8th Week!

Today is Monday of 8th Week.

Yesterday we went to the historic dockyard at Portsmouth. Here is Oxford, it's easy to forget the England is an island (although we recently discovered that there is a canal behind our flat, so we are alway about 100 yards from several boats. Nevertheless, it is easy to forget).

After a two-hour busride, our first priority was lunch and coffee. Once we had put away desire for food and drink (can you tell I'm reading The Iliad?) we toured the HMS Victory, the ship upon which Admiral Lord Nelson was shot and killed in the Battle of Trafalgar. I once saw an actual size replica of one of Columbus's ships and was surprised by how small it was. The Victory was enormous, but each deck was only about 5'10" high, so I had to crouch down a lot. The reason for this is that the cannons are so heavy that if the decks were taller, the ship would become top-heavy and keel over. Also, the average sailor was short enough that this wouldn't be a problem. Nelson himself was a rather small man.

The conditions aboard ship would have been apalling. The crew of the ship was upwards of 800. The sailors were issued hard biscuits, but they would get wet and become full of maggots and weevils, so the sailors would wait until after dark to eat them so they couldn't see what they were eating. The meat was kept in barrels, and the cook used the oldest barrels first, so the first meat came out of barrles that were several decades old. Some of the meat would be served after 2 years in a barrel. Animals were occasionally kept for fresh meat, and the manger was located on the deck where the sailors lived. The galley was plagued with rats, so the Victory always employed a ratcatcher. This was a lucrative position as the rats could be sold to the sailors as fresh meat.

Lord Nelson was shot by a sniper during the Battle of Trafalgar. He was taken below deck where he died. His last request was , "Not over the side." Nelson was to receive a hero's burial in London. In order to preserve his body, Nelson was placed in the largest barrel aboard the ship, and the barrel was filled with Brandy. Nelson's body arrived in London perfectly preserved, and legend has it that the sailors then drank the brandy.

At the Mary Rose museum, we learned about naval battle during the reign of Henry VIII. The Mary Rose was built in the early 1500s and sank 1545. It was raised from a bed of silt in 1982. It's interesting that while it was being raised, the scaffolding collapsed. The 500 year old ship was not damaged, but the modern scaffolding was. So much for progress.

Friday night we saw a performance of Gildert and Sullivan's "Yeomen of the Guard" performed by the Oxford University Gilbert and Sullivan Society. The operetta was, I think, very good. The perfprmance, however, was not. It felt like a high school production where one or two of the students have classically trained voices. Only one song sticks in my head because it was the only one where I could make out a melody.

This week I have two tutorials. For my Greek Tragedy tute, I'm comparing Achilles and Hector in The Iliad, and for Gothic, I'm reading Dracula and comparing it with several of the film versions.

Saturday we go to Cambridge.