Fig. 4. David Jones, Death and Life in Death. © Trustees of the Estate of David Jones.
Enigma
Throughout the symptoms of this disease, there is something so peculiar to itself, that no description, however accurate it may be, can convey to the reader a proper idea of its nature.
—Thomas Trotter, Observations on the Scurvy (1792)
In Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), the calamity of the arrival of bubonic plague in London in 1665 is sharpened considerably by the ignorance of everyone in the city concerning the cause of the disease, its mode of transmission, the fatal tendency of its symptoms, and the method of its cure. While generally it is assumed that it arrived in a cargo from the East, nobody knows where it was lodged, whether in fabric, ointments, or food, nor how it was at first communicated, whether by touch, effluvium, or the hand of God. The cures attempted range from the probable (fumigation) to the superstitious (amulets). The symptoms vary, and the progress of the disease is uncertain. People who have been in close touch with victims survive, the afflicted who have been isolated succumb; some die as soon as the marks are on them, others recover if the swellings burst. Although the narrator seems powerfully of the opinion that shutting up stricken houses with the survivors still inside is the only way to contain the infection, he is full of praise for those who evade municipal controls by getting out of the window, or blowing up the watchmen, or escaping to the country, or by supporting their diseased families with the income from ferrying passengers, freight, and possibly the plague itself up and down the river. Every attempt made by the narrator to nail an effect to a cause or a problem to a solution is inevitably contradicted by events or his own judgments, leaving him confronting unrelated events that coalesce into a kind of miracle: “A dreadful plague in London was / In the year of sixty-five, / Which swept an hundred thousand souls / Away, yet I alive!” (Defoe 1966: 256).
His narrative explodes into a montage of astonishing scenes—a naked man walking down the street with a pan of burning coals on his head; another mistaken for a corpse and making a joke of it as he climbs out of a death pit at Mount Mill; grass growing in the streets; eldritch shrieks of the dying and bereaved. He is unable to trace a sequence leading to any predictable outcome. The plague haunts everything, because although everyone knows what it does, nobody knows what it is; and the result is a confusion that involves both the event and every effort to make sense of it. “Here was no difference made,” says the narrator of the Mount Mill pit, where corpses are tumbled in regardless of age, sex, and nakedness, whether they are quick or dead, advertising a chaos in which all distinctions are lost—between the living and the dead, the poor and the rich, the decent and the shameful, the effectual and the ineffectual, belief and horror (80). Doubtless Defoe’s decision to pass off his fiction as history was influenced by the consideration that amidst such sheer confusion the difference between what is imagined and what is true is immaterial and that fidelity to such a prodigious interruption of civil life requires more than facts to do it justice.
The modern reader of H. F.’s narrative is placed in a position rather like that of the female spectator who shouted out to Othello that he was a fool for not believing Desdemona innocent. For the reader is perfectly acquainted with the truth; namely that bubonic plague is incubated and transmitted by the fleas that live on rats; or, in the case of the pneumonic variant, by the breath of the victims. But the fascination and tension of this historical moment arises from the fact that those in peril did not know this and had no hope of knowing it. We observe how epidemiology is transformed into something like fate, and acts of self-preservation into dramatic irony. We assume for the purpose of intelligent inspection of any epidemic that there is a methodical relation between the empirical facts of the disease and the biochemical breakthrough that will put an end to its dominion. We assume further that the lapse of time is a series that can be understood and that the structure of a historical situation depends on an orderly adjustment of the inside of private experience to the outside of public knowledge. But those in the midst of the infection in 1665 reacted to it as an apocalypse from which the differences between past and future, and between an interior space and an external point of observation, had been obliterated. And it is to that dreadful intuition of lost coordinates that H. F. is loyal, rather than to the reader’s medical hindsight or faith in providence. He calls the plague a “speaking sight” because it communicates only with those implicated in it, not to readers of subsequent accounts of it. “It is impossible,” he says, “to say anything that is able to give a true idea of it to those who did not see it, other than this, that it was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such as no tongue can express” (80, 79). Time and space puzzle him. He has no explanation for how the affliction began or how it ended; why it traveled where it did and why it stopped when it did. He is equally confused about social policy and personal resourcefulness in this kind of emergency, whether quarantine or escape is the best plan, or whether resignation is not, in the end, the only feasible response.
Over a much longer span of time and on a much broader canvas, scurvy exhibited the same dramatic overthrow of the structure of meaning on which its students and victims wanted to rely. Even though it had been known from the first that food played a part in the onset and the cure of this disease, the identification of a preventive in fresh vegetables, meat, and fruit, and of a remedy in concentrated citrus juice (called “rob”), was never universally embraced or systematically pursued. Although victims were regularly restored to health, provided they could make land and start eating the herbs and salads they found growing there, disagreements among medical experts about the causes and treatment of the malady, combined with clinically uncertain results from remedies used at sea, inclined them to rely on favorite theories rather than experiments because facts simply compounded the confusion. Close observation of symptoms yielded “a strange jumble,” Sir Gilbert Blane complained, where no one datum was consistent with another (Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 3.298). Thomas Willis spoke for many subsequent physicians when he called it, “an Iliad of Diseases”: “It extends itself into so various and manifold Symptoms, that it can neither be comprehended by one definition, or scarce by a singular description” (Willis 1684: 170, 169). “The Scurvy,” wrote Sir Everard Maynwaringe, “owns not one univocal cause, but is the Bastard of many Parents” (Maynwaringe 1666: 5). Thomas Trotter was by no means the only one to notice that scorbutic symptoms were as likely to multiply in the head as the body, with a repertoire of temperamental peculiarities that added to the difficulty of making an adequate diagnosis. Thomas Beale, a victim of the disease, announced the difficulties of comprehending an illness that overflowed all points of observation and resistance: “Our mental sufferings were such as defy description, and nothing but being placed within the same situation could convince those who have not the power to imagine its monotonous dreariness” (Beale 1839: 310). Like Defoe’s narration of the plague and like Shakespeare’s dramatization of the extravagances of jealousy, a gulf divides those absorbed by pain and passion, and those who are not. If the latter were able to apprehend the full extent of scorbutic dreariness, then they would know the eyewitness speaks truly of it; but as this is impossible, they cannot even form a judgment of what it was like.
The history of scurvy is heavily marked by this conflict of interests between those who dwell inside the drama and those who don’t. The biochemical breakthrough that isolated ascorbic acid and explained its physiological and neurological importance to the human organism was never aligned with the history of empirical knowledge of the disease. That is to say, biochemistry and naval medicine never shared an inevitable and common destination, although there were many occasions when a coalition of the two was accidentally and briefly achieved. But it will be evident in the course of this chapter that it is difficult for anyone outside the disorganized and passionate situation of scurvy itself not to consider its history as anything but periodic fits of willful ignorance that blinded the world to a necessary truth and an obvious cure: a dismal record then of lost opportunities and culpable amnesias. And in proportion, as the desire to understand the disease from the perspective of its allegedly final elucidation inflects the account of it, another angle of it is ignored. This is the history of immethodical passion, variously productive of misery, exhilaration, mistakes, madness, heroism, and death—the sort of history H. F. writes of the plague and that the lady in the audience thought Othello might coolly have sidestepped, had he only known the truth.
Perhaps in an effort to redress the balance, it has been common in recent years to sound a triumphal note when mentioning the clinical trials of James Lind aboard the Salisbury in 1747 and James Cook’s conquest of scurvy during his Pacific voyages. The bearing of Lind’s work on the practical successes of Cook in avoiding fatal outbreaks during his decade of navigating the South Seas (1768–79), and the navy’s later decision to distribute rations of lemon juice to all sailors, are greeted as phases of a real and solid progress in eradicating the affliction, thus the title of Francis E. Cuppage’s book, James Cook and the Conquest of Scurvy (1994). The subtitle of a history of the disease, How a Surgeon, a Mariner and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail (Bown 2003), is intended as triple homage to the experimental breakthrough of Lind, the prophylactic successes of Cook, and the administrative genius of Sir Gilbert Blane, each praised for discovering and applying the virtues of antiscorbutic remedies and regimes broadly enough to keep the British Navy in fighting trim throughout the Napoleonic Wars.
The truth is that these men achieved much in their respective fields, but none provided an unequivocal solution to the problem of scurvy. Lind had empirical evidence to show that citrus juice removed its effects, but he was much more hesitant in adducing causes, suggesting that indigestion, blocked pores, and the weather might be factors as malign as the shortage of good food. His specialty was cure, not prevention, and even then he was cautious, warning toward the end of his career that health at sea could not demonstrably “be ascribed to any diet, medicine, or regimen whatever” (quoted in Carpenter 1986: 70). In their survey of medicine and the navy in the eighteenth century, Christopher Lloyd and Jack Coulter have suggested that Cook’s neglect of lemon juice in favor of malt wort, which then gained his powerful endorsement in a paper he gave before the Royal Society in 1776, set the cause of citrus back for a generation (Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 3.302). For reasons which must have had more to do with naval economies and medical politics than clinical accuracy, malt (valueless as an antiscorbutic) became the chief official remedy for thirty years, relied on by many surgeons afterward, thanks largely to Cook, whose banishment of scurvy from his ships (particularly the Endeavour) lent practical authority to his judgment in its favor. As for Gilbert Blane, his espousal of the cause of preserved lemon juice was to result in something like its general distribution as a preventive in the navy from the mid-1790s; but he was candid enough to admit that the efficacy of the concentrated juice was not guaranteed, being significantly less than that of fresh lemons, probably owing to the method of preparation (3.132, 319–21). Although Blane arranged a repeat of the success of Lind’s clinical trial aboard the Suffolk in 1793, which sailed to Madras without a single case of scurvy, his preference was always for the fresh juice rather than the rob, a position consistent with his insistence on nutrition as the major factor in the cause and cure of scurvy, one that was shared by the other chief proponents of citrus, such as Thomas Trotter and Nathanael Hulme, although with rather different emphases. On the night before Trafalgar, Admiral Nelson penned a note on the importance of the supplies of onions held on his ships, which, after three months at sea, formed his most reliable stock of antiscorbutic food (Times, 3 May 2013, 3).
If we are looking for a hero in the history of scurvy, Lind would certainly be a leading candidate had the Admiralty not entirely neglected his achievements for forty years, and had his own eclectic approach not misled him. In the context of a disease so manifold and inconstant, perhaps it is inevitable that the person who comes closest to the heart of its mystery is ignored, especially if his discoveries are empirically and not epidemiologically produced. Any empirical cure has to compete with all the other practical and theoretical remedies in which so many people, some of them powerful, have an interest. Not until Albrecht Szent-Gyorgyi isolated the antioxidant molecule he called hexuronic acid, which he found in high concentrations in the adrenal cortex, and which Charles Glen King and A. W. Waugh subsequently found in lemon juice, was the indisputable cause of scurvy known to lie in the depletion of vitamin C, or ascorbic acid (Carpenter 1986: 186–90). Previously, it was referred to variously as a charm, a je ne scais quoi, a sap, a miasma, or a taint in food that entered the body and corrupted it. And because of the obscurity of the cause, Lind was seduced into theories that lessened the value of the results of his clinical experiment on the Salisbury. Another ignored hero in the history of scurvy is Hugh Platt, a contemporary of Francis Drake and Richard Hawkins, who seemed to have understood a lot earlier than most that there is a virtue in citrus that is at its maximum when fresh and requires careful processing and storage if it is to be preserved in any useful quantity. His “philosophical fire” seems to have been a method of pasteurizing juice to prevent fermentation while preserving its curative content. Furthermore, he had devised a method of airtight bottling that likewise kept the juice free from contamination and decay. But as no one was willing to pay for this secret, the secret was kept until Nathaniel Hulme borrowed it for Sir Joseph Banks (Keevil 1957: 1.107–9). Platt knew that it was one thing to find out that fresh oranges, lemons, and limes would cure the scurvy, but quite another to ensure that their hidden virtue lasted over distance and time.
The handkerchief in the Othello tragedy of scurvy is citrus juice. In the play, the embroidered fabric circulates as an equivocal sign of innocence, and at sea, the juice acts fitfully as a lesson in antiscorbutic medicine that is no sooner learned than it is misused, mistaken, or forgotten. Neither ever coheres into a satisfying and final proof of worth and virtue. Favored by the British and eventually the Americans, but never much fancied by the Dutch, French, Spanish, or Russians, citrus juice makes many appearances that are decisive and elusive by turns (Keevil 1957: 1.223). From the earliest days of long-distance navigation the medicinal value of oranges and lemons was known and exploited. Richard Hawkins and James Lancaster had used them and vigorously recommended them. John Woodall endorsed the antiscorbutic benefits of citrus in his influential book on maritime health, The Surgeon’s Mate (1617). Long before Cook, Drake managed a voyage of a thousand with only a single victim of scurvy. The regimes pursued by these mariners were very like Cook’s, for besides the use of fruit and fresh greens, they all appreciated the importance of having a clean and dry ship, a well-clothed crew, and frequent stops for refreshment. One of the reasons for the Admirality’s neglect of Lind was the embrace it extended to broad-spectrum prevention (of which he himself was a proponent) evident in the wide variety of dietary supplements supplied by the Sick and Hurt Board to John Byron, Samuel Wallis, Philip Carteret, and Cook in their explorations of the Pacific during the 1760s.
Before David MacBride published a theoretical account of scurvy that claimed for malt the curative potency Lind had found in oranges and lemons, it was commonly understood that a variety of precautions and remedies would defeat scurvy, not a single wonder cure. This was basically Cook’s approach, until he was edged into a public recommendation of malt after he returned from his second Pacific voyage. Lind himself had never proposed the juice of oranges and lemons as a superlative remedy, only rather more effective than other medicines, such as electuaries, malt, vinegar, and vitriol. This was a fact he had experimentally disclosed, not a program of general health he espoused. Therefore it was not he, but physicians such as Gilbert Blane, Nathaniel Hulme, and Thomas Trotter who recommended lemon or lime juice as an invaluable resource for the navy. And even they had reservations—Blane about the quality of rob at sea, Trotter about the effect of frequent doses of acidic liquid on the stomachs of seamen, while Hulme was aware that the preparation of reliable rob was elaborate and expensive.
A point upon which these defenders of citrus juice were technically unanimous, however, was their contempt for theorists. Their empiricism was joined to a common and powerful belief in the value of clinical trials, not in conjectures concerning air, moisture, salt, acidosis, putrefaction, or bad food. Unlike those who argued that scurvy was an imbalance of the humors, they agreed that a diet of fresh food would infallibly prevent it, and cure it once it had appeared, owing to an ingredient in fresh fruit, vegetables, and citrus juice that was lacking in preserved stores such as salt meat, flour, biscuit, or dried peas. While he was blockading Brest at the start of the Seven Years’ War, George Anson—a commander who had more cause than most to fear a disease that cost him two-thirds of the men who sailed with him in 1740–44—pioneered the first real success in keeping British crews healthy for long periods of time at sea . His was a method that could successfully be practised only near home waters or friendly ports, for it involved supplying ships on blockade duty with fresh meat, vegetables, and fruit. It was prohibitively expensive and physically arduous, but utterly reliable. Sir Edward Hawke, who was serviced with fresh fruit by tenders while blockading the French fleet off Ushant in 1759, and Trotter, who, as Physician of the Fleet in 1794, purchased vegetables and lemons for crews trying to subsist on salt provisions in the hard winter of 1794, provide two notable examples (Rodger 2004: 281, 484–85; Trotter 1804: 1.405; Macdonald 2004: 13). Trotter concluded after his successful intervention, “The late occurrences have sufficiently established the fact, that scurvy can always be prevented by fresh vegetables, and cured effectually by the lemon” (Trotter 1804: 423). A variation of this regime was the plantation of large botanic gardens at strategic distances from home ports, such as that of the Dutch at the Cape, the French in Mauritius, and the British in Calcutta, St. Vincent, and St. Helena. Trotter urged the plantation of a similar garden in the grounds of the Haslar Naval Hospital at Portsmouth (Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 3.241).
The unanimity among proponents of fresh food extended to the battery of measures involving hygiene, clothing, warmth, rest, and proper storage of supplies, but was rather less evident in the matter of citrus. Like Lind, Trotter goes no further than the fact of juice’s usefulness as a cure, for causes are beyond him. He knows that fresh food puts an end to scurvy, but not why. Lemon juice, therefore, does not strike him any more than it strikes Lind, Blane, or Cook, as an Ariadne’s thread leading to a plenary solution of a medical mystery. Enthusiasts like Leonard Gillespie, who were much more exclusive in their devotion to juice, were destined to be disappointed, for on many occasions it was tried without success. It is we, from our postvitamin perspective, who understand the clinical and neurological importance of oranges and lemons and play the part of the lady shouting to Othello, exasperated that those with a vital interest in the matter are blind to what is so obvious or, having seen it, ignore it. It is as if Defoe’s story of the plague experimentally demonstrated a connection between fleas, rats, and the incidence of the disease simply as a naked fact, and left it at that. Hindsight plays leapfrog with that kind of factuality, trying to force the pace toward the truth we know, but of which the experimentalist is ignorant or only imperfectly aware. The history of scurvy is especially tormenting in this respect, being strewn with red herrings, false starts, and mistaken conjectures that mock all teleological symmetries.
When the surgeon William Clowes examined the case of two scorbutic patients and suggested that lack of exercise, neglect of keeping clean and dry, and want of good air “were the only means they fell into the Scurvy,” J. J. Keevil drily remarks, “Unfortunately, Clowes’s ‘only means’ were so numerous that they completely obscured the primary cause” (Keevil 1957: 1.99). Again, when citing Hawkins’s prophetic advocacy of sour citrus, he observes, “On of the most bewildering aspects of the history of scurvy is the manner in which a cure was repeatedly found, only to be lost again” (1.102). Lloyd and Coulter feel the same impatience with William Cockburn, a man so infatuated by his love of theory “he could prescribe lemon juice in a case of scurvy and yet fail to draw any conclusions from its success” (Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 3.40). They are incredulous at official obtuseness in the face of Lind’s work on scurvy (“Neither the Admiralty, the Navy Board, nor the Sick and Hurt Board made any energetic attempt to implement his suggestions”), and they are frankly suspicious of the circumstances in which Cook threw his weight behind malt, postponing for a generation the naval adoption of lemon juice (“In our opinion the causes for the delay are … devious”) (3.43, 303). Yet there is nobody involved in this history who possesses sufficient facts to identify Keevil’s “primary cause,” and in the absence of such facts, conjecture was to some degree relied upon by everyone, even hard-bitten observers such as Lind and Trotter.
Undoubtedly, the most far-reaching event in the sorry tale of antiscorbutic discoveries forgotten or ignored was the failure of Sir George Nares’s expedition to the Arctic in the Alert and the Discovery in 1875–76. After only a year on the ice, there was a serious outbreak of scurvy (sixty cases, three fatal) that the naval issue of lime juice was not alleviating. In one case, the symptoms, far from being eradicated, actually returned after liberal doses of the juice (Lloyd and Coulter 1963: 4.119; Williams 2009: 362). In an interesting reversal of the official position a century before, an Admiralty enquiry (the “Scurvy Committee”) tried to vindicate the limes, but influential voices were arguing that lime juice had never worked, and they prevailed. “By the end of the century,” Lloyd and Coulter point out, “all faith had been lost in the efficacy of lime juice,” a shift in public opinion that was to have a malign influence on the victualing of Scott’s expedition in the Discovery to the Antarctic in 1901–4, where a bad attack of scurvy put an end to Shackleton’s participation in it. Problems of nutrition in British attempts on the South Pole were aggravated by the current theory in favor of ptomaine poisoning as the chief cause of scurvy, a theory harking back to Lind’s ideas about bad food and strengthened by the partial but shocking evidence of the destruction of Sir John Franklin’s expedition to the Arctic, which appeared to have been precipitated by infected canned meat. By the time of Scott’s attempt on the pole in the Terra Nova (1910–13), when Edward Evans succumbed to scurvy and Edgar Evans died of it, ptomaine poisoning was still the official explanation, although many people (including Roald Amundsen) were aware of the importance of fresh seal and penguin flesh. Reginald Koettlitz, Scott’s senior surgeon on the Discovery, stated baldly however, “There is no antiscorbutic property in any food or drug” (Lloyd and Coulter 1963: 4.120; Chick 1953: 216–17; Guly 2012: 1–7). Scott himself referred to citrus juice as an “antidote,” as if its function were solely to neutralize a poison, and he thought its justification as either a preventive or a remedy was “beset with immense difficulties” (Scott 1907: 1.405). No citrus juice other than in small pharmaceutical preparations was prescribed on either expedition to the Pole (Anon 1962: 32). The range of vitamins from A to C were entirely inadequately represented in their diet of pemmican, chocolate, tea, tinned meat, pea flour, biscuits, sugar, tinned fruit, dried vegetables, and condensed milk (Watt, Freeman, and Bynum 1981: 168). To emphasize how far back into the past this turn of events had thrust medical knowledge, Lloyd and Coulter quote Woodall’s confession of ignorance from a book now three and a half centuries old and as relevant as ever: “The causes of this disease are … infinite and unsearchable” (Lloyd and Coulter 1963: 4.119). The enigma of scurvy was fully restored.
The reason for this disastrous loss of faith in the standard antiscorbutic remedy, by then prescribed for sailors worldwide, lay in the growing preference of the navy for West Indian limes instead of Sicilian lemons—the very limes whose overwhelming success as an antiscorbutic had been saluted by Lind himself (Lind 1753: 199). By 1860, the West Indian fruit had entirely replaced Mediterranean citrus, and in 1867, the Admiralty decided to make all purchases of juice from the firm of Sturge, who had extensive plantations in Montserrat. Not until 1917, with an analysis conducted by the Lister Institute, was it known for certain that West Indian limes contain a negligible amount of ascorbate. Sir Clements Markham was right to assert that this sort of juice had never worked, although he could not explain why. It was not intense cold sapping its virtue, or too much boiling in its preparation that destroyed its efficacy, for it had never possessed much to begin with (Lloyd and Coulter 1963: 4.115–16). This left the field free for eminent bacteriologists such as Sir Almroth Wright, who not only identified the cause of scurvy in tinned meat (rendering suspect the chief supply of protein in the Antarctic and causing much of it be rejected) but also shifted the whole debate from nutrition, where it belonged, to bacteriology, where it didn’t.
Casting back through the tangled story of lime and lemon juice, it is possible to see in the enigma of scurvy something like a symmetry between the imperfections of human judgment and the defects of the remedy. Basically there were two methods of preparing rob, either by preserving freshly squeezed juice in casks with 10 percent brandy or rum, or by boiling or reducing it and bottling the concentrate with a seal of oil (Hulme 1768: 57–59; Lloyd and Coulter 1963: 4.113). Lind had correctly rated the ascorbic properties of oranges as superior to lemons. For reasons of portability, he recommended inspissation, using a bain-marie to reduce the liquid to a third of its volume (Lind 1753: 207; Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 3.299). This was a technique widely in use, but it was tempting to short-circuit the process with some brisk boiling, which was known to make the product less effective, as Blane pointed out. However, Nathaniel Hulme concocted a small amount of rob by Lind’s method for Sir Joseph Banks, who used it on the Endeavour when suffering early signs of scurvy, apparently successfully. Somewhere between the confidence of Hulme and Banks and the blanket rejection of rob by the Sick and Hurt Board in 1781 as “of no service” (Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 3.317), we locate the hesitations of Cook, Blane, and Trotter. These may well have had the same foundation as more decisive estimates of the failure of juice such as that of William Perry, the man who replaced William Monkhouse as Cook’s surgeon on the Endeavour voyage, James Patten’s, surgeon on his second, or William Anderson’s, surgeon on the third, upon all of whom Sir John Pringle relied for his rejection of further trials of juice (3.312, 314, 303; Pringle RCPE PRJ/1–9, 8.449).
In any trial of antiscorbutics in which citrus juice was involved, there must have been credible doubts of its efficacy, especially if it had been reduced by boiling rather than in a bain-marie, then stored for long periods and exposed to extreme heat or cold. On the other hand, how long the potency of fresh juice might last if it were merely preserved with an addition of spirits was impossible to determine, but the accounts of its success between the 1790s and 1850s would suggest that it must have been more reliable than the rob were it not for the fact recently discovered by Janet Macdonald that many naval ships’ logs of that period have no record of receipt of any kind of lemon or lime juice on a scale sufficient for a regular issue (Macdonald 2004: 164). To make matters more complicated, Lloyd and Coulter point out that the words “lime” and “lemon” were used interchangeably, so there is no certainty (at least from the Seven Years’ War onward) that the liquid being used was not obtained from the West Indian lime, citrus medica acida, the fruit whose properties Leonard Gillespie had with unconscious irony deemed “incalculable” and which Lind himself had singled out for praise (Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 3.322). With regard to the juice generally, we can only assume that some stores of it were inert, but that others (perhaps the greater amount) retained variable degrees of ascorbate and worked as a cure. As for the trials of malt in its various forms, whether as wort or spruce beer, we must ask how it was possible that a remedy less valuable as an antiscorbutic than even the West Indian lime could garner any measure of enthusiastic support. Well, if it were used in spruce beer, the leaves and sap of pine were known since the days of Jacques Cartier’s exploration of the New World to have mildly curative powers in cases of scurvy (Keevil 1957: 1.86). Sauerkraut, if properly fermented, also had a small amount, and if it were consumed along with wort, as it was on Cook’s ships, then malt would have shared the success of cabbage as it did of spruce. However, it is evident in some voyages that scurvy was confounded with beriberi and pellagra, each likely to erupt from situations of nutritional deficit (Watt 1979: 68–69). In cases involving a loss of thiamin or niacin, malt might even have contributed to recovery. Of course, this would have been claimed as malt’s success against scurvy and, given the state of medical knowledge at the time, one not easily disputed.
This is to assume that all trials of antiscorbutics were made in good faith, which manifestly was not the case. Cook, prudent as well as judicious, was keenly aware of the cost of inspissated juice, writing to Pringle that, “the dearness of rob of lemon and oranges will hinder them from being furnished in large quantities” (Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 3.316). Even after it authorized the use of lemon and lime juice, the Admiralty was always in pursuit of economies, hence its preference for West Indian limes over more expensive kinds of Mediterranean citrus. The cost of the rob put on board the Resolution for Cook’s second voyage in 1772 was 7 shillings and sevenpence per pint. In 1793, two years before the decision to make lemon juice available to any naval ship that wanted it, there were 45,000 active sailors on the navy’s books. At a rate of 28,000 gallons for 10,000 men for a year, which was the rate determined in 1795, the cost would have amounted to 250,000 pounds sterling for the full 45,000 men. By the end of the wars with France, the strength of the navy stood at 140,000. Nelson said he could get lemon juice at Messina for a shilling a gallon, and with the navy at full strength, that would have represented a relatively modest expenditure, but there was no guarantee that prices would remain at that level. In 1701, lemons were £4 a chest, and when Trotter was searching for fresh food for the Channel Fleet in 1794, he said there was scarcely a lemon left in the kingdom (Trotter 1804: 1.417; Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 3.319). No doubt the price factor influenced the reception of reports comparing malt favorably with lemon juice and directly or indirectly qualified Cook’s judgments in the paper he delivered to the Royal Society. Certainly the high price of rob helped MacBride gain influential support for his campaign on behalf of malt, and of this influence he was aware, writing, “As the Material for making this Liquor may be so cheaply purchased, and is capable of being much longer preserved than Oranges, Lemons, or indeed any other Kind of Fruit, there can be no Hesitation in giving it the Preference for general Use” (MacBride 1767: 60). The cost of the citrus cure explains the delay in its adoption by the Merchant Marine. Obliged by the Shipping Act of 1854 to make the same distribution of lime juice as the navy, owners of merchant vessels were so miserly that they purchased cheap supplies of adulterated juice or simply neglected to buy any at all. Merchant seamen (especially whalemen) continued to suffer and die from scurvy. Chapter 4 shows that few vessels on the Australian run, especially convict transports, were able to avoid it. It was reported in 1866 that “in almost every case of the manifestation of scurvy [in ordinary merchant ships] the lemon juice was proved to have been originally spurious or to have become deteriorated,” so the Act was strengthened in 1867 (Dickson 1866: 5; Cook 2004: 224–29). It is ironic that the law gained potency just in time for the remedy itself to lose all credit.
If we return to the parallel between the history of scurvy and a performance of Othello, it becomes clear that the bewilderment and frustration of those at the front end of the struggle to find a cure for scurvy are transmitted to those with a more managerial interest in the same outcome. Although the wisest heads in maritime medicine were aware of the need for diverse approaches when confronting a disease whose symptoms were so confusing and contradictory, it is equally clear that the disease presented obstacles to voyages of discovery and naval strategy serious enough to generate official impatience with moderate and limited solutions. As naval blockades became the strategy of choice for the British after 1757, it was necessary to find a way of keeping crews healthy, for as Trotter pointed out, of all naval duties, blockading was the one where the absence of fresh supplies was most likely to provoke scurvy. Although Nicholas Rodger disputes some of the wilder estimates of death rates for scurvy, such as Francis Cuppage’s (Rodger 2004: 308, n. 53), it is certain that it was treated as a clear and present danger by the time the navy was engaged in a transatlantic war. For every Admiralty Othello loudly calling for a handkerchief for his headache, there was an expert such as David MacBride ready to play the part of Iago, with an allegedly sure remedy that was likely to make things worse.
The peripeteia of a tragedy provoked by the very thing (handkerchief or lime juice) that might have averted it, involves everyone in a new obscurity of which Scott’s two expeditions are unhappily exemplary. Naval medicine ends up where it began: in ignorance and with nothing more substantial to rely on than conjecture. In their irritation with what they take to be the carelessness causing this terrible step backward, its premier historians begin to share a little of the darkness and the passion they lament. I think this leakage from one category of knowledge, or frame of representation, to another—let us say from the inside of confusion and emotion to the outside of observational exactness or theoretical symmetry—is typical of any encounter with scurvy no matter how refined or academic. It is a disease that finds all boundaries porous and (like the plague) abolishes all differences, looping cause into effect, the future into the past, and tempting the audience out of their seats and onto the stage; and it is to this leakage I want now to turn, beginning with my own specimen of it.
In any narrative of scurvy, there are two relatively secure points from which triangulations may be made, and these are the rival positions maintained between those who thought scurvy was owing to a deficiency in diet and those who believed that it was a toxic state brought on by a miasma in the atmosphere or a poison in the food. Insofar as this debate concerned nutrition, it divided over a diet that was either deficient or defective: either there was something lacking in what was eaten, or something present in it that was inimical to health. In a recent essay, Mark Harrison has shown how neatly these opposing views were represented by Blane and Trotter, even though they were proponents of the identical remedy. Blane did not regard citrus as a food but as a medicine capable of correcting a debility arising from “a vitiated diet, consisting in salted animal food” (Blane 1799: 479). It was a remedy, not a supplement. Trotter, on the other hand, was convinced that a diet without fresh fruit, vegetables, or well-prepared lemon juice was failing to supply a catalyst for the oxygen the body needed (Harrison 2013: 7–25). Lind, like Blane, believed that toxicity in food was a powerful factor in scorbutic cases, arguing that any aliment producing a bilious reaction would undermine a remedy based on citrus or fresh food. “I am fully convinced,” he wrote in his Postscript to the 1757 edition of his Treatise, “that whatever weakens the constitution, and especially the organs of digestion, may serve without any other cause to introduce this disease … even among such as live on fresh vegetables, greens, or the most wholesome diet, and the purest air” (quoted in Trotter 1795: 78). At the time Lind wrote that, the consensus among naval administrators and seamen was about to fall behind malt wort and the theory that it supplied the body with the fixed air (carbon dioxide) that was lost in long voyages. But by the time Trotter was writing, there was an equally strong party in favor of the supplemental virtue of citrus juice, a view that was to last until the Admiralty report on the calamity of the Nares expedition. This was the last official endorsement of lime juice before the biochemical discoveries of the 1930s, but it was not unanimous: Dr. Rae stood up for deficiency of diet along with the bulk of the committee, but Dr. Leach believed the problem lay in the bad quality of the food, largely preserved in tins, a suspicion that had been getting stronger since the loss of Franklin’s expedition (RCA 1877: vii).
By the time Scott embarked on his two expeditions, the dominant theory was that bacteria growing in food, especially imperfectly canned meat, were responsible for scurvy. This was espoused by the influential physician Sir Almroth Wright and by the surgeons on the two expeditions: Reginald Koettlitz, Edward Wilson, and E. L. Atkinson. When Atkinson gave a lecture on scurvy in 1911 to the people of the Terra Nova, he stated that the first cause of scurvy was tainted food, producing acid intoxication of the blood followed by the myriad symptoms of the disease (Scott 1947: 300–301). It is evident that the same germ theory governed the practice of Koettlitz and Wilson, for when scurvy struck the Discovery, the latter wrote, “The outbreak is unaccountable, for nothing radically wrong with the hygiene has been discovered” (Wilson 1967: 201). But by the time he sailed again with Scott, Wilson was convinced, for reasons that shortly will become apparent, that seal meat would stop scurvy; but Atkinson was skeptical and thought lime juice useful only if taken regularly, which evidently it was not. He said fresh vegetables would soon restore health, but they were simply not to be had in the Antarctic. Although proponents of citrus were not a powerful caucus by this time, seal meat had plenty of adherents. The Admiralty Committee of 1877 recommended crews in the polar regions consume as large a proportion of fresh meat as it was possible to obtain (RCA 1877: xxii). A Royal Society report on scurvy of 1900 likewise emphasized the value of fresh meat (Carpenter 1986: 149). The Norwegians Nansen and Amundsen were enthusiasts for this solution to the problem of scurvy at the poles: “Everyone, without exception, preferred seal meat to tinned foods” (Amundsen [1912] 1976: 51). Shackleton, who had suffered badly from scurvy on the Discovery expedition, believed in the defective food theory, but on the Nimrod expedition proved himself a great eater of seal and penguin, and did not become scorbutic.
Scott’s experience on the Discovery expedition was not as alarming as Shackleton’s, but he got scurvy along with Wilson and described very well the terrible lassitude that comes with it (Scott 1907: 2.121). There was another symptom that had been discussed in the Admiralty Report which he experienced but did not recognize: the fantasy or dream of food. Scott had begun by finding seal meat unpalatable and blubber so disgusting he thought it tainted the meat. Yet once scurvy made itself felt, he caught himself indulging a special relish for blubber and recalling with hopeless longing feasts of seal: seal soup made of seal blood and porridge strengthened with seal liver (2.79, 51). In the course of the Admiralty enquiry of 1877, Dr. Buzzard was asked about dreams of food: “Would you consider these phenomena as a mental expression, urging the dreamer to the choice of a food best suited to his condition?” “Yes,” he replied, “I should certainly” (RCA 1877: 198). This is a conclusion Scott never allows himself to reach because the flesh and organs of seals are antiscorbutic only in the negative sense that they allow his men to consume protein uncontaminated by ptomaine or other poisons. When hunting was good, “I was able to give the satisfactory order that no tinned meat of any description should be issued” (Scott 1907: 1.401).
Apart from the suspicion that their canned meat was tainted, there was no explanation for the arrival of scurvy or for its eventual disappearance. Seal is an “antidote” or “antiscorbutic” not because it contains something the other food lacks, but because it allows the poisonous constituent in their diet to be jettisoned: “Many cures might have been attributed to the virtues of a supposed antidote which were really due to a discontinuance of the article of food that caused the disease…. The evidence shows [scurvy] was caused by the food the discontinuance of which led to recovery” (1.405, 409). The truth was that, besides canned meat, their supplies contained under half the necessary amounts of niacin, thiamine, riboflavin, and vitamin D, and nothing at all of ascorbic acid (Watt, Freeman, and Bynum 1981: 167). Even the sledded rations contained insufficient calories for the work these men were doing. Nevertheless, Scott declares, “We are still unconscious of any element in our surroundings which might have fostered the disease, or of the neglect of any precaution which modern medical science suggests for its prevention” (Scott 1907: 1.403). He is driven to treat seal meat like pemmican, cooking it “again and again” in an effort to reduce its mass and make it easier to carry. But, of course, this does to seal meat what others had done to orange and lemon juice when they reduced it and boiled away its virtue: “We are rather afraid that our seal-meat has suffered from the heat, and that it is not as antiscorbutic as it was” (2.84). When an opportunity arises experimentally to assess the virtue of fresh meat, it isn’t taken. They have a Christmas feast with biscuit and seal liver, and everyone with scorbutic symptoms feels better; but Scott puts it down to the food in general—the flour, biscuit, sugar, butter, pea flour, tea, chocolate, jam, and marmalade—not to the liver, brains, blood, and flesh of seals that supplies the deficiency of the other. This is where one feels like shouting out down the years at him, “Can’t you see that there is something in seal meat that is not in anything else you are eating, and that you are the better for it?”
***
Scurvy was singular, like no other disease, and yet it was like them all. It was unique and multiple at the same time, unparalleled and common. Trotter wrote in his Observations on the Scurvy (1792), “Throughout the whole symptoms of this disease, there is something so peculiar to itself, that no description, however accurate it may be, can convey to the reader a proper idea of its nature” (Trotter 1792: 71). He went on, “The debility of Scurvy is of so singular a nature, that nothing seems analogous to it: certain it is, that no disease is related to it…. [It] is attended by a train of symptoms peculiar to itself, and which the genius of the distemper has rendered extremely difficult to explain” (106). He was enlarging on Lind, who was adamant that “the scurvy is not a hodge-podge or combination of various difference diseases, but is itself a simple identical malady,” but given to protean manifestations (Lind 1757: 351). The exhibition of scorbutic “genius” was variously esteemed extraordinary (Lind), wonderful (Walter), miraculous (Benjamin Morrell), scarcely credible (Philip Saumarez), and (as we have heard) “infinite and unsearchable” (Woodall). Jacques Cartier called it an “unknowen sicknes … after the strangest sort that ever was eyther heard of or seene” (Keevil 1957: 1.86). On the other hand, the “Iliad of Diseases,” identified by Thomas Willis, “extends itself into so various and manifold Symptoms, that it can neither be comprehended by one definition, or scarce by a singular description” (Willis 1684: 170, 169). Blane called it a jumble, and many people (Thomas Sydenham among them) viewed it as a crowd or multitude of diseases masquerading as one: its name legion, for it was many (Carpenter 1986: 41). The poet Abraham Cowley exclaimed, “A Thousand horrid Shapes the Monster wears, / And in as many Hands fierce Arms it bears” (Cowley 1881: 2.260). At its various stages, it would exhibit the signs of phthisis, asthma, sclerosis, tympany, leprosy, gangrene, dysentery, rheumatism, sea-fever (calenture), venereal disease, dropsy, and mania.
Here is Cowley’s survey of its variety:
When Men for want of Breath can hardly blow
Nor Purple Streams in azure Channels flow,
Then the bold Enemy shews he’s too nigh,
One so mischievous can not hidden lie.
The Teeth drop out, and noisome grows the Breath,
The Man not only smells, but looks like Death.
Qualms, Vomiting, and torturing Gripes within,
Besides unseemly Spots upon the Skin,
His other Symptoms are; and with Clouds the Mind
To Life itself makes Living an Offence. (Cowley 1881: 2.260).
To Cowley’s list of shortness of breath, problems with the flow of blood, hem-orrhaging under the skin, biliousness, constipation, and severe depression, Camoens contributed the lurid addition reported by da Gama, namely that the blackened gums of the victims began to rot and had to be pared away with knives. As time went on, others were added, such as thickening and coarsening of the skin, contraction of the tendons of the legs, severe pains and swelling in the joints, and bloody stools. When opened, scorbutic corpses were found to have lost cartilage from the knees, ankles, and ribs, and their bones were black with blood that had leaked from the muscles. In his contribution to the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions (1721) concerning the outbreak of scurvy in Paris in 1699, Francois Poupart reported that the bones of the victims clattered as they were carried away, and that “their Ribs [were] separated from their Gristles … the Ligaments corroded … the Bones separated from each other … black, worm-eaten and rotten” (Poupart in Jones 1721: 5.360). Lind could hear scorbutic ribs creaking against the thorax, and Harvey detected “a Cracking and Noise of the Joynts” (Harvey 1675: 27; Lind 1753: 315). Henry Ettrick, surgeon of Anson’s Centurion, noted the same blackening of the bones among the dead of Anson’s voyage, “Their Bones, after the Flesh was scraped off, appeared quite black” (Williams 1999: 60). This macabre detail was reported of Crusaders dying during the siege of Damietta in 1218, “Their hips and shin bones turn[ed] black and putrefied” (Bollet 2004: 174). Those in the last stages of decay were regarded as living dead, rotting before they were in the grave. James Rymer thought, “A person so affected is really in a state of actual dissolution and decomposition” (Rymer 1793: 36), an idea and an image imported by Coleridge into The Rime of the Ancient Mariner for the personifications of Death and his mate, the one exhibiting the authentic color and texture of scorbutic bone—“His bones were black with many a crack, / All black and bare, I ween; / Jet-black and bare” (Coleridge 2004: 152, ll. 181–85)—and the other the unnatural hue of roughened skin that made it look like leprosy, ornamented in the accompanying illustration with a subcutaneous hemorrhage masquerading as a beauty spot on her thigh (Fig. 4).
The reason for the variety of physical symptoms of scurvy is to be found in the crucial part played by the antioxidant molecule of vitamin C in the synthesis of collagen. Collagen knits the cells together, and when it fails, the cells dissolve. The disintegration of tissue is indicated in the collapse of the walls of blood vessels, beginning with the smallest. The tiny hemorrhages at the seat of hair follicles, called petechiae, are usually among the earliest physical signs of scurvy, along with the sponginess of the gums, also owing to the collapse of the capillaries (Harrison and May 2009: 719–30). Petechiae are followed by ecchymoses, large areas of discolored skin that soon ulcerate, leaking an evil-smelling fluid. The foul breath of the victims comes from the extravasated tissue that begins to blacken and bulge from the mouth (called “bullocks’ liver” by sailors), hiding the teeth that are left. Sir Richard Burton in his translation of Camoens names it gangrene, “Gangrene that carried foul and fulsome taint, / Spreading infection through the neighb’ring air” (Burton 1881: 2.620). The arteries themselves are then affected, becoming increasingly fragile, while the blood thickens, often ending in an aneurysm, seizure, or infarction when the patient attempts to move, breathes fresh air, drinks cold water, or hears a sudden noise. Difficulty in breathing would be compounded in these cases by the degeneration of the lung tissue, so that coughing blood was occasionally an accompaniment, often mistaken for consumption. Ernest Shackleton was badly afflicted with this symptom of the disease. Thomas Willis pointed to a “dyscrasie” and “foeculence” of the blood as lying at the heart of the thirteen symptoms he lists of scurvy (Willis 1684: 171, 173, 179). The walls of the stomach, intestines, and bowel were known to leak blood, triggering the bilious symptoms often associated with scurvy, along with constipation or diarrhea, until, in the final stages, bleeding from the anus would exhibit the same symptom as dysentery. Subperiosteal bleeding from the muscles accounts for the blackness of bones, and it is also lack of collagen that explains the disappearance of cartilage, leaving he joints uncushioned and, in the end, unhinged from the frame of the skeleton. The destruction of cells causes the old wounds of scorbutic victims to reopen and old fractures to break apart again. It is mentioned as one of the chief causes of Captain Lawrence Oates’s difficulties shortly before his death on Scott’s second Antarctic expedition that a broken femur from the Boer War became unknit owing to scurvy and began to crepitate, causing him atrocious pain (Cherry-Garrard 1994: xxxiii). All organic functions are compromised in this state of affairs: the weakening of the surface, circulation, digestion, sinews, and frame of the body makes it impossible for it to fuel and animate itself, introducing the languor, loss of blood, and deterioration of tissue that dramatically signposts the progress of the disease toward putrefaction and death. Scott remembered, “It was an effort to move…. I had an almost unconquerable inclination to sit down wherever a seat could be found…. To write, or even to think had become totally distasteful, and sometimes quite impossible” (Scott 1907: 2.121–22).
However, there is no symptom of scurvy that may not fail to manifest when expected or to remit when least likely. There is no telling why Columbus should have crossed the Atlantic without a single case while Cartier’s expedition forty years later was severely stricken; or why Cook in the Endeavour should have escaped its visitations while Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, pursuing a similar route through the Pacific, did not. Some experts said scurvy was most likely to attack the young and vigorous, while others said that the most vulnerable were the weak and dejected. Once established, scurvy did not always start with petechiae and swollen gums; it could begin with swollen joints and aching limbs, or with a bilious gut. “The Captain has a return of swelled feet & Obstructions,” Forster reported on the second voyage of Cook, “my son likewise has swelled Legs, all owing to the Scurvy” (Forster 1982: 4.689). On the basis of his observations on the Centurion, Richard Walter reported the inconstancy of symptoms together with the irregularity of their appearance, “For scarcely any two persons have complaints exactly resembling each other; and where there has been found some conformity in the symptoms, the order of their appearance has been totally different” (Walter 1838: 102).
Victims usually succumbed to dejection and homesickness; on the other hand, some were reported in good spirits, even ebullient, until the very end. “Some Hours before they die, they are taken light-headed, and fall a joking and laughing; and in this Humour they expire” (Bulkeley and Cummins 1927: 97). Some recovered with miraculous speed as soon as they reached shore, while others were affected for the rest of their lives (Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 3.125). Many examples have already been cited of cures achieved with remedies whose success could only have been as placebo, a fact not lost on certain astute commanders such as the Prince of Orange, who gave pills of chalk and sugar to his scurvied troops at the siege of Breda, whereupon “Cheerfulness appears in every countenance, and an universal faith prevails in the sovereign virtues of the remedies” (Falconer 1791: 127). William Falconer gets the story from Lind, who said it was an anecdote “in every respect consonant to the most accurate observations, and best attested descriptions of the disease” (Lind 1753: 128). “It would look like reviving the age of miracles,” says Trotter, taking the opposite view of this trick at Breda, “to say, that the bloated face assumed its ruddy hue, the contracted ham became straight … in proportion to the glad tidings” (Trotter 1792: 122). Nowhere is the sudden shift from prostration to joy more common than when a ship with scurvy comes in sight of the shore, and men haul themselves on deck to behold the vegetable world that will save them. Walter assures the reader that even the worst affected on the Centurion drew strength and spirits merely from viewing the prospect of Juan Fernandez. Trotter confirms that “the patient in the inveterate stage of the disease seems to gather strength even from the sight of the fruit” (141). Yet there are stories of sailors getting worse after eating it and becoming scorbutic after drinking lime juice (Keevil 1957: 1.116). The genius of scurvy was never likely to fail before the force of a straightforward remedy. A fresh sweet-smelling breeze will revive the languid mariner, Richard Mead assured his readers (Mead 1794: 112); yet Saumarez observed that his invalids no sooner crawled on deck to breathe the uncontaminated air than instantly they perished, as if a fetid atmosphere and a filthy berth had become their natural element (Saumarez 1739–43, 23 April and 30 May 1741).
I have suggested that Perry’s and MacBride’s use of malt as a cure of scurvy may have seemed to succeed because without their knowing, it was curing pellagra, caused by a shortage of vitamin B that malt restored. If scurvy comprehends a host of other diseases, it sometimes enlists under the flag of another malady. Illnesses arising from nutritional deficits were bound occasionally to accompany scurvy, confounding symptoms that were already confounded enough, so it is worthwhile briefly pointing out what these are. The three confederates of scurvy are night blindness (nyctalopia), pellagra, and beriberi, owing respectively to deficiencies of riboflavin, niacin, and thiamin. The first induces a retinopathic condition that makes it impossible to see in the dark, or in poor light. Pellagra is defined by the four Ds—dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and death—and is most widely known for the personality changes associated with alcoholism, which generally provokes a rapid depletion of niacin. It is noteworthy that improvements in the milling of cornmeal created an epidemic of pellagra that affected three million people in the American South between 1906 and 1940, causing a hundred thousand deaths (Bollet 2004: 160). It has been blamed for Cook’s odd behaviour before his death. Sir James Watt supposed that Cook’s bad attack of colic on the second voyage was caused by a roundworm infection caught in Tahiti that left his intestines unable to absorb vitamin B, leaving him prey to the ungovernable swings of mood on the third voyage that are typical of the disease (Watt 1979: 155). Pellagra is also accompanied by eruptions on the exposed skin of the arms, neck, and face, and by a staggering walk and a swaying habit of the upper body. Mania and convulsive tears are typical too (Carpenter 1981: 9–11). Kerguelen, the French navigator, complained of erysipelas on his second voyage, so it is possible that his erratic and violent actions during that expedition to the Indian Ocean were, like Cook’s during his third voyage, owing at least partly to a lack of niacin.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard remembered that Captain Scott, who did not believe that any nutritional factor was involved in scurvy, was a victim of moods and depressions lasting for weeks, and that “he cried more easily than any man I have ever met” (Cherry-Garrard 1994: 206). The famine aboard Jean de Lery’s ship while making its way from Brazil to France resulted in symptoms that sound like the dementia of pellagra: “The senses are alienated and the wits dispersed; all this makes one ferocious, and engenders a wrath that can truly be called a kind of madness” (de Lery 1992: 212). Captain Cheap lost his wits after the wreck of the Wager, shooting one of his midshipman fatally in the face and then not long afterward forgetting his own name (Byron 1768: 173). Bligh said that some of the men in the Bounty’s launch had “apparent debility of understanding” by the time they got to Timor (Bligh 1937: 2.219). The Muselmaenner of Auschwitz, identified by Primo Levi and so called because the victims would sway like students in a madrassa reading the Q’ran and stagger when they walked, were exhibiting classic symptoms of pellagra, anciently known as “the dance of St. Guy” (Agamben 1999: 45; Carpenter 1981: 9–11). Ptyalism, or the overproduction of saliva, is a symptom of pellagra, and so is black tongue—both listed by Willis as symptoms of scurvy (Carpenter 1981: 214; Willis 1684: 63, 179).
As for beriberi, John Davis’s description of his terrible journey from the South Atlantic to Ireland includes the swollen legs and genitals characteristic of the disease. Foster identified similar swellings as a recurrence of scurvy in the lower limbs of Cook and his own son, but it may have been beriberi (Forster 1982: 4.689). Certainly the dropsical symptoms associated with scurvy, the flesh pitting when pressed, is typical of beriberi, as is nerve damage. Cook’s prohibition against the eating of “slush,” the fatty residue left on the sides of the copper boilers after cooking salt meat, was intended to prevent a set of reactions he called scorbutic, but that may very well have belonged to beriberi or to tropical sprue. Trotter describes its effect on some Chinese cooks who were especially fond of slush: “They became extremely corpulent, and were shortly overrun with scurvy…. [Their] skin appeared as if it would burst … [yet] their cunning to procure the slush of the meat exceeded all description” (Trotter 1795: 54). Byron remembered Cheap at his worst with “his legs … as big as mill posts, though his body appeared to be nothing but skin and bone” (Byron 1778: 173), suggesting a combination of all three diseases: scurvy, pellagra, and beriberi.
The genius of scurvy overwhelms the distinctions between all other diseases, shuffling their symptoms as it pleases and dealing them out in macabre permutations. This genius extends to the environment, too, defined not simply by the body of the victim, but reaching to the timbers of the ship, the air through which it moves and the ocean on which it floats. Seldom was a serious outbreak of scurvy unattended by horrid transformations of the ship, for the sick often outnumbered the healthy and, finding it difficult to move about and with no one to help them, they were left unclean. While that would produce a noisome state of affairs under any circumstances, it was exacerbated by the putrescence that characterized the disease: the breath and stools of the victims were widely reported to be exceptionally malodorous, like the lesions on their skin. Witnesses describe a circuit of infection, with men falling sick—or sicker—from the filth sick men produce. Alain Corbin reports that in the catalogue of bad smells scurvy has always held first place (Corbin 1986: 41). In the course of Alvaro de Mendana’s navigation of the Pacific, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros found himself with only six men capable of work, the rest below deck groaning and succumbing to the miasma they were making: “The sick became rabid from the effluvia of mud and filth that was in the ship” (de Quiros 1904: 1.105). A surgeon on the prison ships at Brest described a scene of multiplying miseries: “As the heat and stench increased, many fainted, some broke out into raving madness, uttering the most incoherent and horrid imprecations” (Crosfield 1797: 5). Philip Saumarez on the Centurion, in Anson’s squadron, reported, “Our sick … caus’d such an unwholesome Stench as contributed to Infect the rest” (Saumarez 1739–43, 23 April 1741): putrefying bodies “spreading infection through the neighb’ring air,” as Richard Burton puts it in his translation of Camoens. One of the most powerful theories concerning the origin of scurvy traced it from the air, asserting that nothing was more corrupting than the foul air emanating from scorbutic flesh (Addington 1753: 3–4).
Although contagion is often discounted in discussions of scurvy, Lind was interested in the idea, while the Encyclopedie (1751–77) identifies it directly as a contagious disease, a position later adopted by the American chemist Samuel Mitchill (Lind 1753: 2; “Scorbut” 1765; Mitchill in Trotter 1804: 2.406). The circular contagion obscenely evident in de Quiros’s and Saumarez’s accounts provides a notable example of scurvy’s genius insofar as it is seen causing itself. Like all personifications, and like the gods, it abolishes the difference between cause and effect: it is what it does (Foxhall 2012: 131). Scott seldom refers to it as anything else but a formidable intelligence, inimical and cunning: “The evil having come, the great thing now is to banish it…. [Our] determination [is] not to give our dread enemy another chance” (Scott 1907: 1.399–400). A. H. Markham recalled what it was like to fall under its influence as he and the crew of the Alert sleighed northward toward the Pole: “The terrible idea forced itself on us that this fearful disease was slowly but surely laying its hands on us” (Markham 1880: 275). It was not difficult to imagine a scorbutic hold filled with rotting bodies as the center of evil. Having visited Paradise, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville was compelled to report as he approached Indonesia, “There have been many arguments about where Hell is situated, truly we have found it” (Bougainville 2002: 135).
The effluvia of scorbutic bodies were believed to rot the very fabric of the vessel. Thomas Trotter gained his first knowledge of scurvy aboard slave ships, where it was rife. These vessels were commonly supposed not to last more than ten voyages, for “the heat and stench arising from diseased bodies rot the very planks” (Coleridge [1796] 1970: 138). In the poem which owes so much to Coleridge’s interest in the effects of scurvy, the decayed state of Death and Life-in-Death is answerable to the skeletal and disarticulated state of the spectre-bark on which they sail, “a plankless Thing / A rare Anatomy!” (Coleridge 1993: 31). In scorbutic voyages, this diseased equivalence between the ship and its company is often noticed. At the furthest reach of Mendana’s expedition, the corruption of bodies (“ulcers coming out on feet and legs”) was matched by the parlous state of the vessel: “Of the hull of the ship, it may be said with truth that only the beams kept the people above water, for they were of that excellent wood of Guayaquil called quatchapeli.… The ship was so open in the dead wood that the water ran in and out … when we sailed on a bowline” (de Quiros 1904: 1.105–7). Similarly, when he was sailing in bad weather off the northeastern coast of Australia, Matthew Flinders reported many men down with scurvy, himself covered with scorbutic sores, and the ship in a crazy condition, its bottom worm-eaten and leaky, the stemson decayed, with “rotten … timbers, planking, bends, tree-nails &c” (Flinders 1814: 2.135; Flinders 2015: 2.179). Carteret found himself in the same condition off Pitcairn Island, the ship taking water, sails splitting, the rigging worn out, and scurvy making great progress among the crew (Carteret 1965: 1.151–54). On several occasions, British crews taking French prizes were convinced they had been tainted by the enemy craft (Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 3.133, 160). Perhaps the most lurid example of a ship disintegrating alongside its crew, prey to its own unique scorbutic taint, is provided by John Davis in the journal of his voyage from Brazil, their only food a freight of dried penguins.
Our dried Penguins began to corrupt, and there bred in them a most lothsome and ugly worme of an inch long…. There was nothing that they did not devoure, only yron excepted: our clothes, boots, shooes, hats, shirts, stockings: and, for the ship, they did so eat the timbers as that we greatly feared they would undoe us by gnawing through the ships side … so that at last we could not sleep for them, for they would eate our flesh and bite like Mosquitos. In this woful case … our men began to fall sick of such a monstrous disease, as I thinke the like was never heard of: for in their ankles it began to swell; from thence in two days it would be in their breasts, so that they could not draw their breath. (Davis 1880: 125)
It is a short step from the twin corruption of a ship and its crew to the ocean itself. The Ancient Mariner’s memorable exclamation, “The very deep did rot: O Christ! / That ever this should be! / Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea” (Coleridge 2004: 171, ll. 123–26; Fig. 5), is indebted to Sir Richard Hawkins’s description of a rotting sea during a calm in the South Atlantic when his crew were already scorbutic, infected by the “loathsome sloathfulnesse” of the ocean itself. “The Sea became so replenished with severall sorts of gellys, and formes of Serpents, Adders, and Snakes, as seemed wonderfull: some greene, some blacke, some yellow, some white, some of divers colours, and many of them had life.” It was Hawkins’s opinion that the sickness was latent in the sea, “And were it not for the moving of the Sea by the force of windes, tydes, and currants, it would corrupt all the world” (Hawkins 1906: 17.75–76). His experience of the sinister extent of the wonders of scurvy was not unique. On his voyage to the Pacific, John Byron found himself in the South Atlantic with all his senior officers incapable of duty, surrounded by a sea “as red as blood” (Byron in Hawkesworth 1773: 1.12). On the same ship, John Bulkeley remembered the dying captain prophesying with terrifying exactness the sufferings in store for the living just before the ship sailed through a bloody sea. Johann Reinhold Forster made experiments on phosphorescence in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, believing that the beauty of the phenomenon was owing to the putrefaction of tiny mollusks and fish, rottenness at the heart of “that luminous appearance which we so much admire”—a mixture that alternately attracted and repelled Stevenson when he sailed past the “precarious annular gangways” of the Southern Ocean (Forster 1996: 27; Stevenson 1922: 16.212).
From the first, reports of scurvy had been considered an unhappy notice of a disgraceful affliction. It was foulness itself, having its source in foulness, and capable of making all things foul. Its presence betokened dirtiness, idleness, and loss of morale. After Cook’s success with hygiene, diet, and medication on the Endeavour, there was apparently no reason why any well-stored and well-run ship should suffer from it, no matter how far it had to sail. So when George Vancouver, who had been a midshipman on the Resolution during the second voyage, and on her consort the Discovery during the third, found scurvy on his own ship when he was off the northwest coast of North America, he was devastated. It caused him “utter astonishment and surprise.” All the measures taken by him in imitation of Cook’s model “on this occasion seemed to have lost their effect,” and his disappointment was “inexpressible” (Vancouver 1984: 4.1471). Bligh had been master of the Resolution and was under no illusion of what was expected of a naval commander on voyages to the South Seas. “The scurvy is really a disgrace to a ship where it is at all common, provided they have it in their power to be supplied with dried malt, sour Krout, and portable soup” (Bligh 1937: 219). When scurvy made its appearance on the Bounty, during a voyage when food and its distribution had been the subject of furious disputes, Bligh was having none of it. He had been punctilious in following Cook’s rules, which he had learned at firsthand; so when his surgeon, who was an alcoholic, reported what were fairly reliable symptoms of scurvy, although they did not include ulcerated gums or loose teeth, he put them down at first to prickly heat, and finally to rheumatism (1.359–63). James Morrison was in no doubt it was scurvy, reporting it in his journal, adding that the worst affected were given malt (Morrison 1935: 29). When he read this, Bligh made a marginal comment in the third person: “Captain Bligh never had a symptom of Scurvy in any Ship he commanded” (Bligh 1937: 153). A blend of the same surprise and denial is found in Scott’s journal when scurvy attacks the Discovery expedition. Unable to explain the presence in his company of a disease he cannot but acknowledge as a reproach, Scott finds himself caught between two stools. His candid resolution to “have everything above suspicion” sits uneasily next to his prudential reservation: “The great thing is to pretend that there is nothing to be alarmed at” (Scott 1907: 400, 399).
He took up a position on scurvy that has always helped confound the facts of it. It is possible that Cook’s proud boast of never losing a man to scurvy in the Pacific did not extend to Tupaia, the Ra’iatean priest who perished in Batavia, probably of a mixture of typhoid fever and the scurvy he contracted off the Australian coast four months before. Cook’s cold summary of the case indicates problems with food and temperament, none of which he cared to blame directly on scurvy: “Tupia[’s] death indeed cannot be said to be owing wholly to the unwholsom air of Batavia, the long want of a Vegetable diat [sic] which he had all his life before been use’d to had brought upon him all the disorders attending a sea life. He was a Shrewd, Sensible, Ingenious Man, but proud and obstinate which often made his situation on board both disagreeable to himself and those about him, and tended much to promote the deceases which put a period to his life” (Cook 1955: 442; Druett 2011: 209). Cook and Bligh perhaps did not want their records blemished by any unambiguous trace of scurvy, but there were other reasons for loathing and disowning it. Lassitude was the most predictable symptom of this infirmity, and the least likely to get a tolerant reception on a ship, where heavy labor was the priority. “The truth is,” wrote Melville in Omoo, “that among sailors as a class, sickness at sea is so heartily detested, and the sick so little cared for, that the greatest invalid generally strives to mask his sufferings” (Melville 1847: 48). By “sickness,” Melville almost always means scurvy.
This kind of discretion has often acted as a filter when reporting nutritional diseases. E. L. Atkinson is supposed (I believe erroneously) to have sunk the evidence of scurvy on the four corpses in Scott’s tent, believing such an affliction to be incompatible with tragic heroism. Wilson did not want to tell Scott when he diagnosed it. He wrote: “Royds was talking to Armitage in his cabin, so I reported it to them, and at present we are the only three who know about it” (Wilson 1967: 192). When the bad news was communicated to Scott the thought crossed his mind that he might keep it a secret, either by pretending to the men it was nothing serious, or by not including it in his official report: “I had been tempted to omit this matter as calculated to cause unnecessary anxiety, but, reflecting the rumour might spread from some other source and become greatly exaggerated, I had finally decided to state the facts exactly as they were” (Scott 1907: 240). However, he was very relieved to see the scorbutic Shackleton carried off to New Zealand. His Jonah had been satisfactorily ejected, along with the disease he carried: “The word ‘scurvy’ has not been heard this year, and the doctor tells me there is not a sign of it in the ship” (150).
Commercial self-interest prevented the full disclosure of the causes of infant scurvy in the United States in the 1930s; and when in 1942 in Britain, a Manchester doctor reported to the Ministry of Health that he had diagnosed eight cases of scurvy in the previous four months, the official response entirely neglected serious food shortages as a threat to public health, and read (much like Cook’s judgment of Tupaia) as follows: “It is quite clear that such persons as do suffer from scurvy do so of their own free will” (Carpenter 1986: 157, 164; The Observer, 20 September 2000, 9). Even after the importance of vitamins to human health was well established in the twentieth century, a powerful preference for germ theories over nutritional regimes, combined with corporate cunning and political opportunism, led to the disgrace of figures such as Thomas Babcock who led the fight against pellagra in the southern states between 1908 and 1914. His epidemiological work was condemned as injurious to the state of South Carolina (Bollet 2004: 161).
Among the reasons that prompted the denial of scurvy on a ship, shame is certainly a powerful one, and not simply because scurvy is associated with dirt, bad smells, and loss of esprit de corps. In a world where order was maintained by means of hierarchies of command and an elaborate division of labor, any interference with the steady achievement of outcomes was dangerous. Greg Dening’s analysis of Bligh’s bad language showed that vituperative and abusive speech was not only impolite and demeaning but destructive of the grammar of command on a ship, allowing passion to usurp meaning and insults to supplant and cheapen the words which, according to the customary confirmation of any order (“Make it so!”), rendered things as they ought to be. In the history of whaling, where skippers deliberately stayed at sea in order not to lose their crews, their own tempers quickly became ungovernable. Melville and Beale suffered from this, Beale remembering how his captain became intolerably abusive, but notwithstanding that he had ordered the second mate to overload a cannon, cried like a child when it took off the man’s arm (Beale 1839: 343–44). Ahab is the fictional synthesis of the infatuation of scorbutic commanders. Inexplicable, terrible, and capricious, they exhibited the properties of scurvy itself, lieutenants of a dangerous and unpredictable force menacing the system and even the physical structure of a ship, just as it menaced the taxonomy of knowledge and the propriety of language. The leakage of the sickness from one part of the body to another, from that body to other bodies, from bodies to minds and back again, from bodies to the frame of the vessel itself, and finally from there to the ocean and the air, proved how immune scurvy was to methods of definition and control. It could overrun every boundary on which physical coherence depended and every distinction on which language and specialist knowledge relied.
To some extent, any disease on a ship (especially an infectious one such as typhus or yellow fever) created disorder, but with scurvy, the leakage and loss of distinction was not limited to physical factors. In one way or another, it entered into the temperaments and minds of those involved and set loose those passions that people of a scientific or professional bent would rather not own they feel. We have heard Cook, Bligh, Vancouver, and Scott reacting to scurvy with painful astonishment and degrees of denial, finding it an impediment to the business in hand but also evidently disturbed by an ill-defined guilt they would rather disavow. With those unfortunate enough to succumb to the scorbutic temperament, it is clear that a plain statement of the case comes hard, evident from this querulous entry in William Wales’s journal: “Brewed Wort for some of the People who began to have symptoms of the Scurvy. I suppose I shall be believed when I say that I am unhappy in being one of them” (Cook 1961: 64, n. 3). Why should he not be believed, and what was the reason for his defensiveness? Presumably Wales was aware of Cook’s formidable reputation as a commander superior to the vagaries of this disease and knew how heretical his confession would sound. Possibly he went further, as if it were more than mere rhetorical or formal unhappiness that was his burden, but real misery at being part of a disgraceful community of suffering. Perhaps Wales was peering over the gap that separates the inside of unreflective passion, where he sits, from the outside of cool observation, where he used to belong, and it is a position he does not enjoy. Nevertheless, he recognizes in his skeptical audience a group of people with whom (for the moment at least) he has not much in common, especially of mutual confidence, whereas with his scorbutic companions, he is affected by what is affecting them, relying on them for company of a sort. Beginning his eyewitness account of the wreck of the Wager, John Byron feels obliged to excuse his position in the narrative as if starvation and scurvy had already excluded him from the company of his readers: “The greatest pain I feel in committing the following sheets to the press, arises from an apprehension that many of may readers will accuse me of egotism” (Byron 1778: v). William Funnell frankly offers his own miseries as entertainment for the public, convinced that pity is not a reaction he can expect: “The great Variety of Accidents we met with, and the … particular Accounts of the manner how our Attempts miscarried, I hope cannot but be very acceptable to the inquisitive Reader” (Funnell 1707: [ii]). In scurvy’s last great exhibition of its genius, the position of the sufferer was almost formalized. One of Shackleton’s team wrote, “If we had everything we wanted we should have no privations to write about and that would be a serious loss to the ‘book.’ Privations make a book sell like anything” (Alexander 1919: 195). The estimate of the reader’s attitude is not mistaken, for in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love (1947) there is a character called Davey: “Fascinated by Polar expeditions, he liked to observe, from a safe distance, how far the body can go when driven upon thoroughly undigestible foodstuffs deficient in vitamins. ‘Pemmican,’ he would say gleefully falling upon the delicious food for which Aunt Emily’s cook was renowned, ‘must have been so bad for them!’ ” (Mitford 1947: 191–92). Whatever makes Davey’s victims take the risk of showing their scars in the public, it is evidently as imperative as the impulse that drives the Ancient Mariner periodically to give his story to a listener not apparently selected for his compassionate nature. That is to say, it is not an appeal for sympathy, nor is it a plea for absolution; and though it may be defensive, it is far from diffident. It is as if the person on the inside is saying to the one on the outside, “Maybe I cannot say anything you will credit or tolerate, and maybe my misery amuses you, but I have seen what you will never see, and felt what you will never feel”—the candor of passion showing off its impenetrability to prudential selfishness.
First of all, Thomas Willis and subsequently Thomas Trotter took up the challenge of scorbutic passion, showing how the gruesome alterations of the body were accompanied by alterations sometimes quite as shocking in the mind. Willis thought that the scorbutic taint generally weakened the “moisturizing juice” and “nervous stock” of the animal spirits, leaving them thin and languid (Willis 1684: 179). This sour liquid occasioned a shrinkage of the self he calls “a dejection and as it were a falling down of the whole Soul” (ibid.). But typically, this is a scorbutic symptom that can make way for one quite opposite in its energy and drift. “For indeed, the Liquor watering both the nerves, and the nervous parts, sometimes disceding from its naturall disposition, is so much stuff’d with heterogeneous and explosive particles, that the animal spirits … are irritated into continuall, as it were cracklings, or convulsive explosions” (61). There are some memorable accounts of these cracklings and irritations in the literature of scurvy, two of which I shall briefly mention.
In a strange aside in the journal of his first voyage, Cook confesses that if it were not for the pleasure of being the first discoverer even of trifling hydrographic details such as sands and shoals, his work would be insupportable. By the third voyage, his addiction to the private pleasure of seeing things for himself became distinctly stronger and more exotic when, for instance, his rapidly growing interest in local ceremonies required he take his clothes off to witness one in Tonga. Along with this active interest in anthropology, Cook became increasingly passionate if his will were thwarted, indulging the kind of bad language that lost Bligh his ship. He would stamp on the quarterdeck in a rage, “paroxysms of passion, in which he often threw himself upon the slightest occasion” (Cook 1967: 1.cliii). Even more sinister, he began to order punishments for local thieves that were torturous (slicing to the bone, cutting off their ears) and well outside the remit of his instructions and commission. At least two of his officers thought he was infatuated in the weeks before his death, so prone was he to intense tides of feeling and irrational actions, including fits of foot-stamping so extravagant they compared them to the Maori rhythmic dance, the heiva. If Cook were suffering from severe pellagra at this stage, as Watt suggests, it is not entirely idle to suppose his dancing the heiva was symptomatic of the spasmodic beat of the ancient dance of St. Guy, one of its notable symptoms. In any event, Watt’s interpretation of this phase of his life as consistent with the nervous or irritated manifestations of a deficit of niacin seems entirely plausible as an explanation for behavior so odd that it still troubles his biographers to explain it.
Ives-Joseph Kerguelen-Tremarec was a Breton officer of the French Navy who made two voyages of discovery to the island in the southern Indian Ocean that bears his name. Each expedition was an uncanny reflection of the other, during neither of which did he actually set foot on his island, and of which he never wrote his own account, copying it instead from a French translation of an unauthorized account of Cook’s third voyage, written by John Rickman. But he was sufficiently a victim of scurvy to write a firsthand account of the disease, Reflections sur le scorbut (1782), an affliction that coincided in his case with various and furious extravagances, such as deserting his consort not once, but twice; carrying his mistress, Louise Seguin, on the second voyage; publicly accusing his senior officer de Cheyron of trying to seduce her; kicking her in the stomach in front his crew and then trying to throw her overboard; and, when he failed in that attempt, flinging two valuable chameleons of de Cheyron’s into the ocean instead (Boulaire 1997: 104–13, 143–45; Brossard 1970: 1.478; Delepine 1998: 113–15; Lamb 2005: 1–9). There is no apparent point of reconciliation between his paroxysms of jealousy and rage and his formal account of the disease that impelled him to indulge them, although it appears that his worst excesses coincided with a bad outbreak of scurvy on his ship, Le Roland (Delepine 1998: 115).
Trotter discusses an example of jealous rage very like Kerguelen’s: “Mr Farquhar, surgeon of the Captain, mentions a very strong case of jealousy that happened in that ship…. The wife [of the officer concerned] was young and remarkably handsome; and these fits were often caused by other men paying her attention” (Trotter 1804: 3.364). Although he doesn’t specify the presence of scurvy, he gives the story in the context of the symptoms of nervous debility that generally accompany it, such as imaginary fears, sudden dejection, “sighings, moanings, sudden laugher and crying” (3.362). He goes on, “The state of mind which attends this condition of body is difficult to be described … the temper is soured with trifles, becomes fretful, irritable, and passionate…. This gloomy turn of mind often assumes a temporary derangement of the intellect; and not only forgets all its old attachments, but shews the utmost signs of dislike to those who had been most dear” (3.364). In this labile condition, the scorbutic imagination is especially prone to nostalgia, a condition first formally named as such by Banks when the Endeavour was becoming scorbutic on the way to Batavia, now adjusted by Trotter to “scorbutic nostalgia” (Banks 1962: 2.145; Trotter 1792: 45). Banks noticed how, in this state of feeling, an emotion would be rapidly supplanted by its opposite when the ship turned for home, “The sick became well and the melancholy lookd gay” (Banks 1962: 2.145), a sequence Trotter noticed in reverse as his patients awoke from dreams of home to bitter reality: “In dreams they are tantalized by the favourite idea; and on waking the mortifying disappointment is expressed with the utmost regret, with groans, and weeping, altogether childish” (Trotter 1792: 45, 44). Several times, he notices their morbid susceptibility to slight impressions, resulting in tears, withdrawal, or interminable and pedantically exact descriptions of feelings arising “from any ruffle of temper occasioned by changeable weather, or other slight causes” (44). This susceptibility springs from a tenderness of nerves often observed in scorbutic cases. Sounds and smells could cause them bliss but also agony, or even kill them. Their imaginative lives were therefore very active even if they were not pleasant—much more so than their bodies. Scurvy provides, William Falconer believes, “a remarkable instance of the influence of the passions of the mind” (Falconer 1791: 124).
The neuroscientific explanation for such a strange affective counterpart to physical decay is as yet incomplete, but so far it offers this intriguing hint: As well as synthesizing collagen, ascorbate produces the chemicals crucial to the healthy action of the nervous system. It is especially important in sustaining the supply of dopamine and serotonin to the brain, responsible for regulating neuronal excitability (Harrison and May 2009). When these sensory modulators fail to work, the ear will hear too much, the palate taste, and the nose smell, more than can possibly be pleasant, and the eye become inordinately sensitive to light and color. These uninhibited sensations are commonly called “sensory phantoms,” the offspring of unregulated excitations in the cranial nerves, but actually they are intensifiers, carrying more information from the senses to the brain than it can handle, so that fragrance becomes disgusting, light blinding, and music deafening. The adjacency of scurvy to the legendary scandals of Bligh, Cook, and Kerguelen is simply to be observed at this point in my history. They serve to show that excitement arms the patient against the more languid tendencies of the disease and encourages an oscillation between feelings of the most opposite kinds: voluptuousness and terror, disgust and ecstasy, desolation and satisfaction, exuberance and languor. The naturalist Anders Sparrman landed at Dusky Bay with scurvy at the same early stage as that which Wales found so awkward to express. In his journal, he remembers how he shot some ducks: “The blood from these warm birds which were dying in my hands, running over my fingers, excited me to a degree I had never previously experienced This filled me with amazement, but the next moment I felt frightened” (Sparrman 1944: 49). It was prior to this, on the first loop into the Antarctic seas, that Cook saw on his rigging the most beautiful ornaments of ice he had ever seen, and no sooner was he charmed by the sight than he was terrified at the thought of the danger in which it put his vessel (Cook 1777: 1.37). Shortly before this, the elder Forster had been studying phosphorescence, noting the paradox of what he believed was the putrescent remains of minute polyps that were nevertheless capable of bursting into “that luminous appearance which we so much admire,” like the scurvy of the sea or the sea snakes of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Forster 1996: 59). In this he echoed Boyle, who was fascinated by phosphoric light not least because it lent such glamour to rotten fish and stale piss (Daston 2001: 312–13). Again and again in the vicinity of scurvy, beauty and horrified disgust are wrapped up in the same bundle.
Let me summarize then the various impediments scurvy puts in the way of any satisfactory firsthand report of its effects. First, there is the confusion caused by its appearance as it impersonates other diseases or is impersonated by them, apparently singular only in its multifariousness. Second, there are the difficulties of diagnosis and prognosis owing to inconsistent patterns of its attack, sometimes striking at the joints, sometimes at the gums, sometimes at the bowel or stomach, sometimes at the mind, and then seeming to disappear (as often it arrives) for no better reason than a change of mood. Third is the uncertainty concerning the efficacy of available remedies, which sometimes seem to work and at other times to fail. Fourth are the punctilios of the navy that teach officers to be discreet about any outbreak of scurvy on their ships, easier to manage because of the crowd of ailments it mimics, one of which can easily be identified as the present malady: rheumatism, for example, or prickly heat. Fifth is the factor of the distance and isolation that so often define the situation of scurvy, whose worst rampages take place when the ship is removed from any neutral observer capable of authenticating what has happened. Sixth is the penetration by scurvy of all aspects of that remote situation, comprehending not only the body but also the ship and the elements that surround it, finally infecting the sensorium that is reacting so energetically and imprecisely to its environment. Seventh, there is the spectrum of vivid feelings, ranging from intense pleasure to uncontrollable unease, brought into play by an illness capable of provoking feelings, words, and actions so extraordinary they inevitably compromise the authority of the person who is giving an account of them, or using them to give the account.
Take, for example, Kerguelen in his short treatise on the subject, so much at odds with the violence of his antics near Kerguelen Island. Like Trotter, he lays his emphasis on fresh vegetables and ripe fruit, mentioning Lind with approval and observing how the very sight of the cure can actually effect it: “On remarque que la vue de ces fruits releve l’esprit abbattu des scorbutiques expirans” [One observes that the sight of fruit revives the sunken spirits of the expiring scorbutic patient] (Kerguelen-Tremarec 1782: 214). Observe also how accurately he seems to understand the extreme nature of the illusions that swept him into such astonishing improprieties: “Et souvent leur imagination échauffée par la douce illusion d’un songe les transport dans des jardins charmants & dans des vergers delicieux” [And often their imaginations, warmed by the sweet illusion of a dream, transport them to charming gardens and orchards] (213). At no point is Kerguelen capable of joining the voice of a medical analyst of this malady to the memoir of a victim of it. The last we hear of him, he is sailing for the third time toward his island, so repulsive to him that twice before he refused to land on it, and twice so urgent was his need to be away that he left his consort in the lurch. Now he is commander of a ship filled with goods intended as the foundation of a new society, a utopia like that his mentor Philibert Commerson claimed to have seen on Tahiti. Whenever there is an attempt to unite steady observation with uneven experiences, the professed candor of the reporter sits awkwardly with the turbulence of what he is reporting; and then a corresponding friction develops in his relation to the reader, as Wales demonstrates. It was shortly after his witnessing a scorbutic, blood-red ocean that Byron met the Patagonian giants, men seven feet tall with frames proportionately large, who dwarfed him and his crew. It was a claim that had been made before by mariners, but given the scientific agenda of these voyages of the 1760s, it excited nothing but hilarity at home, including a brilliant mock-utopia from Horace Walpole. There is, therefore, always a possibility that a narrative of scurvy might itself exhibit signs of the disease, either being dulled by the bleakness and the pain, or brightened by its hallucinations. Two celebrated scorbutic voyages of discovery, Anson’s to Juan Fernandez and Bougainville’s to Tahiti, attracted witty and skeptical “supplements,” one by Gabriel Francois Coyer, the other by Denis Diderot. In them, the extravagance of scorbutic reactions contributes to utopias of pure pleasure, one based on bibelots and romances, the other on erotic abandon (Coyer 1752; Diderot 1992).
On the other hand, when Dampier pauses to give the exact hue, consistency, and volume of a cloud, or Pascoe Thomas spends time specifying the tints on the wing of a little red bird, it is likely that what is being recalled is not just a hallucination, but a sensation so intense that the description of it exhibits the startling precision of a specimen drawing. When a combination of tedium and incipient scurvy causes Cook to complain repeatedly of the desolation of what he sees, or Forster to find the noise of drunken mariners perfectly intolerable, there are traces of the black and obsessive mood in which, as Trotter reports, the scorbutic victim exhibits “a selfish desire of engrossing the sympathy and attention of others, to the narration of their own sufferings” (Trotter 1804: 3.62). But there is also a revelation of the incidents and emotions of lives on ships that seldom makes its way into journals. Very acutely, Trotter points out that this insight is “a new subject in nautical medicine,” one in which “the hero and the infant unite.” The staunchest tar “may therefore be allowed to exemplify the same extremes of the great and the little, in his composition, in his pleasures, his passions and diseases” (3.61). This provokes an intriguing uncertainty in the testimony of the afflicted. By the time of his landing at Dusky Bay, Cook had become quite uncertain of his capacity to identify a fact. He confesses of the place, “We now saw it under so many disadvantageous circumstances, that the less I say about it, the fewer mistakes I shall make” (1.67). Trying to organize the violent see-saw of his feelings as the Resolution made its way once more toward the ice, and he grew ill with scurvy, the elder Forster gave up thinking about natural history and started listing his symptoms instead of his specimens: the pains in his neck and jaw, toothache, a swollen cheek (Forster 1982: 3.447).
Within the circuit of diseased observers who become childishly exact in the account of their sickness, or blindly obsessive about imagined scenes of elsewhere (on his second arrival at his horrid island, Kerguelen became obsessed with the charms of Atongil Bay in Madagascar [Delepine 1998: 113]), Trotter places surgeons themselves, particularly their mates, who seem to have been especially prone to nostalgia (Trotter 1804: 373). For example, when Banks notices his exemption from the onset of nostalgia among the crew of the Endeavour, only to confess two days later that he, too, is longing for home, surgeons were immediately implicated in the conditions causing the disease they were inspecting and treating. So ardent was his pursuit of the facts of scurvy that William Stark, Pringle’s protégé, deliberately contracted it (Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 3.316). Being an enthusiast for malt, he eschewed citrus juice on principle and lost his life; but even if he hadn’t, who is to say that he would have been any more successful than Wales and Kerguelen in bridging the gulf between the vividness of his feelings and the requirements of a credible experimental account. I have often wondered whether Trotter’s fascination with the temperamental side of the disease reflects his attempt to achieve something like an impartial statement of what had once been his own disorienting passions. Who knows how closely surgeons such as Perry on the Endeavour, Hutchinson on the Dolphin, and Ettrick on the Centurion participated in the symptoms of which they were giving an account, and whether their preferences for a systematic theoretical analysis had not something to do with a desire of stabilizing what was for each individual too turbulent and terrifying an experience.
Trotter on the other hand, and maybe Lind too from his days afloat, opted for empiricism in the hope that lonely facts might eventually coalesce into a shapely narrative. For this to happen, there was going to have to be some experimental value to the morbidly enlarged sensations caused by the scorbutic disturbances of the synapses. Was it possible, Trotter must have wondered, for scurvy to act as its own magnifying glass, revealing exceptional beauties and fathomless terrors hitherto unavailable to minds settled firmly within the norms of daily consciousness? Were its extravagances the flourishes of an occult legislation and harmony? There were good reasons to doubt that this might ever be the case, but empiricists had little choice but to support the possibility in what amounted to a conjectural defence of factuality, since sensations were their bedrock of knowledge. Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu. From whatever angle they approached scurvy, sensations were the guides, fallible or sure. If the ear hears too much, and an eye blinded by all the light it lets in, then some benefit must accrue from the pressure of supererogatory information, something more than just noise and dazzle. In this respect, the history of scurvy sets a scene analogous to a larger stage occupied by Cartesians and Neoplatonists on the one hand, and by Epicurean materialists and the Royal Society on the other. The former regarded empirical knowledge as the residue of an assault from external contingencies, a humiliating subjection to the accidental and meaningless impressions made by outward things. The latter knew the weaknesses of the senses and had a choice: Either they could improve their performance by means of prostheses such as microscopes and megaphones, or they could sit down with senses suitable to our place in the chain of being, whether blunt or keen, content to take facts as facts rather than signs of imminent order. It is with that battle, and the stakes riding on it for those trying to clear up scurvy, that the next chapter deals.
