Food

Wealthy passengers, along with the high-ranking officers, carried personal victuals that included all types of live domestic beasts and fowl, hams, sausages, bacon, salted cows' tongues, various kinds of pickled and dried fish, noodles, rice, beans, lentils, olives, capers, butter, lard, olive oil, vinegar, spices, dried fruit, preserves, honey, sweetmeats, and chocolates. The most prosperous passengers sometimes carried as many as twenty different kinds of wine and brandy. An interesting item carried by officers and passengers as early as 1570 was barrels of lemon juice. Did they realize that lemon juice could prevent scurvy? The English are generally credited with making this discovery early in the eighteenth century, but it is possible that the Spaniards made the discovery more than a century earlier, it is equally possible, of course, that they carried lemon juice for some other reason.

It was stipulated by law that each crew member had to be allotted a quart of wine, two pounds of biscuit, one and a half ounces of olive oil, half a quart of vinegar, and a small piece of cheese daily; eight ounces of dried fish and two ounces of peas or beans four days a week; and eight ounces of salt pork and one and a half ounces of rice three days a week. Besides these victuals, sugar, almonds, dried fruit, and live sheep and hens had to be carried aboard each ship in the event of illness among the crew. On many occasions the legal specifications were not met. The Averia officials, at times together with captain generals and admirals, were accused of purchasing insufficient or substandard victuals and wine for the crews and pocketing the difference; the defense of the Averia officials was, invariably, that they had to work under a limited budget.

All cooking was done on the main deck over a large metal box burning wood or charcoal that, for reasons of safety, was set in sand, lit only during daylight hours, and not lit at all when the weather was rough. Table was set in the spacious quarters of the ship's captain or, aboard the capitana, the captain general or, aboard the almiranta, the admiral. There was time for the diners to savor every succulent course, even to tell after-dinner stories over a glass of fine Spanish brandy.

Meals for the crew were an entirely different affair. No cooks were carried aboard flota ships, and the men had to prepare their own food. In good weather, when the firebox (there was usually only one on each ship) was alight, the men would attempt to cook one hot meal a day, reserving cold victuals and some of their biscuit to munch on whenever hunger pangs set in. Often a group of men pooled the victuals that required cooking, with a different man taking a turn at the firebox each day. The men were unable to cook at normal meal hours, since those were the times of preparation of food for the officers and the wealthy passengers, and had to eat their hot meal whenever they could get a turn at the fire.