Sizes and shapes of casks and barrels of the Royal Navy

[Long9Ron]

For those that are interested.....

 

After doing some more research, I have found out some more information on the size of the casks or barrels that were used to transport goods on ships.

 

In the “Arming and Fitting of English Ships of War 1699 – 1815” by Brian Lavery there is a mention of the following:

Methods of Stowage – Most provisions, with the notable exception of bread, were kept in casks of various sizes. The biggest, known as leaguers, were 4ft 6in long, and had a maximum diameter of 3ft. Their capacity was 150 gallons each

and they were used exclusively to hold water, in the lowest tier of the larger ships. Butts, containing 108 gallons, also seem to have common on large ships, at all levels of the hold.

 

I have searched the web and found the following:

Tun                                      = 208 to 256 gallons

Pipe or Butt                        = 105 to 126 gallons

Puncheon or Tertian         = 70 to 85 gallons

Hogshead                           = 52.5 to 63 gallons

Tierce                                 = 35 to 42 gallons

Barrel                                  = 26.25 to 31.25 gallons

Rundlet                              = 15 to 18 gallons

There was no mention of the Leaguer which = 150 gallons.

 

I see it as somewhere in the range between a Tun and a Pipe or Butt.

 

There is a mention in the book by Robert White Stevens - Section Edition 1859 “On the Stowage of ships and their cargoes, freights, charter – parties &c” of which is a free download from Google E-books. In it mentions under Average Capacity in gallons & lbs. The following:

 

Tight Water Casks

Leager                  164   Gallons

Butt                       110   Gallons

Puncheon             72   Gallons

Hogshead             54   Gallons

Barrel                     36  Gallons

½ Hogshead         25   Gallons

Kilderkin               18   Gallons

Small Cask             12   Gallons

Ditto                         8   Gallons

Barricoe                10   Gallons

 

So, with all of this new information, this is what I’m thinking. The Tun was too large to have on board, so they used Leaguers. The Leaguers were the first to be loaded and then anything that was smaller was loaded on top of the Leaguers.

 

Interesting fact: Lord Nelson’s body was shipped home in a Leaguer. The same would be the case with any other high ranking officer of the Navy at that time.

 

See pictures below.

 

Well I think I have solved my first question on what the size of the barrels were at that time. My opinion is they were Leaguers measuring 4ft 6in long, and had a maximum diameter of 3ft. For the other barrel sizes that’s another mystery.

 

Ron

 

[keelhauled]

Cool post! thanks for the info.

So was it not unusual for high ranking navy officers to be shipped back in casks? (assuming that they were deceased that is)

I thought that Nelson was an exception.

[pollex]

Dear Modelling friends; I'm attaching a reply sent to me by Mr. Andrew Bains, Curator, HMS Victory

     regarding the sizes of different casks. I trust you'll find this info. usefull.

Dear Mr Pollex,

Thank you for your enquiry. The dimensions you require, given in the order diameter at the head,

diameter at the bilge, height are:

 

Barrel                   1' 9"      2' 1"       2’ 7”

Hogshead            1’ 11”     2’ 4”       3’ 0”

Puncheon            2’ 1”       2’ 4”       3’ 5”

 

All were circular in section.

 

I trust this answers your query.

Kind regards, Andrew Baines

 

Andrew Baines

Curator of HMS Victory

National Museum of the Royal Navy

Registered Charity 1126283-1

T: 023 9272 7565

[Geoff Matson]

Great information. Thanks for the research and post. It is information like yours that makes this sight so great.

[Long9Ron]

Pollex

 

Thanks for researching and posting the above information on the Victory barrels. I see that there was no mention of the Leaguer in the email. It sure would be nice to have all the dimensions of all of the barrels that were carried on board of the ships during that time period, but I think that would be impossible due to the fact that it depended upon where the ship was in the world when they took on supplies. I would assume that each country would have had their own barrel size standards for that time period.

 

Would it be possible to have your contact on the Victory measure the Leaguer that Nelson was shipped home in? The more information that can be gathered on this subject would help model ship builders re-produce at scale authentic looking cargo for their models.  

[trippwj]

There is a photo and brief description of the procedure here http://margaretmuirauthor.blogspot.com/search/label/leaguer

[AyathTheLoafer]

On 2/17/2013 at 1:57 AM, keelhauled said:

Cool post! thanks for the info.

So was it not unusual for high ranking navy officers to be shipped back in casks? (assuming that they were deceased that is)

I thought that Nelson was an exception.

 

Fun fact. When I was on a merchant container/bulk carrier in 1975/76, we picked up a deceased captain on the Canary Islands. He was kept in a bodybag in one of the freezer compartments on the way back to Denmark.

[Lieste]

One option for transporting dead home for internment was to boil the bones and carry those home - done to the dead nobles after Agincourt for example.

It would be harder to carry home a complete corpse, and burial at sea was more common than transport for other ranks.

[Roger Pellett]

On a less macabre note, the entire concept of tonnage comes from the word Tun.  Tonnage, as in contracts that read “Mr Smith agreed to build a vessel of 500tons, or news reports that read “The Betsy Ann of 350 tons arrived in port yesterday” is a measure of volume, not weight.

 

In the 1500’s The King of England’s revenue came from import duties and the major import was wine shipped in large barrels called Tuns.  King Henry VIII needed a simple method to compute taxes due on imports, so it was decided that ships would be rated by the number of Tuns that could be stowed aboard.  This process was later modified to use a standard divisor of 100 cu ft and sometimes 94 cu ft.  This concept of tonnage is still used today and various costs such as canal tolls, harbor fees, etc are based on it.

 

For merchant ships, this concept is more useful than displacement which is a measure of weight since, volume does not change but displacement is dependent on the density of the cargo carried.  On the other hand, specialized carriers of bulk cargo such as tankers or ore carriers are often described by their full load displacement.

 

 

So yes, at one time, Tuns were once used aboard ship.

 

Roger

[Chuck Seiler]

    A couple references to barrels I have found over the years

 

[allanyed]

Any ideas on what went into the various size barrels?   Food, water, gunpowder, et al went into barrels, but was there any rule as to which size (or more than one size) was commonly used for  given items?    

TIA
Allan

[Lieste]

Use with care - this is after the retirement of the Winchester Bushel, the Wine Gallon and Ale and Beer Gallons... All measure in imperial pints/gallons or pounds.
Naval Architect's and Shipbuilder's Pocketbook. Has overall length, bung/bilge diameter and net and tare weights.  Probably not exclusive, and there would have been two different ladings of fluids according to whether they were weighed by the wine or ale gallon (maybe different cask, maybe different gallons per cask, according to usage... comprehensive scales for earlier periods are not well presented, compared to Victorian documentation).

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ozYDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA500&dq=royal+navy+stores+net+cask+weight&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiv_4zg9LPyAhUhmVwKHXjxBJgQ6AEwBHoECAYQAg#v=onepage&q=royal navy stores net cask weight&f=true
 

[allanyed]

Thanks Lieste. The chart on that page is exactly what I was thinking about. 

Allan

[druxey]

Also, don't forget that powder barrels were made differently without metal hoops!

[Lieste]

So... the barrels raised on the Wine gallon, and those raised on the Imperial Gallon are very close to each other in size (though not rated capacity) - with less tha 0.1% variation in nominal volume.

252 Wine gallons* or 210 Imperial Gallons make the Tun. (An earlier standard was for 256, but 252 is divisible by 7, so it was defined as 252 during the late medieval period)

The equivalent for Ale gallons (1803) is around 4.5% larger in volume, and the Tun would be raised to 216 Ale Gallons if that was a cask size to be used. (Hogshead seems to be the largest brewers cask in common use though).
The Winchester gallon is intermediate and occupies a space between that of the Wine and Ale Gallon (231, 268, 282 cu inches (Imperial 277.2749)).

Not sure whether the casks were sized to their nominal cask size (e.g. smaller barrels for wine, middling for dry goods and large for beer ration), or if they were standardised to a greater extent (at least for naval provisioning), but the number of gallons contained were shifted (as was done in 1826 when the new gallon was implemented). I suspect there was a mix of policy and

[trippwj]

For those so inclined to delve into the older methods of gauging the contents, here are a few contemporary resources that you may (or may not) find of interest.

 

Hunt, William, and Richard Walker. 1687. The Gaugers Magazine: Wherein the Foundation of His Art Is Briefly Explain’d and Illustrated with Such Figures, as May Render the Whole Intelligible to a Mean Capacity. Printed by Mary Clark for the author.  https://books.google.com/books?id=y_FZAAAAcAAJ

Leadbetter, Charles. 1755. The Royal Gauger; Or, Gauging Made Perfectly Easy ... The Fourth Edition, Very Much Enlarged and Improved, Etc. E. Wicksteed.  https://books.google.com/books?id=zFJiAAAAcAAJ

Thomas Everard. 1721. Stereometry, or, the Art of Gauging Made Easie ... The Fifth Edition ... Corrected, Etc. https://books.google.com/books?id=y_FZAAAAcAAJ

Turner, Mr. 1761. The Young Gauger’s Best Instructor: Being a New and Complete System of Gauging in All Its Varieties, Both Theory and Practice. Exhibiting, I. Decimal Arithmetick. II. The Extraction of the Square and Cube Roots. III. The Calculations of All Kinds of Multipliers, Divisors, and Gauge-Points. IV. The Methods of Finding the Areas and Contents, of All Sorts of Superficies and Solids, in Ale, Beer, Wine, Cyder, Perry, Starch, Tallow, Soap, &c. V. Rules for Gauging, Inching, and Ullaging, of All Manner of Tuns, Tubs, Cisterns, Coolers, Coppers, Stills, and Casks. VI. The Methods of Computing the Excise of Any Number of Hogsheads, Barrels, and Bushels, of Ale, Beer, Cyder, Malt, &c. VII. The Description and Use of the Gauging-Rule and Gauging-Rod. VIII. The Scheme of a Division and Dimension-Book; and Specimens of Vouchers, and Abstracts. With Many Other Useful and Necessary Improvements, in a Much More Easy, Familiar, and Expeditious Method, Than Any Yet Published. The Whole Being So Calculated, as to Render It Not Only Serviceable to Experinced [Sic] Officers; But Likewise of the Greatest Use to All, Whose Business It Is to Instruct Others, Or Who Intend to Qualify Themselves for Employmets [Sic] in the Revenues of Excise. B. Law and Company in Avemary-Lane.https://books.google.com/books?id=rZbzZ8H7YhgC

 

Enjoy!

 

 

[modeller_masa]

I made some summary charts. I read articles and researched some Wikipedia documents, but I didn't read all the reference books, so the numbers and direction of editing may be biased.

 

Edited November 20, 2022 by modeller_masa

[bruce d]

40 minutes ago, modeller_masa said:

I made some summary charts. I read articles and researched some Wikipedia documents, but I didn't read all the reference books, so the numbers and direction of editing may be biased.

Thank you., that is helpful.

I have been casually trying to find out the rules for making barrels etc. during the Napoleonic era and so far have failed. The simplest question is ... how many staves for each size barrel/cask? Were there rules or only suggestions?  Did different uses, such as wine or grain, have specified numbers of staves or any other distinguishing feature like those of the powder casks?

[pollex]

     The trade or skill of making wooden casks is known as Cooperage.  Each larger British

naval ship in the 17th and 18th century would have a cooper on board, perhaps also

a cooper's mate (helper, trainee) or two.  He would be "knocking down" (dismantling)

casks which had been emptied of it's contents ( eg. rum, spirits or water) keeping all the

staves and hoops, as there would not be any room on board for empty casks.  If a vessel

had to stop during the voyage to "water" , he would have to get ready as many water casks as required, to be taken ashore in the longboat to be filled.  Coopers usually did not stand a watch, and worked only during the day.  I'm using the term "cask" for all vessels, as a barrel was a specific size of cask, like a hogshead or puncheon.  Each navy had different sizes of casks, the French or American navies not being the same as the British navy.  Most of  the older measurements were made with the "American" gallon  (3.87 litres) as the Imperial gallon (4.54 litres) was a later unit of measure after 1850's

      The width and thickness of a stave depended on the circumference of the cask and the enclosed volume and weight of the contents.        pollex, Calgary

 

 

 

Edited November 26, 2022 by pollex

[trippwj]

On 11/20/2022 at 2:54 PM, bruce d said:

Thank you., that is helpful.

I have been casually trying to find out the rules for making barrels etc. during the Napoleonic era and so far have failed. The simplest question is ... how many staves for each size barrel/cask? Were there rules or only suggestions?  Did different uses, such as wine or grain, have specified numbers of staves or any other distinguishing feature like those of the powder casks?

I had the opportunity to chat with the cooper at the Mystic Seaport museum (approx. 1840ish time period). He indicated that there was no fixed number as it depended on the cooper. If the staves were carved a bit wider then fewer were needed. A bit narrower than a few more. The goal was to make the staves as uniform as possible for a given cask. In fact, when the casks were shipped dis-assembled the staves were each given a letter to identify the cask and a roman numeral to identify the location on the cask The staves were not interchangeable if you wanted it liquid-tight.

 

Bet that didn't help your research any!

 

Good luck!

[bruce d]

39 minutes ago, trippwj said:

Bet that didn't help your research any!

Thanks Wayne, every little bit helps. By co-incidence yesterday I found the flat statement that 'all barrels have 33 staves' from an otherwise credible source. Considering the number of uses for barrels, casks, kegs etc I expect the Admiralty had rules but what about the rest of the county?

I will be contacting the Coopers Guild in the new year, will hopefully have something to report. 

[trippwj]

2 minutes ago, bruce d said:

Considering the number of uses for barrels, casks, kegs etc I expect the Admiralty had rules but what about the rest of the county?

Indeed, they might. THe challenge is that terminology, in this case, matters. A "Barrel" is a specific size of a cask. A cask could range from fairly small to fairly large, and there were names for different size casks such as "tun" "Firkin" "butt" etc. The following tables were shamelessly copied from the USS Constitution Museum website at https://ussconstitutionmuseum.org/2016/03/10/roll-out-the-barrel/

 

 

 

 

The number of staves varied by the diameter of the cask and were not flat on each edge but curved to accomodate the expanded diameter at the middle with narrower tops & bottoms. Since they were hand carved there was quite a bit of variability hence each cask of a given volume might have the same maximum diameter yet a varying number of staves. I believe he said that the standard whiskey barrel had around 33 staves of varying width. Larger casks (such as a tun of about 260 US gallons) had up to 100 staves.

 

So, what do you want to put in the cask - that factors into the size?

[trippwj]

This may be of some use - particularly the references.

 

Twede, Diana, ‘The Cask Age: The Technology and History of Wooden Barrels’, Packaging Technology and Science, 18.5 (2005), 253–64

https://www.academia.edu/57917150/The_cask_age_the_technology_and_history_of_wooden_barrels

[bruce d]

All roads so far lead back to the standardised sizes you have posted, plus other equally exacting tables from different countries, but go no further in terms of visual id or numbers of staves (although numbers of hoops are sometimes dictated).

It is a petty pursuit but I would like to be able to have period-approprite casks/barrels in something I am planning.

 

 

[bruce d]

7 minutes ago, trippwj said:

This may be of some use - particularly the references.

 

Twede, Diana, ‘The Cask Age: The Technology and History of Wooden Barrels’, Packaging Technology and Science, 18.5 (2005), 253–64

https://www.academia.edu/57917150/The_cask_age_the_technology_and_history_of_wooden_barrels

We cross-posted. Yes, many thanks, that looks useful. Annoyingly, I had searched academia and didn't see this paper!

[Mark P]

Good Evening Bruce;

 

One small point to note is that there does not appear to have been a standard stave width, with the cooper making a stave as wide as each piece of wood would allow. I have seen old barrels, and frequently the staves vary in width quite noticeably.

 

All the best,

 

Mark 

[dafi]

For a long time I have been looking for exact information on the sizes and shapes of Royal Navy barrels from around 1800.

 

For the first time, I was able to roughly extract the dimensions of the big water casks directly from a contemporary source:
a Leaguer for approx. 150 gallons of water, 4.5 feet long and 3 feet in diameter, easily measured by the scale underneath the keel.

 

To what extent were these barrel sizes standardized, what sizes were exactely used for what purpose and what were the special shapes? Are there any contemporary sources?

 

As my 34 ft launch is about the same size, I could not resist a test.

And it really fits surprisingly well 🙂

 

 

But as always: questions upon questions ...

 

XXXDAn

 

Edited July 3 by dafi

[Keith Black]

 

[druxey]

Everything was standardised!  The Fully Framed Model lists and shows these (page 211): Leaguer 4' 6" x 2' 9", puncheon 3' 6" x 2' 8" and hogshead 3' 1" x 2' 4". Construction was also standard. Powder barrels had withy rather than iron hoops, for obvious reasons!

[dafi]

Thank you Keith, I always thought I remember all discussiond here, this one slipped my mind. Thank you for redirecting me there.

 

And druxey as always extra thanks, as this is the exact answer I was looking for. And as always the answer is offen nearer than one thinks, in this case exactely 153 cm to the right, seen from the from the center of my working focus up to its place in the book shelf (I measured). Should have grabbed TFFM earlier 🙂

 

Funny enough, if one resaerches for the leaguer, there are popping up so many measures and not one is equal to the other, most of them much more giving spans of mesures or volume than an exacte size. Anyway the standardization was an important factor, otherwise there would have been chaos in the hold ...

 

XXXDAn

Edited July 3 by dafi