Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentlemen Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail

285 Pages·2005·2.05 MB·English

by  Stephen Bown

How a Surgeon, a Mariner and a Gentleman Solved
the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail
s u m m e r s d a l e
Copyright © Stephen R. Bown, 2003
The right of Stephen R. Bown to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted,
nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission
of the publisher.
Summersdale Publishers Ltd
46 West Street
Chichester
West Sussex
PO19 1RP
UK
www.summersdale.com
Printed and bound in Great Britain
ISBN 1 84024 357 0
Maps by John Lightfoot.
Image credits:
The majority of the images reprinted in this book are reproduced from
old editions housed in the collections at the National Archives of
Canada. The portraits of James Lind and Gilbert Blane were sourced
from a 1933 article in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of
Medicine. The images of Anson’s ships, including the cover
illustration, come from an 1853 edition of Anson’s A Voyage Round the
World. Cook’s portrait is reproduced courtesy of the National Portrait
Gallery in Canberra, Australia. The portraits of Napoleon and Nelson
are copied from the 1895 book, Great Men and Famous Women.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank and acknowledge all the talented
individuals who transformed this manuscript into a book.
Thanks to Patrick Crean, Alastair Williams, Gordon
Robertson, Janice Weaver, Kathleen Richards, John
Lightfoot, Gillian Watts and Kelly Cattermole. Particular
credit should go to my editors Liz Kershaw at
Summersdale Publishers, Pete Wolverton at St. Martin’s
Press and especially Jim Gifford at Thomas Allen
Publishers for their insightful observations and
suggestions which tightened and strengthened the book
immeasurably. I would also like to thank my agents
Frances and Bill Hanna who did a remarkable job
organising and coordinating the project with publishers
on both sides of the Atlantic.
Scurvy required a lot of reading and research and I
appreciate the efforts of Helene Lafontaine at the
Canmore Public Library for helping me collect articles
and books from around the country. This book could not
have been completed without the patience and
contributions of my wife Nicky Brink. She lent her
encouragement and support from the moment I
conceived of this project on a dreary November afternoon
when I was eating an orange and wondering how people
got enough vitamin C before modern transportation and
refrigeration brought fresh fruit to their doorstep. Now
that I know more about those distant times, I appreciate
all the more my winter oranges.
Contents
Prologue: A Medical Mystery........................................7
1 – The Eighteenth-Century Seafaring World:
The Age of Scurvy..........................................................16
2 – Scurvy:
The Plague of the Sea...................................................38
3 – Disaster and Victory in the South Seas:
Lord Anson’s Terrible Voyage.......................................63
4 – Found and Lost:
The Search for a Cure Begins......................................88
5 – An Ounce of Prevention:
James Lind and the Salisbury Experiment...................108
6 – Unwinding the Knot:
Rob and Wort and the Trials at Sea............................139
7 – Master Mariner:
James Cook’s Great Voyages in the Pacific................165
8 – Man of Influence:
Gilbert Blane and the West Indies Fleet.....................199
9 – Blockade:
The Defeat of Scurvy and Napoleon.........................227
Epilogue:
The Mystery Solved....................................................256
Appendix: Vitamin C Contained in Common
Foods of the Age of Sail...............................................264
Timeline.......................................................................266
A Note on Sources and Further Reading...................272
Bibliography.................................................................279
SCURVY
List of Maps
1 – George Anson’s Voyage, 1740–1744.................62
2 – Captain James Cook’s Voyages Around the World....164
3 – The Blockade of Napoleon’s Navy, c. 1800.........226
– 6 –
– Prologue –
A Medical Mystery
scur·vy [‘skurvi] n., adj. (-vi·er, -vi·est).
-n. Pathology.
a disease caused by lack of vitamin C, characterised
by swollen and bleeding gums, livid spots on the skin,
and prostration. Scurvy used to be common among
sailors when they had little to eat except bread and
salt meat.
-adj.
low; mean; contemptible: a scurvy fellow, a scurvy
trick.
scur·vi·ly, adv., scur·vi·ness, n.
Arthur James was too weak to scamper up the masts and
rigging, useless even for hauling on a rope or mending a
damaged sail. Reluctantly ordered below deck, he
crawled into the bowels of the ship, where the men’s
hammocks were strung up, and joined the others who
had succumbed to the insidious illness. The worst of
them were hideously drawn, feverish, dreamy, and
insensible; their skin was like paper covered in blotches
of ink as they lay shrunken and gap-toothed in their
hammocks, swaying with the motion of the ship. They
were listless and morose in their misery and despair,
moaning under the dim light from a few oil lamps,
– 7 –
SCURVY
patiently awaiting death from this most feared of all
maritime diseases. Some cried because they were cold,
others because they were hungry and thirsty. They could
not eat because their mouths were in ruins – swollen
gums, brown and spongy, grown over their wobbly teeth.
Their breath rattled in their chests and their eyes were
dull and unfocused.
Soon James’s shipmates began to die, in such
numbers that there were scarcely any strong enough
to sew them into their hammocks and give them a
proper farewell before pitching them overboard.
Corpses lay in the fetid compartments belowdecks,
stiff, blue, and shrunken, gnawed on by rats and
abandoned by their comrades. Others sprawled about
the deck until someone pushed them overboard. The
ship left a trail of bobbing corpses in its wake as it
limped into a safe port on San Fernandez Island, off
the coast of Chile, where the crew desperately hoped
to find fresh fruit and vegetables.
Arthur James was one of the hundreds of men who
wasted away and died of the dreaded scurvy while
Commodore George Anson’s flagship, Centurion, rounded
Cape Horn in 1741 on a mission to harass Spanish
shipping in the Pacific Ocean. Of the nearly two thousand
men who set off from Portsmouth the previous year in
five warships and a sloop, only about two hundred ever
saw home again, the vast bulk of them perishing horribly
from scurvy. What happened on Anson’s voyage is
considered one of the worst seaborne medical disasters
– 8 –
A MEDICAL MYSTERY
of all time. It sickened and appalled the English public
and aroused the consternation of naval authorities
concerned with the loss of the astronomically expensive
warships. It sparked a golden age of scurvy research in
England that would see the distemper practically cured,
if not fully understood, before the century was out.
Scurvy was responsible for more deaths at sea than
storms, shipwreck, combat, and all other diseases
combined. Historians have conservatively estimated that
over two million sailors perished from scurvy during the
Age of Sail – a time period that began with Columbus’s
voyages across the Atlantic and ended with the
development of steam power and its adaptation for engines
on ships in the mid-nineteenth century. Like a constant
but irritating and occasionally violent companion, it had
sailed with virtually every major voyage of discovery, from
Jacques Cartier to Vasco da Gama to Francis Drake.
Explorers feared it, the merchants of the Dutch and
English East India companies feared it, and by the
eighteenth century Europe’s national navies feared it. It
was not uncommon for a proud and lumbering warship
to slide to sea from Portsmouth or sally forth from Brest
with over seven hundred mariners and return months
later with only three hundred sickly wretches – the
unlucky others perishing horribly from the ‘grey killer’
during the months at sea, the life slowly sucked from them
on a diet of salt pork, biscuit, and grog.
Scurvy is a hideous and frightful affliction where the
body’s connective tissue degenerates, resulting in bleeding
– 9 –