---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- A peculiar practice of at least two European navies probably negated any improvements hygenic measures would have afforded: the Catholic concept of consecrated burial ground and the dictates of canonical law prescribed against French and Iberian mariners' disposing of their dead at sea. As late as 1780, French ships captured during Rodney's campaign in the West Indies were observed to be carrying mangled limbs and decomposing corpses in the ballast.
-Joe J. Simmons III,
Those Vulgar Tubes: External Sanitary Accommodations Aboard European Ships of the Fifteenth Through Seventeenth Centuries
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- "For thirty years," he said, "I've sailed the seas and seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views - amen, so be it."
-Robert Louis Stevenson
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
