The first accounts of Sea Scurvy.
The malady that figures most in the narratives of the long ocean voyages which began with the modern period is scurvy. In the very first of the great voyages, that of Vasco de Gama to the Indies by the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, scurvy appeared when the ships were on the West African coast, fifty-five deaths occurring within a short period. Of all the known subsequent occurrences of the kind, there are accounts more or less full in the collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, from which the facts in the sequel have been taken.
In the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan to the Pacific, scurvy is mentioned first at a late stage; in the year 1520 the ships had passed the straits called by his name and had been three months and twelve days sailing westwards from the last land; their provisions had run short, and, “by reason of this famine and unclean feeding, some of their gums grew so over their teeth that they died miserably for hunger.” Nineteen men, as well as a giant from Patagonia and an Indian from Brazil, were dead, and some twenty-five or thirty others were sick, “so that there was in a manner none without some disease[1121].”
There were no voyages of the same length by English ships until many years after: and then we find the same troubles in them from scurvy and other sickness. While the Portuguese and Spaniards were navigating in tropical waters, the English and French were sending most of their expeditions to the North. The French attempted to found a colony on the shores of the Gulf of St Lawrence, while the English sought to establish a trade with Muscovy by way of the White Sea, and to open a nearer route to the far East by way of the polar regions. The voyages in all these enterprises were short, the ships for the most part returning after an absence of four or five months, and without any notable experience of sickness: it was only when the French wintered in Canada that scurvy broke out. Thus the English voyages for the Muscovy Company have little or no interest for our subject; while the three voyages of Frobisher in search of the North-West passage in 1576, 1577, and 1578, and the three of Davis in 1585, 1586, and 1587 (in which last he got to 73° N.) are as nearly as possible free from records of sickness.
Jacques Cartier’s second expedition to the St Lawrence in 1535 had a disastrous experience of scurvy. In his first voyage in 1534, with two ships of sixty tons each and each carrying sixty-one men, he appears to have had no sickness, having left St Malo on April 20, traded with the Indians on the Gulf of St Lawrence, and returned on September 5 of the same year. The expedition of the following year, with three ships, wintered on the coast, amidst heavy ice, and about mid-winter began to suffer from scurvy[1122]. The crews appear to have had no lack of stores, both meat and drink, and the outbreak of scurvy, described as an unknown disease, was so surprising that it was traced to infection from the Indians, who are said to have admitted the deaths of some fifty of their number from “pestilence.”
“The said unknown sickness began to spread itself amongst us after the strangest sort that ever was either heard of or seen, insomuch as some did lose all their strength, and could not stand on their feet; then did their legs swell, their sinewes shrink as black as any coal. Others also had their skins spotted with spots of blood of a purple colour; then did it ascend to their ankles, knees, thighs, shoulders, arms, and neck; their mouth became stinking, their gums so rotten that all the flesh did fall off even to the roots of the teeth, which did also almost all fall out. With such infection did this sickness spread itself in our three ships that about the middle of February, of a hundred and ten persons that we were, there were not ten whole; so that one could not help the other.... There were already 8 dead and more than 50 sick, and, as we thought, past all recovery.” The body of one dead, aged 22, was opened to see what the disease was; he was found to have his heart white, but rotten, and more than a quart of red water about it[1123]; his liver was indifferent fair; but his lungs black and mortified ... his milt toward the back was somewhat perished, rough as if it had been rubbed against a stone.
“From the midst of November to the midst of March there died 25 of our best and chiefest men, and all the rest sick except three or four; then it pleased God to cast his pitiful eye upon us, and sent us the knowledge of remedie of our healths, and recovery.... The Captain, walking upon the ice, asken of Domagaia [an Indian] how he had done to heal himself; he answered that he had taken the juice and sap of the leaves of a certain tree, and therewith had healed himself! for it was a singular remedy against that disease.” The Indian’s advice was “to take the bark and leaves and boil them together and to drink of the said decoction every other day, and to put the dregs of it upon the legs that is sick.”...
“It is thought to be the sassafras tree. After this medicine was found and proved to be true there was such strife about it, who should be first to take of it, that they were ready to kill one another, so that a tree as big as any oak in France was spoiled and lopped bare, and occupied all in five or six days, and it wrought so well that if all the physicians of Montpelier and Lovaine had been there with all the drugs of Alexandria, they would not have done so much in one year as that tree did in six days, for it did so prevail that as many as used of it, by the grace of God recovered their health.”
In 1542, while Cartier was still trading on his own account to the St Lawrence from Brittany, a more ambitious project, under a Crown patent, issued from La Rochelle[1124]. With De la Roche, count of Roberval, as governor, a number of adventurous nobles and gentry, with men, women and children to the number of two hundred in all, sailed in three ships, and established themselves in Lower Canada with all the formalities of occupation. Two of the three ships were sent home in September, the colonists proper being left to taste the rigours of a Canadian winter: “In the end many of our people fell sick of a certain disease in their legges, reynes and stomacke, so that they seemed to bee deprived of all their lymmes: and there died about fiftie.”
The first English records of scurvy at sea are in connexion with the early voyages to Guinea for gold-dust[1125]. Mr John Lok sailed on the second voyage to Guinea, on October 11, 1554, his ships being the ‘Trinitie,’ 140 tons, the ‘Bartholomew,’ 90 tons, and the ‘John Evangelist,’ 140 tons. After trading some months on the African coast the ships sailed for home: “There died of our men at this last voyage about twenty and four, whereof many died at their return into the clime of the cold regions, as between the islands of Azores and England.” The disease is not named; but it is probable from what follows that it was scurvy.
The next voyage to Guinea was Towrson’s first, in October 1555, from Newport, Isle of Wight, in the ‘Hart’ and the ‘Hind;’ the death of only one man is mentioned; he died “in his sleep” on March 29; by the 7th May, the provisions were so reduced that the ships put in on the coast of Ireland to purchase milk and two sheep from the wild kernes, paying in gold-dust.
In Towrson’s second voyage there is no word of sickness; but in his third voyage in 1577, it is a prominent topic of the narrative. The vessels ‘Minion,’ ‘Christopher’ and ‘Tiger’ left Plymouth on January 30, 1577. On the 8th of May, “all our cloth in the ‘Minion’ being sold, I called the company together to know whether they would tarry the sale of the cloth taken in the prize at this place or no: they answered that in respect of the death of some of their men, and the present sickness of 20 more, they would not tarry, but repair to the other ships, of whom they had heard nothing since April 27.” Having at length bartered for gold until the natives would barter no longer, the three ships bore up for home. On July 24 the master of the ‘Tiger’ came aboard the ‘Minion’ and reported that “his men were so weak and the ship so leak that he was not able to keep her above the water.” A muster held of all the three crews the same day showed that there were not above 30 sound men in them. On September 3, there being only six men in the ‘Tiger’ who could work, the gold and stores were taken out of her, and she was abandoned. On October 6, when off the coast of Portugal, the ‘Christopher’ reported herself so weak that she was not able to keep the sea. The ‘Minion’ promised to attend her into Vigo; but a fair wind springing up, she signalled that she was off for home, whereupon the ‘Christopher’ followed. On October 16, a great south-westerly storm arose; the men in the ‘Minion’ were not able, from weakness, to handle the sails, which were blown away: however, they made shift to reach the Isle of Wight on October 20, nothing more being said of the ‘Christopher.’
The English voyages to Guinea for gold-dust were shortly followed by the three expeditions of John Hawkins in 1562, 1564 and 1567 to the West coast of Africa for negro slaves to be sold to the Spaniards in Hispaniola and Cuba and on the Spanish Main[1126]. Only a brief summary remains of the first voyage, in which nothing is said of sickness; in the second, the negroes, at least, appear to have suffered on the somewhat long passage across the tropical belt, especially from want of water; and the third was so calamitous in various ways that Hawkins himself wrote of it: “If all the miseries and troublesome affairs of this sorrowful voyage should be perfectly and thoroughly written, there should need a painful man with his pen, and as great a time as he had that wrote the lives and deaths of the martyrs.” Little or nothing is said of one class of martyrs in the business—the negroes, of whom the ships carried four to five hundred. English lives were lost in the kidnapping raids, from poisoned arrows, it was thought, the wounded dying “in strange sort with their mouths shut some ten days before they died, and after their wounds were whole.” It was on the return from the Gulf of Mexico, more than a year out from England, that the sickness on board was worst. They cleared the Bahamas channel on November 16, 1568, after which, “growing near to the cold country, our men being oppressed with famine, died continually, and they that were left grew into such weakness that we were scarcely able to manage our ship” (the ‘Jesus’ of Lubeck, 700 tons). They put in at Ponte Vedra, near Vigo, on December 31, but the fresh provisions that they got turned to their hurt: “our men with excess of fresh meat grew into miserable diseases and died a great part of them.” Twelve fresh hands shipped at Vigo enabled the vessels to reach the nearest English haven at Mount’s Bay in Cornwall.
Meanwhile we obtain some glimpses of seafaring among the Portuguese, who had now in the middle of the 16th century a regular trade to the Indies, established by Vasco de Gama’s route round the Cape of Good Hope. Perhaps the most famous of these records is that of the voyage of St Francis Xavier from Lisbon to Goa in the spring of 1540. The expedition with which he took passage carried, it is said, a regiment of a thousand men to reinforce the garrison of Goa; during the voyage the Jesuit apostle “rendered to the diseased services too revolting to be described, and lived among the dying and the profligate, the unwearied minister of consolation and of peace[1127].” After five months the ships arrived at Mozambique, by which time Xavier and many more were suffering from fever. Goa was not reached until thirteen months out from the Tagus. A more familiar narrative of the same voyage of the Portuguese ships a generation later is given by an English youth, Thomas Stevens, in a letter written home to his father, a citizen of London, shortly after arriving at Goa. Both in its generalities and in its particulars this excellent letter will serve to measure the prevalence of scurvy, flux, and fever in the earlier period of the East Indian trade by the Cape[1128].
The five ships left Lisbon on April 5, 1579, the solemnity being marked by the firing of ordnance and the braying of trumpets. In the ships, “besides shipmen and soldiers, there were a great number of children, which in the seas bear out better than men; and no marvel, when that many women also pass very well.” After a passage along the Guinea coast, made tedious by calms and head winds, they rounded the Cape of Good Hope on July 29. From that point in the voyage the Portugal ships were wont to follow one or other of two routes according to the lateness of the season—either the route by the Mozambique Channel, in which case they were able to get fruits and fresh provisions, or the route along more southern parallels for a time, and passing to the east of Madagascar[1129]. In the latter case, “by reason of the long navigation and want of food and water, they fall into sundry diseases, their gums wax great and swell, and they are fain to cut them away, their legs swell, and all the body becometh sore and so benumbed that they cannot stir hand nor foot, and so they die for weakness. Others fall into fluxes and agues, and so die thereby.
“And this way it was our chance to make; and though we had more than one hundred and fifty sick, there died not past seven-and-twenty, which loss they esteemed not much in respect of other times.”
The ships went greatly out of their course, having sighted the island of Socotra at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden, and did not arrive at Goa until October 24, 202 days from Lisbon without calling anywhere.
The first of the long English voyages beyond the Line was Sir Francis Drake’s famous circumnavigation from November 15, 1577, to September 26, 1580[1130]. Drake must have lost many of his men in those three years, but there is nothing in the narrative to show that they perished of disease. The expedition was by way of the Straits of Magellan, and was mainly given up to plundering the Spaniards on the coasts of Chili and Peru. Drake set out for home loaded with treasure by way of the Philippines and the Cape of Good Hope. It is not until the narrative brings us to a small island between Ternate and Celebes that we hear of sickness; they graved the ship there and remained twenty-six days, during which the “sickly, weak and decayed” recovered their strength, a large species of crayfish found on the island being “very good and restoring meat, whereof we had experience.” But even Drake, with all his systematic care and resource, was destined in after years to have a share of the common sickly experience at sea, and to find disease a more potent enemy than the Spaniard.