The man in charge of “hotel services” on one of today’s cruise ships is called the “purser. The title also was used in the old navies for the man responsible for keeping the ship supplied with food and other consumable materials, and for safeguarding and dispensing petty cash (and, generally at a cruise’s end, pay). Unlike all the other officers, the purser’s pay was a percentage of the value of all the goods and monies that passed through his administration.
One of the major sources for him was the set daily allowance of money provided for feeding the crew. That money was credited to his account for each and every man so long as the sailor’s name was on the muster roll. Any monies a purser did not have to use to feed the men was his, for records did not exist for someone to check up on him. The U.S. Navy employed this same system, inherited from the British, when it first was organized in 1797, but in little more than a decade pursers not only were placed on regular salaries but were required to post bonds to encourage their proper performance of duty.
Another major source of income of early naval pursers was in the matter of providing clothing and sundries for the crew. The supplies were provided by Navy contract, and each purser was to debit a man’s pay account for everything he acquired. Since accounts were not settled until the end of a cruise—anywhere from a year to three years later—most sailors had no precise idea of what they had put on the tab, and the usurious purser could have a field day.
The clothing provided, in particular, was the source of much grudging humor, for it invariably was one size fits all and of uncertain quality. As a result, sailors took a word from their roots and called it all “slops,” a word from the farm for the scraps fed to hogs. It did not take long for the term to be extended to describing a man clad in these ill-fitting clothes: he was sloppy, a far cry from the stereotype of the jauntily decked-out tar who swaggered ashore to impress the ladies.
