And so, all full of this lugubrious discovery as to what had laid up our shipmates, we met for dinner, a much reduced mess, with only De Long, Dunbar, Danenhower, Collins and myself present. Ah Sam, substituting for the deathly ill Tong Sing, served the meal—no bear, no seal, no ducks this time—just salt beef and the ever present stewed tomatoes, our principal vegetable antidote for scurvy, the supply of which was holding out splendidly.
More quietly even than usual, dinner proceeded. I carved the salt beef, Dunbar ladled out the tomatoes. Ah Sam padded around the cabin with the dishes. Moodily we bent over our plates, and then an outburst, doubly noticeable in that silence, brought us erect.
“Bah!” burst out the semi-blinded Danenhower, spitting out a mouthful of food. “I don’t mind breaking my teeth on duck, but who, for God’s sake, shot these tomatoes?”
“Shot the tomatoes, Dan? What do you mean?” asked the puzzled skipper.
“Just what I say,” mumbled Dan, trying more delicately with his napkin now to rid his mouth of the remainder. “They’re full of birdshot!”
I walked over and examined the tomatoes spattered on the tablecloth before Danenhower. Sure enough, there in the reddish mess were several black pellets of solder, looking remarkably like birdshot! A light dawned on me.
“Ah Sam!” I ordered, “bring me right away, half a dozen unopened cans of tomatoes and a can opener, savvy?”
“I savvy; light away I bling cans from galley,” answered the cook, and in a few minutes dinner was suspended and forgotten, while the mess table was converted into a workbench on which I opened cans and poured the contents into a large tureen. In every can we found drops of solder, mostly tiny! Evidently when the canned tomatoes were stewed before being served, the hot acid juices of the cooking tomatoes completely dissolved the fine lead pellets. They had never been noticed till a few drops large enough to escape complete solution had come through for Dan to bite on!
We called the sick doctor from his bunk. He promptly got his chemicals and then and there tested the hot stewed tomatoes already served for dinner. The percentage of lead in them was far above anything found in our water. No question about it now, the tomatoes were the cause—our mysterious lead poisoning was at last solved!
But the captain was still both perplexed and worried. Perplexed, because from the day we entered the ice, we had had canned tomatoes four times a week. Why hadn’t we been poisoned before and why were some of us apparently still unaffected? He was worried, because if we gave up tomatoes, our last source of anything like vegetables, what (with our lime-juice now practically gone) over the long months to come was going to save us from scurvy?