[1143] Woodall defends the use of biscuit in his Surgeon’s Mate, published in 1617.
[1144] Purchas, III. 847.
[1145] The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster, Knight, to the East Indies. Hakluyt Society, ed. Clements Markham, 1878; and in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, II. pt. 2, p. 102.
[1146] The slowness of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope in old times was due less to the build or rig of the ships than to the course shaped: instead of steering southwest from Madeira across the Atlantic almost to the coast of Brazil at Cape San Roque, so as to get the north-east trade wind, and thence on another tack in a wide sweep round to the Cape with the south-east trade wind, the earlier navigators sailed past the Cape de Verde islands and along the Guinea coast, keeping within meridians 20 degrees to the eastward of the modern track, and so falling into the tropical calms at one part, and at another part of the voyage into the baffling south-east trades, varying in force according to the season.
[1147] Purchas, I. 147.
[1148] Calendar of State Papers. East Indies (under the respective dates).
[1149] It seems to have passed into common usage, as “to lie in cold obstruction and to rot” (Meas. for Meas. III. 1), and to have been kept up therein after the faculty had dropped it—if indeed Byron’s line, “Where cold Obstruction’s apathy” be a survival of medical terminology. There is an instance of the same kind of survival in the use of “scorbutic;” at one time land-scurvy was detected (under the influence of theory) in many forms, and we find in the Pickwick Papers a late reminiscence of that singular dogma in the “young gentleman with the scorbutic countenance.”
[1150] The three earlier instances from Purchas, I. 248, 466, the later from the Cal. State Papers, East Indies.
[1151] Cal. S. P. Colonial. East Indies. Dec. 24, 1628.
[1152] Ibid. Feb. 6, 1626, p. 146.