Seamen Nailing Things

You know it's going to be a good history book when you read a sentence like this: 

"Among the able seamen, the initial going rate was one ship's nail for one ordinary fuck, but hyper-inflation soon set in"

and this sentence was written by author Richard Holmes, while describing Lieutenant James Cook's expedition to Tahiti in his book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.