Good Monday evening,
I read a book by Stephen Bown last week called "Scurvy". I was surprised when it said that Napoleon had a population of 25 million in France and could easily taken over England as he wished if he could have crossed the English Channel. It seems like ~1805 was in that time frame.
My brother in law, Red Formica suggested I read "1494" by Stephen Bown last year and I noticed this again last week. It wasn't available at our local library so I picked "Scurvy" instead. I created the most fascinating, thorough Orange Lab activity for my science students over the years. For about a decade it was handwritten, draft after draft. I finally refined it all and typed it up but it was still a work in progress. Especially the extension activities. Many of my students will never look at an orange, grapefruit, lemon or lime the same way again. And now we have tangerines called Clementines and Cuties.
One of the guess questions near the end of the procedures was to answer "Why do they call British sailors limeys?" Of course this piqued curiosity about scurvy and vitamin C. Did you know vitamin C was not identified until 1930? The 1400's-1800's of long distance sailing and warring were often deadly to more than half the crew of the ships. So sad. And how do you find something that disappears when dried, salted, pickled or preserved and decomposes when you try to heat it to kill the germs? Poor Columbus had about cashed it in with his weakened, scurvy suffering crew when he discovered America. 10 weeks at sea and Scurvy rears its ugly head! The grossest symptom to me is the gums swelling taller than the teeth, turning brown and dark, spongey and bleeding and the teeth loosening and falling out if you weren't careful! So gross. Have you ever had dreams where all your teeth fall out? Yuck!
As it turns out even bones once healed came apart again! Which bones in your body would no longer work. I would be missing an arm and both legs. : (
The connective tissue of our body comes apart without vitamin C. It also affects our immune system so we no longer fight off diseases. Scurvy was not caused by an infectious agent. You can not catch it from your neighbor. It is a deficiency disease. Lack of something in your diet.
Rob and Wort were two words well understood by all sailors in the 1700's but which I didn't know before reading this book. Packing space on a ship was limited so just like backpackers like to carry dehydrated food to be reconstituted, sailing ships liked to concentrate anything they took for food. Rob is boiled, dehydrated, condensed fruit juice. Problem was heating the juice denatured the invisible ascorbic acid, vitamin C. They tried sulfuric and hydrochloric and acetic acid but none of them worked. The only animals which cannot make their own vitamin C are guinea pigs, capybaras, bats and humans. All the others can make their own! Eskimos got vitamin C by eating the skin and meat of sea animals raw. Only 5% of the ascorbic acid was left in the rob.
Wort was a derivative of malt and barley. It didn't have any vitamin C in it to begin with, but since Captain Cook was so foggy in his report of how he kept his seaman alive a few in administration thought it a simple way to cure the problem. Sorry, didn't work.
You may have heard of Press Gangs or Impress Gangs. So many of the crew died on the sailing ships that the Navy had the right to grab any male they could nab off the streets of the port cities in England. In those days the lives of the non wealthy people were of little value to the nobility. It was just a cost of shipping. Gross.
Blood letting and mercury were also magical cures. Let the evil and bad humors out of the body. We were kept alive by a proper balance of the humors. Looking back at Greek and Roman philosophy was thought of as rediscovering what man had already learned and forgotten. Sorry, they did not have a clue. Modern medicine had not arrived. Experimenting and concluding were not as important as using the then current medical terminology which was a play of words confusing but philosophical.
Oranges and Lemons have the most ascorbic acid. Limes though more sour have 1/2 the vitamin C. But who was to know? There was no way to measure it. And when British access to citrus from the Mediterranean was cut off they figured well, limes are sour.
James Lind actually performed a controlled experiment on 16 of his scurvied crew as a ship's surgeon/physician. He wrote it down but then explained it away with the in-vogue medical philosophies of his day. Aches and Pains- I hated it!
One captain saved his sailors winter frozen in the Quebec bay by making an infusion of pine needles which are high in vitamin C. That's what the natives did. Why not try it?
| Plant source | Amount (mg / 100g) |
|---|---|
| Papaya | 60 |
| Strawberry | 60 |
| Orange | 53 |
| Lemon | 53 |
| Pineapple | 48 |
| Cauliflower | 48 |
| Kale | 41 |
| Melon, cantaloupe | 40 |
| Garlic | 31 |
| Grapefruit | 30 |
| Raspberry | 30 |
| Tangerine | 30 |
| Mandarin orange | 30 |
| Passion fruit | 30 |
| Spinach | 30 |
| Cabbage raw green | 30 |
| Lime | 30 |
| Mango | 28 |
| Blackberry | 21 |
| Potato | 20 |
| Melon, honeydew | 20 |
| Tomato, red | 13.7[114] |
| Cranberry | 13 |
| Tomato | 10 |
| Blueberry | 10 |
| Pawpaw | 10 |
| Plant source | Amount (mg / 100g) |
|---|---|
| Grape | 10 |
| Apricot | 10 |
| Plum | 10 |
| Watermelon | 10 |
| Banana | 9 |
| Avocado | 8.8[115] |
| Crabapple | 8 |
| Onion | 7.4[116] |
| Cherry | 7 |
| Peach | 7 |
| Carrot | 6 |
| Apple | 6 |
| Asparagus | 6 |
| Horned melon | 5.3[117] |
| Beetroot | 5 |
| Chokecherry | 5 |
| Pear | 4 |
| Lettuce | 4 |
| Cucumber | 3 |
| Eggplant | 2 |
| Raisin | 2 |
| Fig | 2 |
| Bilberry | 1 |
So as you read through this list and you remember preserving food was mainly done by drying and salting or pickling what do you notice? Did you notice it says, raw green cabbage? Where do you get raw green cabbage 10 weeks out to sea?
Some thought drinking seawater a cure. Fresh water was a major problem on sea ships as well.
I know that Joseph Smith's ancestor made a big investment in gin sing root to sail and to sell in China and his partner faked him out and said sorry we didn't make any money on it and kept all the income. That was the late 1700's.
1776 would not be our nation's birthday if the British sailors had been healthy and not scurvy ridden.
Oh, and then the grossest tradition: British sailors could be sewn into their hammocks and buried at sea. Catholic sailors had to have their remains returned to their homeland to be buried. They would drop the bodies into the ballast/rocks and water below the hold of the ship and their they would decay. Terrible stench and bacteria.
Eventually kindness to the sailors by getting them fresh fruits and vegetable as often as possible at ports around the world paid off. Although, not understood they were providing Ascorbate for their crew. At that point the fevers of the foreign countries became the main concern. Yellow fever, malaria etc. But by that time the value of a living healthy sailor was better understood.
Did you know that Captain Cook kept being sent out for 2-3 year voyages to find the missing southern continent. The world would wobble and be unbalanced if there were not equal landmasses in the northern and southern hemispheres. He did discover the north and south islands of New Zealand. The Maori's reassured him they did not cannibalize their friends only their enemies. The South Pacific did not hide any major land masses.
C S Forester wrote a series of book I loved about Horatio Hornblower and the desperate times of the ships of the line. My previous experience with those books was a good backdrop for "Scurvy". I learned about those books from a modern series of science fictions books by one of my top 5 authors, Lois McMaster Bujold. Miles Vorkosigan is the protagonist/main character with the handicap and compensating gifts and abilities in those 15-20 books in the series.
The book "Scurvy" was not easy to follow. But it was gross and frustrating. I am so glad to be living in current times and not then with all the superstitions governing medicine and lack of value for a human life. I did send a copy to Purgatory and when it eventually arrives I may copy and post this to Srandon.
I was so discouraged and depressed last Thursday night and couldn't figure out why. Friday I realized this book was taking in toll on me. 11:48p
PS. Scurvy took a terrible toll in the Age of Sail, killing more sailors than were lost in all sea battles combined. The threat of the disease kept ships close to home and doomed those vessels that ventured too far from port. The willful ignorance of the royal medical elite, who endorsed ludicrous medical theories based on speculative research while ignoring the life-saving properties of citrus fruit, cost tens of thousands of lives and altered the course of many battles at sea. The cure for scurvy ranks among the greatest of human accomplishments, yet its impact on history has, until now, been largely ignored.
From the earliest recorded appearance of the disease in the sixteenth century, to the eighteenth century, where a man had only half a chance of surviving the scourge, to the early nineteenth century, when the British conquered scurvy and successfully blockaded the French and defeated Napoleon, Scurvy is a medical detective story for the ages, the fascinating true story of how James Lind (the surgeon), James Cook (the mariner), and Gilbert Blane (the gentleman) worked separately to eliminate the dreaded affliction. (inside front cover)
PPS. Where are the west indies? Answer: Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic etc. Did crossing the Atlantic impact scurvy? You better believe it!
Page 170
When Adm. Sir George
Rodney hoisted his flag across the Atlantic to join the West Indies fleet in
1780 he could not have known it but he had with him in his retinue the man who
would reform the Navy's policy on antiscorbutics and untimely and ultimately
save the nation from defeat decades later. Although Blaine was a physician and
a scholar with great administrative capacity, he was an irritating fellow to the
dozens of other surgeons of lower status whom he dismissed as irrelevant and
unimportant.
Blaine began by
taking stock of the situation. "I perceive” he wrote, “the most anxious
and laudable pains taken to husband and preserve from decay all manner of stores,
such as ropes, blocks, spars, gunpowder and arms. But however precious these
may be as the indispensable weapons of war, it will not be disputed that human
hands are equally so. Yet it does not appear that this branch of duty has been
studied with the like degree of anxiety as that which regards the inanimate
materials of war." The health of the sailors of the fleet was in shambles,
and Blaine instinctively knew not only that it could be improved but that it
must be improved to realize the potential of the fleet and improve their odds
in a conflict where they were outnumbered and without allies.
There were 21
warships and more than 12,000 mariners stationed in the west Indies, which had
become the major theater for naval battles involving France Spain, and England
during the War of American Independence. The combined French and Spanish fleets
were slightly larger than the British fleet and the British fleet was also on
duty helping the British Army and blockade farther north, in the territory of
the Thirteen Colonies. Although it was the Channel fleet that was the worst manned
and suffered to an alarming and debilitating extent from scurvy and fever,
Blaine was appalled at the state of health of the British mariners in the West
Indies.
His first act was to
compile and distribute to all the ships surgeons, at his own expense, a
pamphlet on hygiene and diet based on Lynn's and Cook's recommendations. He
titled it A Short Account Of The Most
Effective Means Of Preserving The Health Of Seamen, and in it he advised
improving shipboard cleanliness, the regular washing of sailors clothes and
bedding, the removal of infectious sailors to hospitals, and, most important,
the inclusion of citrus juice and wort malt as daily dietary supplements.
Blaine neutrally observed that Cook preferred wort of malt while Lind preferred
lemon and orange juice and rob, and he concluded that therefore both should be
used, showing himself to be a man in tune with the realities of politics and
influence.
To understand the
problems he was dealing with Blaine began collecting statistics from throughout
the fleet. He requested each ship's surgeon to report to him monthly on the
state of the sailors health, with a breakdown of "diseases, deaths, and
other circumstances of ships companies." For the first time, the Admiralty
had an accurate picture of how disease was weakening naval power and how
disease rates fluctuated with the seasons. Fevers rose during the hurricane
season, while scurvy rates doubled in the late winter\early spring and dropped
again by June, when fresh foods were more readily available. Blaine reported
that the death rate from disease and the fleet was in an incredible one in
seven when he arrived, with cases of
scurvy outnumbering all other illnesses combined. Of 12,019 mariners, 1,518
perished from disease during his first year in the west Indies, and only 60
died from enemy action. [What does perished mean?] It was a staggering loss of
manpower that was caused, in Blaine's opinion, by the men living for months at
a time upon "sea victualling". He also reiterated an observation
first made by Lynn decades earlier. "There is at sea a dismal uniformity
of life," he wrote, "favorable to indolence and sadness, and
therefore tending to hasten the progress and aggravate the symptoms of
scurvy"
