Holystone is a soft and brittle sandstone that was formerly used in the Royal Navy and US Navy for scrubbing and whitening the wooden decks of ships. A variety of origins have been proposed for the term, including that such stones were taken from broken monuments of St. Nicholas Church inGreat Yarmouth or else the ruined church of St. Helens adjacent to the St Helens Road anchorage of the Isle of Wight where ships would often provision. The US Navy has it that the term may have come from the fact that 'holystoning the deck' was originally done on one's knees, as in prayer. Smaller holystones were called "prayer books" and larger ones "Bibles". Holystoning eventually was not generally done on the knees but with a stick resting in a depression in the flat side of the stone and held under the arm and in the hands and moved back and forth with grain on each plank while standing or partially leaning over to put pressure on the stick-driven stone. Holystoning continued on teak-decked Iowa class battleships into the 1990s.
Royal Navy
Holystoning was a routine activity on Royal Navy vessels until the early 1800s. The practice reached its height in 1796 when Admiral St Vincent recommended to his captains that the decks of all ships in the fleet be holystoned "every evening as well as morning during the summer months." For a ship of the line, the practice could take up to four hours. St Vincent's successor, Admiral Keith, rescinded the order in 1801, finding that "the custom of washing the decks of ships of war in all climates in every temperature of the air, and on stated days let the weather be what it may" was so onerous as to be damaging the health and lives of the crews. The practice was subsequently limited to once every seven to fourteen days, interspersed with sweeping. Holystoning the deck was part of Queen Victoria's regulations for British-owned Emigration vessels in 1848, "11. Duties of the sweepers to be to clean the ladders, hospitals, and round houses, to sweep the decks after every meal, and to dry-holystone and scrape them after breakfast." Holystoning continued as part of Navy routine throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but was ultimately regarded merely as a means to occupy an otherwise idle crew. Its lack of utility was evidenced in contemporary accounts including an 1875 British Medical Journal advice which warned against having patients "set to useless tasks simply to keep them employed, such as sailors have to do in holystoning the decks."
Holystoning was banned in the US Navy as it wore down the decks too rapidly and caused excessive expense, but the practice may have disappeared slowly. A 1952 graduate of the Naval Academy recalls of his Youngster cruise to England in the summer of 1949 aboard the : A photo on the US Navy's Navsource purports to show Navy Midshipmen holystoning the deck of the same ship in 1951.
Holystoning is referenced in Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s diary, the 1840 classic Two Years Before the Mast, in what he calls the "Philadelphia Catechism": John Huston's 1956 filmMoby Dick, and most recently Peter Weir's 2003 film , also show sailors scrubbing the deck with holystones.
