Alcohol, Drugs and Smoking in Seafaring

It is, of course, a well-known fact that songs, shanties and novels concerning the lives of seamen contain many references to alcohol (Hitz [21]; Nolan [34]; Schadewaldt [37]; Wenzel [46]; Wodarg [50]). Alcohol has long been connected with life at sea, and the reason for this view is historical. Intemperance among seafarers in past centuries had many causes: the adverse social conditions of seafaring, the extremely bad living conditions on the ships of the day, the cold temperatures to be endured, the scarcity of good potable water and the lack of non-alcoholic beverages as well as, in some cases, the character of the crew members selected. In the reports of the British Admiralty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries complaints are voiced about the increasing intemperance on ships (Schadewaldt [37]), and in 1856 Fonssagrives, a French specialist in nautical medicine, wrote that alcoholism is the leprosy of seamen [13].