Cruising food today sure is lush compared to the grub journalist Robert Carter and three friends took with them in the summer of 1858 when they chartered a thirty-three foot sloop named Helen for a recreational cruise from Provincetown, Massachusetts,
to Bar Harbor, Maine. As described in Carter’s Coast of New England, their provisions were very simple, basic necessities
really: salt pork, crackers and biscuit, which they called hard tack, plus ale and whiskey. They talk about coffee; claret; lemons to add to the whiskey; potatoes and onions and they must have taken flour because they mention flapjacks once in a while and I bet they stowed a cask of corned beef, too, though it isn’t mentioned.

Mostly they ate fish. Fishing was both sport and necessity and they had fish for breakfast, dinner, and supper. They ate whatever they caught that day–cod, haddock, pollock, bluefish, flounder, simply prepared usually boiled or broiled or fried as allowed by the Helen’s. They bought lobsters directly from the lobstermen, and acquired eggs, milk, butter and “soft tack” or loaf bread at various stops ashore.

Their cook was Capt. Widgin whom they nicknamed The Pilot, and once while catching cod near Harpswell, Maine, the gents had to
nerve to ask The Pilot if he knew how to made a chowder to which he said he had constructed forty-thousand chowders, an exaggeration, because he was only 60 years old and would’ve had to make two a day for all of those sixty years.

Carter described it: “He went to work, and as we had salt pork, potatoes, onions on board, and plenty of “hardtack,” or crackers, in
less than an hour we were sitting in front of as fine a chowder as one could wish to eat. Our morning sport had given us good appetites, and the chowder rapidly vanished, much to the delight of the Pilot, who was not a little proud of his culinary skill.”

Sandy Oliver, Food Historian, Author, MF&L columnist: The Way Things Were