7]