Object of the Week

Imagine you’re a sailor on a eighteenth century ship. You’ve been at sea for weeks and fresh food is in short supply. You’re given your (pretty tiny) ration of food – 1 pound of biscuits a day, dry even when washed down with rum mixed with water. What do you do with your ration – rather than gobbling it down after your day of exhausting labour? Well, you decorate and paint it with prayer. Just like this rather marvellous example of decorated biscuit in the Maritime Museum that we were lucky enough to get close to while filming The Quizeum.

This late nineteenth-century sea biscuit, decorated with a line from the Lord’s Prayer, is an incredibly rare object. It’s rather priceless – simply because unlike Sevres china or a Gainsborough painting, a biscuit isn’t the kind of thing people treasure for posterity. After writing a biography on Nelson’s mistress, Emma Hamilton, and spending months in the archives of the museum, I got to know a lot of the collection, wandering around in my lunchbreak. But I’d never seen this – in fact I’d never seen anything like it. I was struck by the intricacy of the workmanship and the beautiful colours. We don’t even know how it got to the Museum.

Ship’s biscuit was pretty much the only palatable thing to eat during long voyages – until the advent of canned food – not officially introduced to the Navy until 1847. It was made as hard as possible – to withstand humidity and pesky insects – so no wonder sailors dubbed it a tooth breaker. This particular biscuit would have been made by a Royal Navy machine in Hampshire. But factory production didn't necessarily make it tastier.

For a historian like me – it’s the humdrum that we don’t get our hands on because people don’t save it. When you ask people what they’d put in a time capsule now, they say an IPhone or a computer – not a digestive biscuit or a take away pizza. But historians of the future, in a time when they have computer chips in their hands rather than phones and eat pills rather than meals, will have thousands of phones and diagrams of them – but not many pizzas.

Perhaps this particular biscuit was so hard that the owner thought he’d rather paint it than eat it. But I like to imagine that a sailor brought this back as a souvenir, thankful for surviving another dangerous journey, and painted it while he was waiting for his next ship – and his family kept it as a souvenir...

We saw some incredible objects in the Museum – I was blown away by the staff that James Ross put at the North Magnetic Pole in 1831. I was thrilled by Nelson’s first letter with his left hand after losing his arm at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797 – as researchers are quite rightly given a facsimile. But if I could pop one of our objects in my handbag – it would be the biscuit.