How Sailors Preserved Food for Long Voyages With These 6 Forgotten Preservation Methods

In the old world of nautical exploration, sailors who left port for months at a time had to learn how to preserve food in order to have enough supplies for the duration of their voyages.

In this guide, we take a look at 6 simple methods that teach us how sailors preserved food for long voyages so that you can apply their techniques to your own food preservation adventures.

How Sailors Preserved Food

Back in the 16th century, at a time when colonists would sail 3000 miles across the sea from England to America, the journey could take up to 3 months at a time.

To make sure that everyone onboard survived the journey, it was essential that seafarers had a reliable method (or number of methods) to store enough food for the journey.

History is littered with accounts of ships and their crews running out of food in the middle of their journeys because sailors didn’t know how to store and prepare different types of food for longer periods.

Sea Voyages Gone Wrong

One of the more horrific accounts, and perhaps apt for the times we're in now, was the 1884 account of the Mignonette whose ill-fated and starving crew reportedly killed a cabin boy in order to cook him and stay alive.

In a best-case scenario, sailors who left on voyages lasting more than six months would have been able to eat the fruits and vegetables they brought aboard ship along with meat, butter, and fermented dairy products.

When that food ran out, they would have had to rely on dried meats, salt fish, and hardtack (a type of biscuit made from flour, water, and sometimes fat), plus whatever edible plants they could find on any land they passed.

If a voyage went too long without success, a ship’s crew would likely have gone through periods of starvation.

It is no surprise then, that of all the old methods of food preservation, those used by the sailors are some of the most tried and tested, albeit not always the tastiest!

In this article, we'll take a look at the 6 most simple methods sailors used to preserve food for long voyages – lessons you can be sure will help you become more self sufficient with food in your own life.

6 Methods sailors used to preserve food on long voyages

Sailors were able to keep food fresh and edible for months on end by using these 6 simple preservation methods:

Smoking:

Smoking food was one of the earliest methods of preserving food. It was used extensively by native Indian cultures to keep food fresh, particularly meat, through the off-seasons.

Whether information was given to them from some higher source (some Indian tribes will tell of the sky people giving them knowledge, for example) or it was through pure trial and error, these ancient cultures discovered that smoke from forest fires would kill bacteria and insects found in meats and fish.

Before a sailor embarked on his voyage then, he would have brought on board plenty of smoked food.

Smoked food is, as you'd expect, simply the art of hanging raw meat above a fire so that the smoke bathes the meat and kills off bacteria. Smoking meat to preserve it can take up to 48 hours if you want to preserve meat for months.

There's a good chart showing how long you should smoke meat for to preserve it over on the Homesteading Hippy's website.

Salting:

People have been using salt to preserve food since long before the days of the sea voyage. There have been several times in recorded/taught history where salt was a highly sought after and valued commodity for this very reason.

Salting meat draws out the liquid in food through the ‘scientific' process of osmosis, leaving it dry. Bacteria needs moisture to survive so the process of salting kills off and prevents bacteria from surviving.

Salting was used to preserve both meat and fish which would have been packed in a barrel with layers of salt on top.

You can try the process yourself by putting some meat into a jar and sprinkling it with salt. Leave it for a couple of weeks and you'll notice a dramatic difference.

Drying (Known as the Dry Stores):

Sailors also dried fruit and vegetables to preserve them.

Drying is different to smoking because with drying, food is simply left out in the hot sun to dry. The drying removes moisture from the food which helps to kill off bacteria and make it last longer. Dried food can last months if kept in sealed jars.

For a more contemporary method of food dehydration, visit our dedicated guide.

Boiling Water:

When fresh water was limited, the crew would have boiled seawater and then added it to food to prevent it from going bad.

Fermentation:

Fermentation was a key method for helping sailors preserve food for long voyages.

It requires only 3 ingredients; water, salt and the vegetable that you are going to ferment.

A first hand account of how important fermentation was to sailors can be found from the writings of ‘Cook' over at the Australian Maritime Museum, where he writes in his journal that “the use of chou croute (sauerkraut cabbage,) preserved in brine and rich in potassium, phosphorous and vitamins preserved by fermentation, preserved food.”

It is now well known that fermentation, or good food rich in vitamins helped prevent Scurvy (we are told was the result of lack of vitamin C). It was common amongst sailors who did not have enough fruit and vegetables.

Cabbage was one vegetable that purportedly helped prevent the disease, as did potable soup, a preparation of dried vegetables, beef stock and malt which is why fermentation and sauerkraut in particular, became so important to sailors on long voyages.

Fermentation was also used in the making of bread, of course. When yeast is added to bread, it creates carbon dioxide gas. The gas builds up inside the bread and expands, creating bubbles, which keep the bread from going mouldy.

Beans and Rice:

This is not so much a preservation technique as a type of food that was used frequently on long voyages by sailors. Beans and rice don’t spoil quickly, so they were a good choice for sailors who had to store their food for months at a time.

Final thoughts on how sailors preserved food for long voyages

Sailors on long voyages had to find ways to preserve food so they didn’t run out, starve and die. But you don't have to be a sailor to benefit from their teachings.

You can learn a lot from these old ways and today, you can apply the same techniques to keep your own food fresh after a bountiful harvest or while you’re away from home.

Learning these old methods will be a key skill as the world recovers from a severe shock to the supply chain following the unwinding of almost everything at the hands of man-made crises.

I've said for a long time that in order to go forward, we must first go back and learning from history is truly our best chance at doing it.