When at sea one advantage of having a low free board (1 meter), as was the case on the good ship Duivendrecht, was the fact that lots of flying fishes stranded on the deck. Not every day but quite regularly. We used to turn on the deck lights aft a couple of hours before sunrise to attract the fish. At dawn the sailors on duty used to ‘harvest’ the fishes lying on the deck, which were then fried for breakfast by the ship’s cooks and they were quite delicious. In the beginning I almost gagged at the idea to eat fish for breakfast, even the smell of it was distasteful. But eventually I overcame my dislike and learned to appreciate it. You cannot get fish fresher than that. Later, when sailing on much bigger ships with very high free boards I never saw a fish on the deck again, only in or rather out of the water! Flying fishes could only ‘fly’ or rather glide a little distance above the water. They would break out of a wave top quite unexpectedly and could sail on their special fins quite a distance. It was said that they did not do that for the fun of it, but to escape other predator fish.
The free fish was a welcome supplementary food item. The food on the ship was very bad and kept to a bare minimum by the captain in close cooperation with the chief steward. The last one had to come to the captain’s office every day in order to discuss the next day’s menu and anything expensive or that smelled of luxury was stricken of the menu list. Like other Dutch companies the owners had invented the “Ship of the Month” game. You became the “Ship of the Month” when the average food figure of a ship was the lowest in the fleet. Quite an honor and it reflected also very positively in the captain’s bonus, which was pursued by most captains also for that reason, but not by all I must say.
For breakfast the number of slices of cheese and sausage where carefully counted per person and as most young officers including myself , I was 18 then, normally sat in on the first table session - the staff always on the second - we ended up by eating slices of bread with only margarine on top, if still available. Some, like me, poured on some salt on the margarine to give it a little more zip.
Often the captain complained that we were eating like miners. Not more than exactly three eggs per week as this was the minimum that was allowed by the seaman’s union regulations. Sometimes two eggs per week but then the chief steward argued that a slice of cake had been served at a certain moment that week. One egg per slice was a bit much, especially since the cake was bleak and dry like ship’s biscuits in the old days.
The captain tried to store always in the UK as prices were much cheaper there than for instance in the States. Fruit was also kept to the regulatory minimum as it was expensive and for vegetables he had a strong preference for turnips as they were far out the cheapest kind. We got turnips almost day in and day out. I still can not stand turnips, the smell alone turns over my stomach. In Holland turnips are sarcastically called “Zeeuwsche Ananas”, meaning “Ananas or Pineapple from the Dutch province of Zeeland”. The inhabitants of that province are traditionally called scrooges and turnips there favorite food as it costs next to nothing. The captain was a born Frisian from the northern part of the country. The inhabitants of that province are also not known to be big spenders and tight-pursed.
The gravy was another story. Please pass me the water-boat we used to ask each other, instead of the gravy. The official hot meal was served at 1200 and 1230 hours, first and second session. At 1800 and 1830 hours we also got a warm meal supplemented with bread. The meat was often of such low quality that you could hardly cut it. Steak was served on rare occasions and when it was it was so tough as shoe leather, although it handed been run through a meat tenderizer. A kitchen contraption with a lot of needles which penetrated the stubborn meat. It only helped a little bit. We called it steak from the nose bone of the cow or steak from the cow’s hoof, specialty of the house we used to say. Often we did not eat the hot meal and contented ourselves with eating slices of bread. As there was no cheese, sausage nor butter at that meal time, we poured some gravy from the gravy- or rather water-boat over the bread. That was it then. Nice.
The English potatoes which we stored were also of a very low quality, probably the cheapest they could buy. No matter how long they were cooked they had a ‘glassy’ texture and no taste at all. On one occasion a delegation of the sailors went to the captain’s cabin with a pan full of these potatoes in order to complain about this kind of food. As we later heard the captain took a sample potato out of the pan, tasted it and declared that nothing was wrong with the potatoes. One of the sailors picked up the big pan and turned it over on the captain’s desk saying: “Well if you like them so much you may keep them, we certainly do not want them”. After that act they stamped out of the captain’s cabin. Well, crew can complain, officers don’t!
My family, when returning from a voyage, noticed that I had lost considerable weight. When arriving at the Hook of Holland pilot station, the pilot came on board with a smirk and told the captain that the text “Honger” , meaning “Hunger”, had been painted on both sides on the ship’s hull in huge white letters. The captain was enraged but nothing could be done to remove the lettering on short notice. Some sailors must have risked their lives to paint the text during night time on the ship’s hull before arrival. The Van Ommeren’s office crowd, as usual waiting for the ship to berth, was not amused at all. To make matters worse the next day a photo of the ship with text appeared in one of the newspapers. The captain said it was all to due to a few criminal crew members and certainly not to the food which was excellent. It was true that we had quite a number of ex-criminals on board who were paroled when they were willing to go to sea…
The s(team) t(urbine) s(hip) W. Alton Jones, callsign ELLT, was built in the US in the port of Newport News and owned by the Grandbassa Tankers Company. It was carrying the Liberian flag and van Ommeren Rotterdam managed the ship, also providing the Dutch crew. In those days this was a very large and also fast (20 - 21 knots) ship. Oil consumption at this speed was huge, about 110 ton per day.
In very big contrast was the food on my next ships, also manned by van Ommeren, the “W. Alton Jones” under Liberian flag. The food there was suddenly of a more than excellent quality. How can? Well the American owners paid for the food on board and then it suddenly was a completely different story. We even had a mechanical cow which with milk powder and water produced a drinkable glass of milk and we could get all the eggs to order and grapefruits we wanted. One of the captains there even encouraged us to eat as much as possible as the Americans paid for it anyway as he testily stated…