How Many Monkeys Can It Hold?

“Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he could go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it suited him; nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit up as late as he pleased; he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make life precious that boy had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg.”  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain.

This was how Twain introduced Huck Finn to the world, in chapter six of Tom Sawyer.  Even with such a prodigious head start, Huck still beat out Tom as the most memorable of Twain’s characters.  I can still remember the first time I read that paragraph—I was immediately filled with a sense of wonder.  Specifically, I wondered just what the hell was a hogshead.  I probably wasn’t the only one to wonder, because eight years later, when Twain gave Huck his own book, whenever he mentioned Huck’s temporary housing, he called it a ‘sugar hogshead’, furnishing a small clue.

Consulting the family’s venerable 1957 set of World Book Encyclopedias—an early analog version of Google—I learned that a hogshead was a barrel, a big barrel.  No, it had nothing to do with hogs, pigs, or even transporting bacon.  The term comes from the 15th century English term 'hogges hede', a large 63-gallon wooden cask, two and a half feet wide and four feet tall, more than big enough for a boy to sleep in, and perfect is incorrect:  they are casks.  A barrel is a specific size of a cask.  (All barrels are casks, but not all casks are barrels.)

Centuries ago, barrel makers (more properly called coopers) discovered that the best barrels were made from white oak obtained from 75-year-old trees, whose sawn timber was left to age for a minimum of six months.  After a master cooper quarter sawed the staves and bound them together with iron rings, the barrels had to age for several more months while the fibers making up the white oak staves slowly dried, and the tannins in the wood leached out.  Master coopers created watertight casks, while ‘slack coopers’ crafted the less demanding casks to transport dry goods.

Among the many reasons the Spanish Armada failed to defeat the English in 1587 was the raid by Sir Francis Drake on the seaport town of Cadiz the year before.  Besides looting and sacking the town, Drake set fire to some 1700 tons of barrel staves that were drying in preparation to make barrels to store food and water for the invasion fleet.  When the Spanish Armada sailed up the English Channel to attack England in 1588, the fleet’s food and water were improperly stored in green barrels which quickly contaminated their contents, poisoning the crew.  The crew of one ship, attempting to make landfall, found themselves too sick to maneuver their ship properly and simply ran it aground, ripping the bottom out.

Assuming that no pyromaniac pirates have been around, our seasoned barrel is ready for most uses, but bourbon distilleries learned that if the insides of the barrel was scorched with fire, it gave the aged whiskey a distinctive color and taste.  Across the Atlantic, the distillers of the best scotch learned that if the empty second-hand bourbon barrels were re-scorched, it produced superior scotch.  (Only one of the reasons that Laphroaig—my favorite scotch—tastes so good.)

Since barrels were so widely used for so many different commodities, it is not surprising that there was a wide and confusing variety of sizes of barrels and a guild was organized to regulate the training and pay of the coopers.  What is surprising is that the guild is still operating.  Among the many other guild halls in London, you can find the Worshipful Company of Coopers, which received its royal charter in 1501.  

Just an abbreviated list of the various sizes of wooden casks is confusing, but there is at least a little order to them:  There are 8 pints in a gallon, 4.5 gallons in a pin, 2 pins in a firkin, 2 firkins in a kilderkin, 2 kilderkins in a barrel, 1.5 barrels in a hogshead, 2 hogsheads in a butt, and finally 2 butts in a tun.  If someone says they drank a butt load, they consumed 108 gallons.  If they drank a tun, they imbibed 252 gallons.  The tun is a measurement of volume, not weight, though by a strange coincidence, a tun of water weighs a ton.

What prompted me to think about all of this was a discussion in an economics class about the global oil market.  When someone asked how many gallons of crude were in a barrel, the prompt—and incorrect—answer was 55 gallons.  I volunteered that 55 gallons was the capacity of a modern drum, and that oil barrels were 42 gallons.  No one believed me, even after I explained that when I grew up in West Texas, we learned arithmetic in elementary schools by calculating oil depletions allowances.  I didn’t tell them that as true native-born Texans; The Doc and I actually own a whopping 1/214th of an aging oil well.  The well currently pays an annual royalty not quite sufficiently large enough to buy a single breakfast burrito.  

So how did the international standard for a barrel of oil come to be the somewhat arbitrary measurement of 42 gallons?

It started in America with Edwin L. Drake’s 1859 oil discovery at Titusville, Pennsylvania.  This was the first commercial oil well, setting off a drilling frenzy that today we would refer to as an ‘oil boom’.  For years, the oil was shipped in anything available, a confusing variety of hogshead, barrels, tierces, kilderkins, empty whiskey barrels and just about anything else you could fill and then hammer a plug into the bung hole.  Eventually, people noticed that the 42-gallon tierce, previously commonly used to transport fish, when full of crude oil weighed almost exactly 300 pounds—about as big a container as could be handled by one experienced worker.  Just as important, 20 of the wooden tierces would completely fill a standard railroad flat car.  

Within a few years, the tierce had become the standard container for oil transport.  So many oak barrels were needed that Standard Oil maintained its own oak forests to insure a steady supply of barrels, manufacturing so many that they were able to drop the production cost of a new barrel down to only $1.50.  The wooden barrels could be tipped over by a single man, then using the extended middle of barrel, could be rolled into place, before being righted.  For years after the steel barrels replaced the wooden variety in 1902, the steel barrel retained the traditional shape.  Though oil is no longer shipped in these containers, it is still sold in 42 gallon lots.

Personally, I find it a little difficult to visualize how much a barrel or a hogshead of something is, but I know a trick to help.  A standard American bathtub holds exactly 42 gallons, or one barrel.  It turns out that “a barrel of bathtub gin” is redundant…sort of.