"Into the Fog." This painting depicts the USS Constitution with a more recent rendering. Her gun stripe is white, as is her bowsprit, fighting tops, and lower mizzenmast. Further, she now has gun port shutters, and her lifeboats are no longer green and red, but painted white. In this painting she is portrayed as she sails through a growing fog during a mission. Her crew can be seen clambering up the ratlines and reefing the sails, while others work the lead line, calculating how many knots she is traveling. Three of her jolly boats hang from the davits, ready to be lowered should anything happen to the ship. The crew of a super frigate was immense, with the crew at one time consisting of 59 marines, 376 enlisted men, and 38 officers. This is easy to understand when one realizes the large number of men required for reefing a sail, regardless of those required on deck for maneuvering the yards according to the wind. The main topsail alone required 23 men to furl. This vast crew were required to live in close quarters for months, even years, at a time aboard a ship no more than 207 feet in length. Their diet largely consisted of salted pork, hard tack (more often than not full of worms and weevils), and cheese. Any food even remotely edible, no matter how foul, was served. When visiting shore, whether an inhabited island, or home, fresh fruits, vegetables and meat were taken aboard. When it had been months since touching some shore with vegetables, scurvy struck the crew, causing teeth to fall out, gums to swell, and men eventually died. Life aboard a sailing ship was by no means romantic as it is seen today. It required the nations toughest men.