Napoleon famously said an army marches on its stomach, but it has always been assumed that the British navy fought him on a disgusting diet of weevil-filled biscuits while the men's teeth dropped out from scurvy.
In fact, the food in the Royal Navy was rather good during the Napoleonic wars and a key factor in its success, according to historians at the University of Greenwich.
In consigning another myth to the dustbin of history, they hope to explore for the first time how the Royal Navy provided 140,000 men each year with hundreds of tonnes of meat, wheat, biscuits, flour and fruit - not to mention beer, rum and spirits - in far-flung locations during the longest and most complicated period of war in British history.
The work of the navy's victualling board and its suppliers was such a success that in the period of the Napoleonic wars the death rate from disease at sea fell from one in 42 men in the 1770s to one in 143 men by 1813.
Greenwich University - housed appropriately in the Old Royal Naval College - and the National Maritime museum have been granted nearly £200,000 by the Leverhulme Trust for a three-year programme of research into a mass of unseen documents.
Roger Knight, professor of naval history from the university's Greenwich Maritime Institute and author of this year's biography of Nelson, The Pursuit of Victory, said: "The mass feeding of men was an unqualified success for the Royal Navy, one of the reasons it triumphed over the navies of France and Spain."
From: Dean Livingston
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