Leather Canteen

I just got back from a California trip. I visited several missions. The Mission in San Diego had a leather canteen. It looked like a round circle folded in half- so a half moon shape and one corner was formed into a spout with a cork stopper. I asked the curator who thought it might be a Spanish military design. I saw a similar canteen at the Sonoma Mission. Any ideas?

I know leather canteens are, and have been, in use for a long time. But, even if lined with tar, pitch, or whatever, they seem highly prone to harboring bacteria, IMHO. Very unsanitary. On some TV travel documentary I saw about India they showed goats milk being stored in, and dispensed from, leather containers. These were used over and over without cleaning. Yuk :barf: . Yet, somehow, humanity continues to thrive, even with that lack of hygiene. I would go for a leather covered glass container if you want the look of leather.

I have a couple of reenactment friends who both made hard leather canteens and used beeswax to coat the inside. They don't leave any water in them in between reenactments but have used them for years with no problem. I always thought they looked pretty classy. They used about 9-oz. leather in their construction.

I also learned early on to empty out my tin canteen and leave it uncorked in between reenactments or it would really give a nasty taste to the water. Mine is lined with brewer's pitch and even at the best of times it has a pitchy taste by the end of the day. For best results, I try to empty it out at the end of the day and refill it in the morning.

Twisted_1in66 :thumbsup:
Dan

I don't know about this one, but jack ware was common. I made a half gallon one that did well. The leather is waxed inside and out very heavily. The one problem I had is its fragile. I had the knot on mine come untied and it suddenly slipped off on the trail. It hit the ground and busted. Big crack right down by a seam.
I always use a water pill in my canteens. The roughness may give more place for bugs to grow then a smooth surface of a metal canteen.
They didn't know too much about germs back then, but I would think it was no worse water barrels at sea. :idunno:
I remember my gunna din " it was watergreen and crawling and it stunk but of all the drinks I drunk I'm gratefulness for the one I got from gunga din"

Jackware was relatively common in the 17th c., but not so much after the first quarter of the 18th c. properly made jackware is not normally fragile. If it is, it was likely over heated in the process used to make it.

Wick Ellerbe said:

Properly made jackware is not normally fragile. If it is, it was likely over heated in the process used to make it.

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x2

I dropped my full (~32 oz) jackware canteen from 4 feet onto the blacktop and all I found were a couple of minor scratches and small dents. Sounds like yours was overheated which can result in the cooked leather crumbling. I don't heat my jackware above 180-200F, which is about the melting point of beeswax.

Could well be it was my first attempt.

Over-heating your wax is another easy way to cook your leather.

A nice tutorial on making a jackware canteen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-w9pyxyZF8

Spence

Fwiw, The Military Police Museum, then at Ft McClellan AL, had one leather canteen that has a ironstone bottle inside, so my guess is that by the time that that canteen was made that either they had an inkling of the "germ problem" OR that the water in jack-ware had a really bad taste.
(The canteen is undated, though I suspect post-War of 1812.)

yours, satx

satx78247 said:

...had an inkling of the "germ problem" OR that the water in jack-ware had a really bad taste.

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No and no.
The germ theory of disease wasn't really widely accepted until the late 1800's.

Water out of a jackware canteen tastes better than water from a wooden stave or gourd canteen and rivals/exceeds the taste of water from a metal canteen.

Ever heard of LISTER, PASTEUR, MORTON or any of the other "germ guys" & when they were active as scientists/physicians??
(Germs were certainly well-understood by the Crimean War & TWBTS.)

I'd bet that water out of an ironstone liner tastes better than out of a canteen of leather, wood, tin or copper, especially if it's not freshly filled.

yours, satx

satx78247 said:

Ever heard of LISTER, PASTEUR, MORTON or any of the other "germ guys" & when they were active as scientists/physicians??
(Germs were certainly well-understood by the Crimean War & TWBTS.)

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Perhaps you should re-check your sources...
Pasteur and Lister were late 1800's and even then, the general medical community was slow to accept that bacteria were causative agents of disease. The general population at the time was essentially completely ignorant of the concept and indeed still appears to be.

If you had said the leather helped protect the ironstone from breakage, I would have agreed with you. However you chose to wander far afield and speculate without supporting evidence.

Actually Pasteur was the Dean of Sciences at the University of Strasbourg in 1848 & had been working in "germ theory" since about 1842-43.

Joseph Lister was treating infected wounds & disinfecting surgical instruments with carbolic acid & boiling water by 1850.

Additionally, Jean Baptiste Duma (Pasteur was his protégée) was working with microbes & treating certain diseases with various disinfectants as early as 1830, building on the previous work with "tiny creatures" by Redi & Spallanhzani.
(The term "microbe" hadn't yet been coined in Redi & Spallanhzani's day.)

Further, Dr. Francesco Redi & Lazzaro Spallanhzani were experimenting with cures to microbe causation of various ailments in 1765 at the Ecole Sorbonne & at the Ecole Rouen.

So you're only about 50-100 years "off" in your comments.

I will grant you that many less qualified "physicians" were ignoring what better educated & more intelligent physicians & surgeons were doing a half-century or more than a century earlier.
(Many of the advances in "germ theory" were discovered "by observation" by barber-surgeons & (oddly by) veterinarians.)
Surgery was considered to be a separate field of scientific endeavor until about 1880-1900.
Note: Even on 2017, Senior Members of The Royal College of Surgery prefer being addressed as "Mister _______", rather than "Doctor ______".
(That's a bit of "reverse snobbery".)

Note: IF you're interested in a fascinating & quite readable (for laymen, like me) book (from 1960) on the early days of "modern" medicine & surgery, may I suggest that you borrow the (very lightly fictionalized & "somewhat simplified" for us non-physicians) book THE TRIUMPH OF SURGERY by Jurgen Thorwald, MD & PhD of The Poly-Technic University of Berlin's College of Medicine??
(The German version of Thorwald's book is the only book, that I can remember reading, that has a longer combined set of footnotes & bibliography than the "main body" of the book is.)

Moreover, I'm sure that you're correct that the leather cushions the ironstone liner of the canteen at USAMPM & protects the liner from breakage.

yours, satx

I like that boys stuff, it was in fact a version of his canteen I made, only in a 1/2 gallon instead of a qt. As Black hand said I may have got it too hot

I would think the big draw back to leather covered stone ware would be the weight. Jack is a little heavier then tin but a 1 at pottery 'can' has to weigh at least as much as the water it holds.

Happy Birthday, Tenngun!! Now you have hit the big "Six UH - Oh." :haha:

To all,

Large leather drinking Jacks were used in "Low Taverns" and even some "High Taverns" beyond the first quarter of the 18th century for ale/beer. They were far cheaper and less likely to be damaged when dropped by drunk customers than the more expensive earthen ware pottery mugs and even more expensive pewter chargers/mugs. (Rum and Whiskey or other drinks higher in alcohol content were served in wood, horn or earthen ware containers in the Low Taverns.)

American glass factories were founded first in New York in 1732 and then in South Jersey by Caspar Wistar in 1739. (Caspar was the Philadelphia based merchant who smuggled complete custom flintlock rifles, locks and barrels and other high end goods in the luggage of German immigrants.)

I don't know how early canteens made from glass bottles wrapped in leather or wicker showed up, though they were mentioned during the AWI.

Gus

Jackware is the specific term, I did a thread on a DIY piece I made some time ago with tooling leather and beeswax.

In short I don't carry it, gave it away. Personally I prefer guard canteens for water carrying.

The others have brought up good information.

And others were working on the concept far earlier.

Doesn't change the fact that the theory was not accepted until the late 1800's and the general population still had little to no idea about bacteria & viruses. Therefore, speculating the use of ironstone as a way to prevent water-borne bacterial diseases is still implausible for people who had no idea about bacteria & viruses as causative agents of disease.

Regardless, the use of ironstone would not have prevented disease, as the microbes were in the water sources...

From everything I've ever read on jack ware it was pretty much replaced by cheaper tin ware soon after about the first quarter of the 18th c. Some would have existed, but it was just not commonly used or even commonly made beyond that time. Tin ware of that time was much more rugged than what you normally find today. I made a circular canteen of 10oz leather and lined it inside with beeswax. The water was not at all distasteful, but I prefer a wood canteen over most.