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America's oldest commissioned naval warship still afloat, a three-masted wooden frigate named the USS Constitution, has inspired a fanciful tale or two in its 220 years of service, not least the claim that it was nicknamed Old Ironsides because its hull proved to be impervious to British cannonballs during the War of 1812. (A contemporary account confirms that crewmen shouted Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron! after one enemy shot bounced off a plank and fell into the water, but many more broke through the hull and inflicted damage, according to the same source.) Another cherished anecdote chronicles a six-month voyage during which, supposedly, the officers and crew of the USS Constitution single-handedly consumed more than 252,000 gallons of liquor (roughly three gallons a day per sailor), and not a single drop of water. Some of the details of the story vary from teller to teller, but the punchline is always the same. Here, for example, is a version imparted in a speech by then-U.S. Secretary of the Navy John H. Dalton in 1997: You are permitted to scoff. Despite their age-old reputation for heroic drinking, no seamen (or any other humans) could have guzzled that much booze and lived. Not counting the rum confiscated from British ships (an unknown quantity), the volume of liquor allegedly consumed in six months by the Constitution's crew of 475 totaled 252,700 gallons, or 2.94 gallons per individual per day. Assuming one remained conscious long enough to consume that much in a 24-hour period (which is doubtful), one would not likely survive the experience, much less repeat it day after day, week after week, for six months. The human body can only tolerate so much alcohol. To be sure, the Constitution would have sailed with a sizable store of rum on board. Like their British counterparts, American seamen received a daily ration of grog (rum, or sometimes whiskey, mixed with water), which had been settled upon in the mid-1700s as the most practical alternative to plain water (which tended to spoil on long voyages, mainly due to impurities in the wooden casks in which it was stored), beer and wine (also prone to spoilage), or straight rum (prone to causing behavioral issues). However, the grog wasn't dispensed willy-nilly, but rather in carefully measured increments prescribed by law, as the USS Constitution Museum explains: So, although the ship would have been stocked with rum, the amount would have been only a fraction of the 79,400 gallons claimed. An actual list of supplies loaded aboard the Constitution prior to a 1799 voyage, for example, included 37,500 gallons of water (similar to the amount claimed in the story), but only 3,000 gallons of rum. If that was insufficient to last the voyage, it wasn't unheard of (though it was unpopular) to cut grog rations as necessary. None of which is meant to suggest that the quantity of rum is the only credibility issue to be found in this story, which, in fact, is rife with historical inaccuracies. For one, given the multiplicity of variants in circulation, the story has been set in at least three different time periods. The version relayed by Dalton claims it took place during the War of 1812; another says the voyage commenced in 1798; yet another, relayed by National Park Service curator Harold Peterson and quoted in the book Oceanographic Ships, Fore and Aft, stipulates the date of departure as 23 August 1779: Here's why this version doesn't hold water: The USS Constitution couldn't have sailed in 1779 (during the Revolutionary War), given that they weren't finished building it until 1797. It could have sailed (and, in fact, did sail) in 1798, but its mission would not have been to destroy and harass English shipping, given that the U.S. and Britain were not at war. What we do know about the Constitution's 1798 voyage is summarized thus by the USS Constitution Museum: The Constitution saw plenty of action during the War of 1812 (1812-1815), of course, but the timeline of its actual exploits during that period doesn't match up with any of the events in the story. We therefore share the conclusion of the USS Constitution Museum (and others), to wit that the fabled rum-soaked voyage of the Constitution never took place. The story was fabricated, unquestionably, though we can't say with any certainty by whom, or precisely when. It does appear to be of fairly recent origin, however. The museum notes that the earliest variant discovered by its researchers is Peterson's version, (though they also note that Peterson was a careful scholar and unlikely to have invented the story himself). The earliest variant we've found besides Peterson's dates from 1959, having appeared in Volume 74, page 112 of The Reader's Digest that year.
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