I remember a captain, whose ship had been often exposed to these alternations, amusing his people very much on entering the tropics, by directing them to roll up all their blue clothes, worsted stockings, and so on, in neat bundles, each having the name and number of the person it belonged to written on a wooden tally, and fastened to it.  These being all collected, and packed carefully in well-dried, watertight casks, were stowed away in the hold, and forgotten, till the pinching blasts off Cape Horn made the unpacking of the casks a scene of as great joy as ever attended the opening of a box of finery at a boarding-school gala.

In warm climates, the stock of a man-of-war sailor consists of four duck frocks, which are more like shirts than anything else, with sundry strings, and touches of blue binding about the breast and collar, which is generally lined with blue, and allowed to fall over the shoulders.  It is totally contrary to Jack’s habits to have anything tight about his throat; and one of the chief causes of his invincible estrangement from the royal marine corps is their stiff-necked custom of wearing polished leather stocks.  I hardly suppose there could be found any motive strong enough to induce a genuine sailor to buckle a permanent collar round his neck with any tolerable grace; the alternative of the yard-arm would almost be preferable!  His delight is to place a black or coloured silk handkerchief lightly over his neck, and to confine its ends across his breast by means of one of the small bones or vertebrae of a shark, which forms a neat, white, perforated cylinder.  Some very prime dandies of the mizen-top fold a part of their handkerchief over the shoulders and back; but it requires the aid of a handsome person, and a good deal of modest assurance, to make this tolerable.

They must also provide themselves with four pairs of duck trousers, a straw hat for fine weather, and a canvas or beaver one for squalls, though this need not be insisted on.  Shoes are not much used, except by those whose work lies aloft; and prudent hands generally keep a blue jacket by them, in case of rain or night-work.  It is not a bad rule to muster the crew occasionally with blue jackets, even in hot weather, to see that such things are really in existence.  Each man has, of course, a bed, a pillow, and two blankets; sheets are never heard of.  He has also two hammocks, one of which is slung and in use, the other scrubbed, dry, and stowed away, ready to be exchanged for the dirty one.  The hammocks, at the time I first went to sea (1802), were made of a coarse brown stuff, which it was difficult, if not impossible, to make white by any amount of scrubbing; and, what was worse, so thick that it was by no means easily dried.  Now-a-days, they are generally made either of canvas, or of a twilled sacking, and, when spread out, measure 4-1/2 feet by 3-1/2; but when lashed up, and ready for stowing away in the netting, they form long sacks, about as big as a man’s body, but not tapering to the ends.