As bread is one of the principal articles of diet, the utmost care should be taken in preserving it, and great advantage would arise from stowing it in casks that are water tight, instead of keeping it in bags, or letting it lie loose in the bread room. Captain Cook, by this method, and by giving it a cast in the oven in the course of the voyage, preserved his biscuit found in every respect for more than three years. But the greatest improvement in this article of diet would be to have, in the form of flour, a greater proportion of what is now allowed in bread. The flour might be made into puddings, and seems, in this form, to be more nutritious and antiscorbutic than biscuit which has undergone a strong force of fire. This sort of mess would be still more proper and agreeable now that melasses is a stated article of diet. Flour, by being well pressed and rammed, will keep as long as biscuit, and it can be stowed in one fifth part of the space; it will, therefore, cost much less in freight than the same quantity of it in that form, and it may be baked abroad if necessary[69]. Malt, by being well rammed, may also be preserved for a great length of time. Of all the former articles of sea victualling, there was none more abused than oatmeal. The quantity allowed to each man was twice as much as he could consume, and the overplus went to the purser’s profits, or was wasted by being given to the hogs, or even wantonly thrown overboard. Melasses have, with great advantage, been substituted for part of it, in the proportion of eleven pounds for two gallons of oatmeal. The first trial of melasses was in the[70] Foudroyant, and it answered so well, that, in a cruise under Admiral Geary in 1780, this was the only ship free from the scurvy, and out of two thousand four hundred men that were landed at the hospital with this disease, there were none from this ship. It appears to be so similar in its nature and effects to essence of malt, that it seems hardly worth while for Government to be at the expence of providing the latter.