It was 6 May 1725 and Chaplain Onnokati Ferrari had had enough. He had been the official ship chaplain of the Ostend Company ship Sint-Elisabeth ever since it had left the Chinese port of Canton headed for its home port in the Southern Low Countries. Little had he known that life aboard the Sint-Elisabeth would prove so challenging. Conflicts between crew members occurred daily, between captain and merchants, officers and sailors, merchants and their clerks – the small community was rife with tension. To aggravate matters, Ferrari had been obliged to spend a considerable portion of his time at the bedside of Captain Balthazar Roose, attending to the ailing captain during his month-long death struggle against dysentery. A month spent on unsuccessfully attempting to get the captain to repent, and being cursed at, had been challenging enough, but what happened on 6 May was the last straw. At noon, while he made his way to the ship’s cabin – the room in the rear of the ship where officers and merchants shared their meals – Ferrari discovered that merchant Guillaume-François De Waersegher had returned from his personal quarters after an illness. The merchant had disdainfully moved the clergyman’s plate across the table, as he was appalled that during his bed-ridden absence his customary seat next to the captain had been claimed by the chaplain. Affronted and seething, the chaplain announced he would take his meal with the petty officers, gathered his tableware, left the cabin, and loudly vowed never to set foot in it again.²

The incident, as related by ship clerk Gerard De Bock, reveals that aboard the Sint-Elisabeth officers and petty officers apparently ate in different places. Such observations about on-board hierarchies at mealtimes are not new: over the past two decades, sociologists and historians alike have stressed the crucial role of commensality, the act of eating together, as a social act with profound impact, structuring daily life and social interactions. Sociologist and anthropologist Claude Fischler saw this as a creative process: eating together creates or strengthens bonds and fosters kinship, implicitly following sociologist Georg Simmel’s 1957 observation that ‘with each common meal (...) the same group becomes “more society” than it was before’.³ Sociologist Claude Grignon considered commensality less a process and more a reflection of the social composition of a society: pre-existing relations are reflected and enforced by who eats together and thus commensality provides a means of distinguishing the social groups present in a given society and understanding their mutual relationships.⁴

The idea and concept of commensality as creating and strengthening social distinctions has been embraced eagerly by social historians. Allen Grieco, Mary Hyman and Peter Scholliers followed Grignon in stressing how commensality played a major role in identity construction throughout history, especially in hierarchical societies where they served to create and maintain hierarchies.⁵ Similarly, Gervase Rosser and Laura Crombie demonstrated how, by the early modern period, European societies had a long history of using exceptional meals to demarcate group boundaries between members and non-members of certain (sub-)groups.⁶ In more everyday early modern meals Paul Steven Lloyd likewise discovered how commensality fostered senses of both social inclusion and exclusion as groups were either welcome or unwelcome at meals.⁷ When these firmly established and stressed social hierarchies intersected with professional relations, this process became even more explicit. Raffaella Sarti explored how, in households affluent enough to afford them, servants ate at separate tables, spatially divided from the master of the house and his family.⁸ In doing so, commensality served the very clear purpose of not only reflecting but enforcing the hierarchies that were deemed important. Through the use of different rooms, tables and seating arrangements, these distinctions were driven home.⁹ Historical research attributes a great complexity to commensality, with different occasions characterised by at times opposing commensal custom, all playing different roles in establishing and preserving group demarcations. However, the flexibility of commensal norms and the degree to which they could be and were deviated from, has received much less attention.

Maritime historians too tend to understudy the flexibility and deviations of commensality, as they focus more on commensality as sets of iron-clad rules. The divisions are then considered one of many ways in which the fundamental hierarchy aboard was ingrained in daily life. In this light, differences in diet between sailors and officers have been a regular staple of such studies, along with the practical organisation of meals, albeit less frequently.¹⁰ In exploring the realities of shipbound life, Dorothy Volo and James Volo emphasised how such differences reflected and enforced the overarching professional and social hierarchy dominating on-board life.¹¹ Herman Ketting, in studying various elements of life aboard ships of the seventeenth-century Dutch East India Company, reached similar conclusions: in almost every aspect of daily life these hierarchies were reflected, including at mealtimes. The incredibly isolated and spatially limited context of life aboard is seen as the main reason why the central hierarchy of shipbound labour was extended to all aspects of life, from sleeping arrangements to dining formalities.¹² So the commensal divides between officers and sailors are stressed as serving to confirm and enforce the hierarchies so central to the ship’s functioning and survival.¹³ However, the commensal divisions elucidated by maritime historians are often limited to distinctions between officers and sailors, while the conflict aboard the Sint-Elisabeth already suggests a much more complex set of relationships featuring different officers, petty officers, sailors and various locations.¹⁴ The full complexity of such commensal relations and how they related to existing hierarchies remains to be fully explored.

The tendency of scholars to trace the central hierarchy through every single aspect of daily life aboard ships is often explicitly or implicitly based on sociologist Erving Goffman’s seminal work on total institutions.¹⁵ These are defined as places of residence and work cut off from wider society, in which all aspects of life take place under the same authority and according to a strict schedule.¹⁶ The hierarchical divide between ‘managers’ (prison wardens, doctors, officers) and the ‘managed’ (inmates, patients, sailors) is expected to be reflected in, and enforced by, the structure of everyday life. As a result, deviations from these structures are to be avoided at all costs because they threaten the hierarchy key to the institution’s functioning.

Yet opponents of the classification of a ship as a total institution emphasise that the isolation and spatial limitation of the ship is a side effect of the ship’s nature as a technical artefact, not a functional necessity as is the case for total institutions as army barracks and prisons. In addition, unlike other institutions, officers on board of ships are to a large degree dependent on sailors’ skills and labour to maintain the ship.¹⁷ The shipbound community is a hybrid community with a top-down hierarchy enforced on all aspects of daily life combined with a relative bottom-up dependence inherently limiting this enforcement. This provides an unparalleled view on the process of commensality and its functioning. While deviations from the rules governing daily shipbound life have been studied by historians interested in mutinies and social strife, transgressions of the more subtle rules of commensality have so far been overlooked.

This article seeks to address these lacunae by exploring the complexity of the commensal structure aboard Ostend Company East Indiamen. On these long-distance trading ships the social and practical importance of such a structure was uniquely intense and crucial. Life and survival aboard these technically highly complex vessels deeply depended on collective and coordinated labour for very long periods, in which a solid social structure played an important role.¹⁸ It also examines how these rules could be transgressed or circumvented by individual actors to serve their personal goals. It hypothesises that, despite commensal rules being a reflection and enforcement of vital on-board hierarchies, they could and were bent by individual actors in pursuit of personal aims. Furthermore, it proposes a more flexible conception of the commensal structure in which such deviations were, to a degree, functional: the structure was able to bend temporarily, absorbing tensions and shocks without threatening existing hierarchies.

The Ostend Company or gic (Generale Keizerlijke Indische Compagnie) held the monopoly on trade between the Southern Low Countries and the Indian coasts and Canton between 1722 and 1731. During its brief but highly lucrative existence, the gic sent out 21 individual ships, with on average 95 people on board, their life at sea is the focus of this study. Historian Karel Degryse has argued that life aboard Ostend Company ships could be rife with tensions, both social and sexual, and could occasionally explode into conflicts, violence and sexual crimes, yet, his implicit call for further research has, until now, largely gone unheeded.¹⁹

The first part of this article briefly sketches the sources and methodology used. Next, the general diet on board is outlined before delving into commensality itself. The latter commences with a closer look at commensality among officers in the cabin. Next, divisions of tables, differences in seating arrangements and degrees of mobility are discussed. Afterwards, attention shifts down to the deck and below, as commensality among the rest of the crew is studied. Throughout the analysis attention will be paid to the organisation of commensality on a daily basis, as well as the degree to which individual agency allowed for deviation and how such violations were used by actors to pursue particular ends. The final section argues for a much more complex conception of shipbound commensality than before, in which both rules and deviations were functional in strengthening and maintaining professional hierarchies.

The main sources underpinning this research are Ostend Company ship logs, official reports of the journeys undertaken by Company ships, compiled by the highest officers on board.²⁰ Generally consisting of notes added on a daily basis, these logs were specifically meant to function as extensive reports for the Company directors, who remained at the Company headquarters in Antwerp, to peruse.²¹ To serve in this capacity, logs included daily notes on the ship’s course, speed and the prevailing winds.²² Sporadic notes on daily events could be added depending on what authors deemed interesting to report.²³ While written from the perspective of the ship’s higher-ups and dependent on individual interests, these notes provide both a window on the practice of life on board, recording events that reveal agency, as well as shed light on how authors expected daily life to be structured.

All 24 surviving GIC ship logs were studied. These are preserved in the Antwerp City Archives and the Ghent University Library and span the entire period of the Company’s maritime activities and report on 85 percent of its ships. Various officers kept individual logs, as a result some ships are covered by more than one officer aboard. In total, this amounted to entries on around 7,000 separate days on 17 individual ships. Relevant entries relating to food and meals were collected into a database, resulting in 640 entries being retained. The large majority of these, 437 entries, were concerned with provisioning: buying food, hunting or inspecting stocks. 203 however, or about 31 percent, dealt with events and habits relating to meals, allowing a closer look at daily meals and commensality. These were then grouped according to whether they shed light on the daily commensal structure (155 entries or 77 percent) or rather reported deviations (67 entries or 33 percent). The overlap between these categories is due to deviations which by their very nature shed light on what was considered the regular state of affairs. The first group was used to reconstruct the entirety of commensal structures, while the second group was further subdivided with regards to the cause of the deviations such as conflict, punishment, and reward.

The logs first and foremost served a maritime and administrative purpose. As captains and other high-ranking officers could be judged on how they led their ship and managed to complete the trading expedition, they were heavily incentivised to minimise or underreport conflicts and tensions aboard. Furthermore, only high-ranking officers and merchants kept such journals. While these hierarchically biased sources provide an exceptional view on the daily life of a certain segment of the crew, they also supply, depending on events and authors’ interests, occasional glimpses of the lives of the rest of the crew, whose voices are so rarely heard in the available source material.

One exceptional document providing unique insight is the journal of Gerard De Bock. As a ship’s clerk, De Bock was tasked with assisting the supercargoes – merchants responsible for procuring the cargo – by meticulously recording all trade transactions as well as supporting them in any other tasks requiring writing skills. Appalled by goings-on aboard the Sint-Elisabeth (which sailed from Ostend to Canton and back between 1724 and 1726), he compiled a hybrid document between a ship log and personal diary.²⁴ He did not opt for brief daily annotations but instead made more spontaneous, sporadic and lengthier notes. While these provide more extensive and prosaic insights in daily life aboard, the document is not quite a personal diary. Its clearly stated goal was to provide the Company directors with a record of incidents on board, which also explains why this, to some degree very personal, document was preserved in the Ostend Company archives. Perhaps partly driven by personal vendettas, partly by professional ambitions, De Bock went out of his way to interpret the behaviour of the ship’s top officers and merchants in as unflattering a light as possible. He often revelled in describing conflicts, unrest and tensions aboard. In doing so, De Bock sought to demonstrate his own insight and skills in trading and travelling, and perhaps successfully so, given his subsequent promotion to company merchant.²⁵ His interpretation of life aboard as at all times replete with tensions, conflicts and violence thus cannot be taken at face value. De Bock’s focus on the sensational and the exceptional unavoidably brought with it a certain disregard for everyday routine. Entire uneventful weeks were at times ignored in the journal. Nevertheless, he provided a unique perspective on minor annoyances, uneasy tensions and crucial conflicts aboard, which feature much less prominently in the formal journals.

Ordinary sailors had the most basic diet of all those on board, highly similar to that of other companies of seafaring nations. Breakfast was served at eight in the morning and consisted of gruel made by adding oil, molten fat, vinegar or beer to dry groats.²⁶ At noon (twelve o’clock) and in the evening (six o’clock) meat, bacon or stockfish was served alongside peas or ship biscuit, an easy to preserve type of very hard twice-baked bread requiring extensive soaking before being fit for consumption.²⁷ In theory, every week counted four so-called ‘meat days’ and three ‘fish days’, although, as on all ships of the time, this was contingent on stocks and could be altered according to needs.²⁸ In the first few weeks after departure, meals were more diverse as large amounts of potatoes, pumpkins, turnips and cabbages were loaded aboard either in Ostend or in Asian ports. As the weeks ground on, however, the basic diet once again became dominant on the two-year-long voyages.²⁹ It was supplemented by limited daily rations of brandy, unlimited access to weak beer and meagre supplies of water not used by the cooks.³⁰

While differences in status and hierarchy determined access to food, the sailor diet provided the blueprint for the nourishment of all others aboard and was upgraded per rank. Petty officers’ meals were regularly supplemented with bottles of wine.³¹ Officers not only had access to higher quality food (freshly baked bread or white bread rather than ship biscuits, stronger beer, higher quality meat) but also to much bigger portions.³² Low-ranking officers were given much more wine than petty officers, while high-ranking officers had unlimited access.³³ Finally, officers could buy their own ingredients, such as sugar, mustard and various types of cured meat, and request the officer cook to prepare special meals with these, such as pastries, spit-roast meat, and soup.³⁴ Following international naval customs of the time, sailors were dependent on very basic rations, while increasing rank equalled increasing dietary privileges.³⁵

Differences between officers and sailors went deeper than different diets. Muster rolls, lists of employees on board of each ship, feature both a cook for the crew (‘cock van d’Equipagie‘) and a cook for the cabin (‘cock van de cayutte’).³⁶ This division between crew and cabin entailed more than logistics: cabin-cooks were consistently paid 25 percent more than their counterparts for the crew, had much more diverse national backgrounds and were directly hired as cabin cooks, while cooks for the crew more often started as assistant cooks before being promoted after a few voyages.³⁷ Moreover, ship inventories suggest cabin-cooks had a larger supply of basic cookery tools, such as pans and knives, and often of a higher quality.³⁸ Dietary inequalities between officers and non-officers meant they also handled sets of tools entirely unique to the more diverse and labour-intensive dishes they prepared for the officers, such as pie-shapes, skewers and teapots.

However various and complex social distinctions were at mealtimes within the cabin, it was only a small part of the entire crew that had their meals in this exclusive venue. Sailors and petty officers were served their meals elsewhere. Sailors were divided into messes or bakken of about seven members who shared their meals either on deck in fair weather or just below deck during storms.⁷⁵ Sailors’ bakken were named after the communal recipient in which a mess’ food was served and out of which sailors ate with individually provided wooden spoons or personal knives.⁷⁶ This cutlery further amplified and reinforced existing hierarchies and inequalities. Petty officers, grouped in separate messes of similar sizes and organised according to their professional activities such as carpenters, sailmakers and overseers of sailor labour, supplemented this with their own personal cutlery. Officers at the first table were not supplied with low-quality cutlery, nor did they need to rely on their own tools. Rather, they were generally given high-quality pewter knives, forks and spoons.⁷⁷

In organising the division of bakken, the gic likely followed the French or Dutch examples by putting these decisions into the hands of the ship steward or the captain.⁷⁸ Concerning Dutch voc ships, research has shown that ethnicity played a significant role in this process. Bakken regularly grouped together sailors of similar ethnic roots and, especially during the Company’s seventeenth-century voyages, Asian cooks were often hired to cook specifically for the Asian members of the crew.⁷⁹ From the 1720s onwards, this practice of separate cooks fell into disuse. In contrast with their competitors from the Northern Low Countries, gic crews were much less ethnically diverse.⁸⁰ More than half of all crew members originated from the port of Ostend itself and about 67 percent from the Southern Low Countries as a whole.⁸¹ Of the rest, about half (15.17 percent) hailed from Dunkirk, the sailor community which was intricately linked to that of Ostend, with many Dutch-speaking sailors having Dutch names and family ties to Ostend.⁸² So meals on the gic ships were less ethnically diverse and one cook for the sailors sufficed. A likely form of exceptional sailor commensality is connected to the mobility of the ships’ elite, as these transfers required sailors to row across the water. As no mention is made of rowing boats returning immediately, it seems that this handful of sailors remained aboard for as long as their captains, supercargoes and chaplains did, likely being served the ship’s sailor rations alongside their colleagues.

Finally, while the nature of everyday or regular commensality seems to suggest the reproduction or, at the very least, the presence of clear hierarchical norms, commensal structures could also be rooted in more logistic considerations. This is most apparent when considering the petty officers who were directly involved with meal preparation: the cooks, the steward who was responsible for supervising supplies, and their respective assistants. As meals for the entire crew were served simultaneously and the functioning and course of the ship needed to be watched at all times, these culinary petty officers were likely made responsible for this watch. The Dutch East India Company in any case, sailing on similar routes with similar ships, solved this matter by grouping culinary petty officers into a separate mess, who stood watch while their colleagues ate and shared their meal after the other crew members had finished.⁸³ The gathering of culinary petty officers in the so-called ‘cauldron watch’ (‘ketelskwartier’), devised by the gic’s main competitor and model, strengthens the case for hypothesising that the Ostend Company used a similar arrangement of a separate commensality for cooks, stewards and their assistants.

Culinary petty officers’ commensality remains the densest to pierce. Possible differences in diet potentially set them even further apart from their fellow petty officers. While all petty officers shared an officially strictly prescribed and identical diet, research on eighteenth-century households has demonstrated that access to the cooking area could have its own advantages. While no evidence has been found of a maritime counterpart to kitchen maids’ access to ‘kitchen stuff’ on shore, such as leftover ingredients or fat, the existence of similar informal arrangements cannot be excluded.⁸⁴ Food supplies aboard were under sharp scrutiny by both the captain and the ship steward. Pilfering was not tolerated and punished severely.⁸⁵ Nevertheless, much like kitchen maids and cooks on dry land, culinary petty officers’ unique access to food made occasional illicit commandeering potentially easier than it was for other crew members.⁸⁶ Despite their differences in wages and the divergent quality of the ingredients they had to handle, cabin cooks took their meals together with the cooks serving the crew. How this unique commensality interacted with these inequalities (perhaps even in diet due to differences in ingredients and leftovers) and how this shaped sociability among culinary petty officers, calls for further research.

Mealtimes aboard gic ships, much like all of daily life, were deeply shaped by existing professional hierarchies. Top- and low-level officers, culinary and petty officers and sailors were set apart from each other through a distinct hierarchy, which determined where they ate onboard and with whom. In addition, only a select few (captain, supercargo and chaplain) had the possibility to eat elsewhere, on another ship, and captains could use this privilege much more easily than supercargoes, while chaplains only rarely left the ship.

This web of divisions, as demonstrated by the gic-ships, has proven even more extensive and complex than the existing literature on commensality and daily life aboard ships has assumed. Often grounded in Goffman’s work on total institutions, research has deemed the (re)enforcement of hierarchies between especially officers and non-officers in every part of daily life crucial to preserve the functioning of the institution.⁸⁷ This article has uncovered these commensal rules and how they confirmed, enforced and reproduced professional hierarchies to a much greater, broader and more elaborate extent than hitherto suspected. From access to the cabin, over access to specific tables and seating arrangements to differences among messes, it has revealed a fine network of hierarchies underpinning this key part of daily life.

However, it also shows that deviations from these rules could and did occur, especially among officers. These deviations took many forms: from bottom-up initiatives by actors to signal discontent to top-down expressions of power to either fight personal conflicts or mete out disciplinary measures. In addition, they could serve as a means of defusing tensions and restoring on-board peace or of fostering social cohesion across different commensal units on different ships. Commensal rules were less immutable than both company directors and (maritime) historians have assumed. This observation fits with those strands of literature that resist the classification of ships as total institutions, as the ‘managers’ (officers) were dependent on the labour and skills of the ‘managed’ (sailors), inhibiting Goffman’s top-down enforcement of hierarchy. The very tension between top-down hierarchy and limited bottom-up dependency can help explain why the unique social context of the ship gave birth to an equally unique system of commensal hierarchy.

This system, built around the rigid professional hierarchy crucial for the ship’s functioning, exhibited a much higher degree of flexibility and provided especially high-ranking actors with much more agency. As to a certain extent the lives of everyone aboard depended on the labour of the managed, top-level officers had much more narrow margins for conflict resolution and enforcing discipline than in less spatially isolated and bottom-up dependent contexts. In sharp contrast to similar situations on dry land, conflicts, whether due to insubordination or perceived slights in regard to status, could not be allowed to fester. Commensal rules and especially the possibility to deviate from them, made it possible to defuse tensions, vent frustrations or enforce discipline without resorting to violence or corporeal punishment that could acutely endanger the fragile balance of the shipbound community, and by extension the lives of all those on board.

If the commensal structure could be bent for a brief while, bringing tensions to a controlled simmer, order was generally soon re-established and reaffirmed, leaving the hierarchy, social order, functioning and survival of the ship unthreatened and potentially even strengthened. Rather than being opposites, commensal rules and transgressions of these rules played complementary roles in maintaining the social integrity of the ship. While here uncovered in the specific context of the gic-ships, this article calls for a reappraisal of deviations as a functional element of commensal rules in social settings throughout history, both at sea and on land.