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.