The birth of a child was not normally recorded unless the child’s mother was entitled to draw a ration, but occasionally an interesting occurrence would force the baby’s presence on someone’s attention. ‘This day the surgeon informed me that a woman on board had been laboring in childbirth for twelve hours,’ Captain W.N. Glascock recorded in an early nineteenth-century log, ‘and if I could see my way to permit the firing of a broadside to leeward, nature would be assisted by the shock. I complied with the request, and she was delivered of a fine male child.’ The spaces between the broadside guns were a preferred location for a woman in labor and gave rise to the saying ‘son of a gun.’