BBC - History British History in depth: Captain Cook and the Scourge of Scurvy (2024)

The emergence of scurvy

Scurvy did not emerge as a problem for maritime explorers until vessels started penetrating the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. Vasco da Gama lost two thirds of his crew to the disease while making his way to India in 1499. In 1520 Magellan lost more than 80 per cent while crossing the Pacific. Two voyages made by Pedro de Quiros early in the 17th century resulted in huge mortality from a sickness Sir Richard Hawkins called, after his venture into the South Seas, 'the plague of the Sea, and the Spoyle of Mariners'.

Scurvy came to public notice in Britain after Commodore George Anson led a squadron into the Pacific in the 1740s to raid Spanish shipping. He lost all but one of his six ships, and two thirds of the crews he shipped (700 survived out of an original complement of 2000), most of them to scurvy. Their symptoms were vividly described by Richard Walter, the chaplain who wrote up the official account of the voyage. Here were descriptions of its ghastly traces: skin black as ink, ulcers, difficult respiration, rictus of the limbs, teeth falling out and, perhaps most revolting of all, a strange plethora of gum tissue sprouting out of the mouth, which immediately rotted and lent the victim's breath an abominable odour.

There were strange sensory and psychological effects too. Scurvy seems to have disarmed the sensory inhibitors that keep taste, smell and hearing under control and stop us from feeling too much. When sufferers got hold of the fruit they had been craving they swallowed it (said Walter) 'with emotions of the most voluptuous luxury'. The sound of a gunshot was enough to kill a man in the last stages of scurvy, while the smell of blossoms from the shore could cause him to cry out in agony. This susceptibility of the senses was accompanied by a disposition to cry at the slightest disappointment, and to yearn hopelessly and passionately for home.

Now we know that scurvy was a co*cktail of vitamin deficiencies, mainly of C and B, sometimes compounded by an overdose of A from eating seals' livers. Altogether these produced a breakdown in the cellular structure of the body, evident in the putrescence of the flesh and bones of sufferers, together with night blindness and personality disorders associated with pellagra. In the 18th century no one knew what caused scurvy, whose symptoms were so various it was sometimes mistaken for asthma, leprosy, syphilis, dysentery and madness.

Prevention

Physicians speculated that it was owing to a salt diet, to a lack of oxygen in the body, to fat skimmed from the ships' boiling pans, to bad air, to thickening of the blood, to sugar, to melancholy; but no one knew for certain. People were aware that once victims were on shore they could be recovered by eating scurvy grass, wild celery, wood sorrel, nasturtiums, brooklime, Kerguelen cabbage (Pringlea antiscorbutica), cabbage trees and other esculent plants growing on the shores of distant islands. Fruit and palm wine were also esteemed to be fine remedies, and since 1753, when James Lind published A Treatise of the Scurvy, there was experimental proof that citrus had a rapid beneficial effect.

Captain Cook's voyage around New Zealand and the east coast of Australia©Once on shore it was a superstition among sailors that the smell and the touch of the earth gave the surest cure. One of Anson's crew had his shipmates cut out a turf and put his mouth into the hole. Vitus Bering, the Danish navigator, died of scurvy half buried in the ground. No one had a remedy for scurvy at sea - however; the best on offer was a battery of prophylactic measures, including portable soup (a preparation of dried vegetables), malt, sauerkraut, concentrated fruit juice (rob), vinegar, mustard, molasses and beans. These were aimed at repelling any sign of scurvy from the outset, since it was impossible to control it, once it had gained a footing, other than by going ashore.

All the British voyages of the Pacific undertaken in the 1760s - by Byron, Wallis, Carteret and Cook - were used to test these prophylactics. Wallis carried malt, sauerkraut, 'vinegar and mustard without limitation', 30 hundredweight of portable soup, and 180 Magellan jackets to protect the men against cold and damp. Under the direction of the 'Sick and Hurt and Victualling Boards of the Admiralty', Cook was supplied likewise with 40 bushels of malt, 1000lb of portable soup, vinegar, mustard, wheat, together with 'proper Quantities of sauer Kraut and Rob'. Like Wallis, Cook paid strict attention to airing and drying the lower decks, and keeping his men warm and well slept.

Scurvy takes its toll

Cook had five cases of scurvy reported by his surgeon and no deaths from it. Wallis's men were dogged by the disease, three dying of it, and he himself appears to have been suffering from it when he came across Tahiti. Byron reports the 'dreadful havock' made among his crew by the disease, while Carteret records 31 men dead of scurvy, and his ship for the most part of his voyage a hospital. In his next two voyages Cook's good management, or luck, persisted, and no deaths from scurvy were reported. Since then he has been hailed as the conqueror of the sea's great plague. William Bowles wrote in his poem The Spirit of Discovery (1804):

Recently Christopher Lawrence has called Cook's regimen 'a representation and an endorsem*nt of 18th-century social order'. For his own part, Cook was in no doubt that the principal cause of the health of his crews was owing to regular doses of malt, and woe betide the sailor who refused it! In a paper delivered to the Royal Society he said of malt, 'This is without doubt one of the best antiscorbutic [effective against scurvy] sea-medicines yet found out; and if given in time will, with proper attention to other things, I am persuaded, prevent the scurvy from making any great progress for a considerable time'.

There were dissenting voices about this at the time, as there still are today. Gilbert Blane and Thomas Beddoes, highly esteemed authorities on scurvy in the 18th century, rightly doubted that there was any antiscorbutic virtue in malt. Thomas Trotter, another expert, thought sauerkraut and portable soup were 'mere placebo'. They stated what Lind had already experimentally deduced - that fresh vegetables and citrus juice are the only substantial sources of vitamin C. But although 'rob' was carried on board Cook's ships, it had been boiled to reduce it, and in the process all its vitamin C (ascorbic acid) had been lost.

Cook's men suffer

It turns out that Cook's prohibition against the fat from the boiling pans was the only truly antiscorbutic measure he took, for hot salt fat coming into contact with copper acquired a substance that irritates the gut and prevents its absorption of vitamins. James Watt has pointed this out in several articles, together with the plausible conjecture that an infestation of worms caused a similar effect in Cook's own body, precipitating a deficiency of vitamin B that might have been responsible for his odd behaviour in Hawaii shortly before his death.

There is no doubt that many people suffered from scurvy on Cook's ships. On the second voyage William Wales, the astronomer, and Johann Reinhold Forster, the naturalist, both give descriptions of their symptoms, chiefly their growing melancholy and sense of isolation. On the first, Joseph Banks records that once the Endeavour was in the Arafura Sea everyone - except Cook, Solander and himself - were suffering from homesickness, 'the longing for home which the Physicians ... esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia.' Thomas Trotter was to characterise the symptoms 20 years later as 'scorbutic Nostalgia', a condition to which Banks himself soon succumbed, when he thought of the explorer William Dampier in these same seas, and confessed, 'this thought made home recur to my mind stronger than it had done throughout the whole voyage'.

When they landed at Savu, Banks reported that there were many people sick on board. The deaths at Batavia of Tupaia, the priest from the island of Raiatea, and Charles Green, the astronomer, have usually been ascribed to the dysentery that killed 30 of the Endeavour's crew at the end of the voyage. Beaglehole suggests, however, that it was not dysentery that put an end to Tupaia's life and Cook himself was adamant that his death was owing to 'the long want of a vegetable diet which he had all his life before been used to, and brought upon him all the disorders attending a sea life.' As for Green, 'he had long been in a bad state of hilth, which he took no care to repair but on the contrary lived in such a manner as greatly promoted the disorders he had had long upon him'.

Cook's record

Cook was referring to the fact that Tupaia refused malt, portable soup and all the other remedies against scurvy, and that Green's addiction to drink was precipitating scorbutic symptoms. However, Tupaia, Green and a crew member named Hicks had been diagnosed at Batavia as the three people suffering from complaints 'occasioned by long continuance at sea', which makes it look as if perhaps Cook's record is not as clean in this respect as has sometimes been thought, and he did lose two of his men to scurvy.

Captain Bligh's Bounty was also afflicted by scurvy©That was not his reputation, however, and based on his example no commander wanted scurvy on his ship. When James Morrison reported that scurvy appeared on the Bounty on the run between the Cape of Good Hope and Tahiti, Captain Bligh wrote in the margin of his manuscript 'Captain Bligh never had a symptom of Scurvy in any ship he commanded', and Vancouver was dismayed when he found it on his vessel, Discovery, while he was mapping the north east coastline of America: 'To my utter astonishment and surprise, I was given to understand from Mr Menzies that the sea scurvy had made its appearance amongst some of the crew.' Clearly it was greeted with the same shock and incredulity as headlice today.

In naval logs of the later 18th century, scurvy is scarcely mentioned, fluxes and cholera being far the most common complaints. But Leonard Gillespie, a naval surgeon, had it reported to him that scurvy was still common on the India station, and that in 1781 HMS Egmont lost a third of her crew to the disease, on a return journey from Jamaica. Thus it has always been hard to say anything authoritative about scurvy, or to trust the testimony of its victims, who are afflicted by emotions so powerful that they lose the virtue of dispassionate neutrality that has been understood to distinguish the minds of explorers and navigators during the Enlightenment. Hence William Wales's terse yet strangely querulous entry in his Resolution journal: 'Brewed Wort [malt] 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'. About scurvy so much is to be supposed, so little known for sure.

Find out more

Read on

The Ship - Retracing Cook's Endeavour Voyage by Simon Baker (BBC Worldwide, 2002)

The Journals of Captain Cook, edited by Philip Edwards (Penguin, 1999)

The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy by NAM Rodger (many editions since 1986, including WW Norton & Co, 1996).

About the author

Jonathan Lamb is Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He was a historian on the BBC programme The Ship, where he was able to test some of the theories about 18th-century Pacific voyaging that he had fashioned in a recent book, Preserving the Self in the South Seas.