Further, “in every of the said ships, three merchants to succeed one the other, if any of them should be taken away by death”—a sufficient indication of the risks of foreign trade.
The ships, having loaded in the Thames, sailed from Dartmouth on April 18, 1601, and got clear of Tor Bay on the 22nd. On July 24, two months from the Channel, they crossed the southern tropic. But they had been so long under the Line that “many of our men fell sick.” On August 1, in 30° S., they met the south-west wind, “to the great comfort of all our people. For, by this time very many of our men were fallen sick of the scurvy in all our ships, and, unless it were in the general’s ship only, the others were so weak of men that they could hardly handle the sails.” Headwinds again hindered their course, and “now the few whole men we had began also to fall sick, so that our weakness of men was so great that in some of the ships the merchants took their turn at the helm and went into the top to take in the top sails, as the common mariners did.” Lancaster at length made Saldanha Bay, where he had landed to refresh his crews on his first voyage round the Cape ten years before. The state of three of the ships “was such that they was hardly able to let fall an anchor to save themselves withall;” but “the general went aboard of them and carried good store of men, and hoysed out their boats for them.... And the reason why the general’s men stood better in health than the men of other ships was this: he brought to sea with him certain bottles of the juice of lemons, which he gave to each one as long as it would last, three spoonfuls every morning fasting, not suffering them to eat anything after it till noon. This juice worketh much the better if the partie keepe short diet, and wholly refrain salt meat, which salt meat, and long being at the sea, is the only cause of the breeding of this disease. By this means the general cured many of his men and preserved the rest, so that in this ship (having the double of men that was in the rest of the ships) he had not so many sick, nor lost so many men as they did, which was the mercie of God to us all.”
At Saldanha Bay they bartered with the natives for an abundant supply of fresh meat and other provisions, and in due time doubled the Cape of Good Hope. On Christmas day, eight months out from England, they put in to Antongil Bay, on the east side of Madagascar. On landing they found a writing on the rocks that five Dutch ships had sailed thence two months before, having “lost between 150 and 200 men while they roade in that place.” The English had a similar experience in store for them: on board Lancaster’s ship, the master’s mate, the preacher, the surgeon and some ten others, died; and, in the vice-admiral’s ship, the master with other two. It was mostly the flux that they died of, brought on by the drinking-water, or by the excessive wetness of the season, or by “going open and cold in the stomacke, which our men would often do when they were hot” (Hawkins gives the latter reason for flux at the Cape de Verde islands).
The references to scurvy before reaching the Cape, and to dysentery in Madagascar, are all that is said of sickness in this first venture of the East India Company. But in the accounts of the voyages which regularly followed we hear a great deal of the loss of men at the factories, or in the country trade, or on the voyage home, as well as on the outward voyage[1148]. The Directors in London were naturally well aware how greatly their ventures were imperilled and their profits reduced by the enormous loss of men. Under their own eyes ships would arrive in the mouth of the Channel with crews so weakened that they had to be met at Scilly with help to navigate them through the narrow seas to the Thames. By their correspondence from abroad, they were frequently hearing of artificers dying in their factories, of ships arriving out with so many men dead, and of other ships cast away, partly by stress of weather no doubt, but sometimes from inability of the crews to man them. Accordingly we find that they were alive to the best means of preventing “flux, scurvy, and fever.” Lancaster, as we have seen, carried lime-juice on his first voyage for the Company in 1601. In the Court minutes of August 13, 1607, the following were ordered to be provided with expedition: “Lemon water, ‘alligant’ from Alicante, a wine very fit for beverage and good against the flux, and old corn, etc.” At the Court of Directors on December 10, 1614, there was considered an “offer of Dr Burgis to present the Company with an antidote against poison, scurvy, and other diseases to which people are subject these long voyages: Sir Thomas Roe and Captain Keeling to confer with him and report their opinions.” Trial was also to be made of baking fresh bread at sea, with the grinding of corn, “an exercise fit to preserve men in health.” The offer of Dr Burgis was accepted; and on January 26, 1615, the minutes of the Court mention “instructions in writing, and boxes of such things as are to be used, for prevention of the flux, scurvy, and fever, prepared by Dr Burgis, to be delivered to each ship; the cost, about £23, to be paid.” In the minutes of the Court, November 22, 1619, there is reference to another preventive of scurvy: “The fleet to be supplied with 15 tons of white wine, to be drunk at the Line, and the Cape, which is used by the Dutch to preserve men from scurvy, and will refresh the men and scour their maws, and open and cool as well as lemon water”—the latter having been in all probability disliked or refused by the men. In 1624, “the death of mariners” is a topic at the Court of Directors; again, on October 15, 1626, the Court considers of the great mortality from scurvy in the ‘Charles’ and ‘Hart,’ homeward bound, and how to prevent it. Some were of opinion that lemon water was very good, but Mr Styles related that tamarind was the excellentest thing. However, there had been plenty of tamarinds aboard the ships; and on Lieutenant Hill being called in, he testified that the crews had all got tamarind, but they were all debauched people.
John Woodall, surgeon to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, was at this time surgeon-general to the East India Company, having medical charge of their dockyard at Blackwall; his name appears in the Court minutes as early as 1614. In 1617 he published his ‘Surgion’s Mate,’ “chiefly for the benefit of young sea-surgions imployed in the East India companies affairs,” and dedicated it to Sir Thomas Smith, himself a navigator, and then chairman of the Court of Directors. This practical manual is largely occupied with the management of fractures, dislocations, amputations, and the like, a part of his subject wherein Woodall was thoroughly competent; but there appears also in the title, “the cure of the scurvie, the fluxes of the belly, of the collica and iliaca passio, tenasmus and exitus ani, the callenture.” The section on scurvy, twenty-six pages long, is the one that here concerns us. This was what Sir Richard Hawkins had desired: “And I wish that some learned men would write of it, for it is the plague of the sea and the spoil of mariners.” Woodall begins by disclaiming learning: “A learned treatise befits not my pen.” But, at all events, his was the voice of the faculty, and he plunges boldly into pathology in the very first lines: “Scurvy is a disease of the spleen, whereby it is sometimes wholly stopped” etc. Being a man of much good sense, Woodall quickly leaves that line of remark, for a time at least. He repeats all the familiar experience of Hawkins, Lancaster, and the numerous captains of East Indiamen, with whom he must have conversed many times (it does not appear that he had himself sailed). He mentions the great benefit to the crews from landing at the Cape, with the fresh air and food, scurvy being thereby cured “without much other help.” He enforces the need of changes of clothing, and other things in the regimen on board, just as Hawkins and others were wont to do in practice. He is as clear on the virtues of lime-juice as Lancaster, and copies somewhat closely the practice of the latter in 1601: “each morning two or three spoonfuls, and fast after it two hours”; his originality appearing in the rider, grateful to seamen: “and if you add one spoonful of aqua vitae thereto, to a cold stomach it is the better.” He mentions that a “good quantity of juice of lemons is sent in each ship out of England, by the great care of the merchants, and intended only for the relief of every poor man in his need.” The ship’s surgeon is advised to lay in a store of fresh lemons and oranges where they were to be had on the voyage, and of tamarinds at Bantam.
So far, Woodall merely sets down what every shipmaster knew as to the things that bring on scurvy, the best regimen to keep it off, and the extraordinarily rapid curative effect of lime-juice and of change to land air and fresh food. But there was a certain professional doctrine of scurvy, and a treatment of it secundum artem, namely the wisdom of learned men which Hawkins had called for; and we have now to see what that was, according to Woodall. His pathology is that of “obstructions,” a curious fancy of the learned[1149].
The spleen, said Woodall in his opening lines, is the chief seat of obstruction; but on resuming the pathology, he proceeds to obstructions also of the liver and brain:
“But it is plain that this grief is a lazy foul disease with obstructions of the liver, or spleen, or both; as also it appeareth that the head is much diseased, and that there is great obstructions in the brain, for that the eyes not only look evil coloured, but also the gums putrefy, and the teeth grow loose, and all the sinewy parts of the body bear their part in the disease, for the shrinking and withering of the sinews, with the great pains the party hath, declareth no less” (p. 180).
This theoretical pathology Woodall supports by an appeal to morbid anatomy:
“Also it is manifest that divers of those which have been opened after death have had their livers utterly rotted”-others having their livers much swollen, and the spleen swollen, others full of water, others their lungs putrefied and stunk while they have lived, (which last may have been an incorrect inference from the foul state of the mouth).