Daily Inspiration Quote by William Bligh

Even in a single line, Bligh manages to make scarcity sound like a moral indictment. The complaint is practical on its face - beef is hard to get, what you can get is lousy, and it costs "nearly sixpence farthing per pound" - but the precision is the point. That finicky accounting doesn’t merely inform; it establishes credibility, the clipped authority of a man trained to measure rations, distances, wind, and discipline. Numbers become rhetoric.

Bligh’s intent is administrative and self-exculpatory. Officers in imperial systems wrote to be read by superiors, and a sentence like this is a quiet argument: conditions are bad because supply is bad, not because leadership is incompetent. The subtext is that order is being tested by logistics. If meat is scarce and overpriced, sailors grumble, morale thins, and the fragile hierarchy aboard ship or in a remote posting starts to look less like divine right and more like an arrangement contingent on dinner.

The word choices sharpen the class edge. "Exceedingly poor" is not gourmet snobbery; it’s an anxiety about standards collapsing at the frontier. In the late 18th-century British military world, provisioning wasn’t background detail - it was strategy, health, and control. Bligh, remembered through the prism of the Bounty mutiny, often appears as a caricature of harsh command. Here he sounds less like a tyrant than a manager in a failing supply chain, documenting the mundane pressures that can turn discipline into revolt.