The feeding of the men in the days of the Great War is generally considered to have been villainous. It was one of the causes of the Mutiny; but there is some reason to believe that it was not invariably bad. Rodney’s fleet is said to have been excellently provisioned, and much of what has been written about “thieving pursers” in the past is now known to be mythical. It was a classical legend that the purser stole and swindled with bad food. He might do so, and many did. But all did not, either from honesty or because they did not get the chance. Under Nelson or Rodney an unscrupulous purser stood to have a very bad time indeed, and there were others very keenly alive to the fact that good feeding and efficiency went hand in hand. The bad food at the time of the mutinies seem to have been a feature of that particular time, and even so due rather to mismanagement than much else. For the rest, the real culprits were economists on shore, who had no connection whatever with the Fleet, and were merely interested in husbanding the financial resources of the country. The provisions as made were almost uniformly good, and the stories of unscrupulous contractors who, in league with the pursers, foisted inferior food on the Fleet, may mostly be dismissed. Such cases occurred now and again, but comparatively rarely. “Rogues in authority” were mainly mythical. There are yarns by the score. There are corresponding yarns to-day, quite as plentiful, which the careless historian of the future will no doubt swallow. For example, at the present day it is an article of faith with every bluejacket that the first lieutenant pockets odd sixpences out of the canteen, and nothing ever can or ever will remove the impression. It is absolutely absurd; but within the last ten years I have had it chapter and verse all about the peculation of 1s. 4d. by a first lieutenant whose private income ran well into five figures! It is a sea-legend so hoary that bluejackets honour it, no matter how ridiculously improbable. The purser of the days of the Great War was not perhaps entirely clean handed, but as Commander Robinson has pointed out,[71] even at the Spithead Mutiny, when the provision question was very much to the fore, the mutineers did not complain of the purser, but of the system and regulations. It was people on shore, not the man afloat, who, when it came to the point, mixed up the instrument with the handlers thereof.