Ship's Bell

The Ship's Bells were primarily used for keeping track of watches. A typical watch was four hours where by six watches comprised a regular day. Beginning at mid night every half hour is one additional bell. So 12:30a.m. is the first interval and so gets the first bell;1a.m. is two bells; 1:30a.m. is 3 bells....and so forth till the end of the four hour watch/shift at 4a.m that ends with eight bells. If this was your shift and you had nothing of interest to pass on to the next watchman you might use the old expression "alls well m' eight bells". Since any sailor would know whether it was morning noon or night,  dividing the day into six intervals was all that was needed to tell the time. The beautiful simplicity of this system has secured it a place even in our modern navies today.

 The Six Watches broken down (*military -24hr time)

 The Dog Watch is divided onto two parts An Early and Late watch for two reasons: the first being so that sailors would not have to miss the evening meal with their mates. The second reason is to uneven the cycle to prevent sailors from having the same shift night after night.