What did Captain Cook give his men to fight scurvy? Detailed answer

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What did Captain Cook give his men to fight scurvy? Detailed answer

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What did Captain Cook give his men to fight scurvy?

a) limes.
b) Lemons.
c) sauerkraut.
d) Rum with blackcurrant.

No lemons or limes were ever found aboard Cook's ships. Of all that he had, sauerkraut and a mixture of concentrated fruit juices, the so-called "rob" ("rob"), would be most suitable as a medicine. In order to preserve the product on a long sea voyage, both were pre-boiled, so that there was almost nothing left of vitamin C.

By the time it became standard practice to supply British sailors with lemon juice, Cooke had been in his grave for twenty years.

Scurvy was a serious problem on long sea voyages. Magellan, for example, lost most of his team while crossing the Pacific Ocean precisely because of scurvy. Now we know that scurvy occurs due to a lack of vitamins C and B, leading to the destruction of the somatic cells of the body - but in the XNUMXth century, attitudes towards it were based more on superstition than on the basis of knowledge. Many sailors sincerely believed that it was enough for them to touch the ground - and the disease would disappear by itself.

A real breakthrough in the fight against this terrible disease was the publication of the work of the Edinburgh physician James Lind "Treatise on scurvy" (1754), where the author strongly recommended the use of citrus fruits and fresh vegetables.

Legend has it that scurvy bypassed Cook's ships thanks to his enlightened approach, free from prejudice and superstition. However, it seems to us that Cook simply did not pay attention to her. The ship's logs of that time confirm that scurvy was not uncommon on all three of the captain's voyages, although, oddly enough, there were only a few deaths.

When, in 1795, the Admiralty finally ordered ships to be supplied with citrus fruits (on Lind's recommendation), it was lemon juice, not lime juice. The effect was truly amazing.

In the middle of the XNUMXth century, lemon began to be replaced by lime - for economic reasons (limes were grown by a British merchant in the colonies, while lemons were grown in the Mediterranean by Johnny the Foreigner). The scurvy paid off with a vengeance for such savings - ironically, lime contains very little vitamin C.

The first officially recorded use of the nickname "lime-juicer" (later - "limey" (Literally - "one who drinks lime juice") in relation to the British (especially to English sailors and immigrants in the colonies) dates back to 1859. In its pure form, vitamin C was obtained only in the 1930s - then it got its current name. The chemical name for vitamin C is ascorbic acid. "Ascorbin" means "against scurvy".

Author: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

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