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Health & Fitness

Slip Shod: The Truth about Early Navy Shoes

Pick up any modern book about the age of sail, and you’re likely to read that sailors never wore shoes on board ship.  As the reasoning goes, the men had much better traction on a wet deck and aloft in the rigging if they dispensed with their slippery, leather-soled shoes. While salt water adversely affects leather, and the thin calf-skin shoes favored by the Navy might have fallen to pieces with frequent wetting and the stress of work, this was just another inconvenience of life at sea (as would frost-bitten feet be if one were to run about bare-footed in the North Atlantic at most seasons of the year).  Sailor Frederick Harlow offered his wisdom as to why shoes were necessary on board ship --> Read the full story on Log Lines

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