Samuel Johnson who remarked to a friend about to take a voyage, "Why go to sea when there are prisons ashore?" Those wooden ships, with their bilges filled with black, stinking water, the crowded quarters, poor facilities for carrying and keeping foods, and the necessarily long voyages, were pestholes to rival the Black Hole of Calcutta.
In those days, the expression "Scurvy as a sailor" was not undeserved. During the great years of the East India Company's trade, the ships that sailed from England to Calcutta regularly lost one third of their crews from this disease on every voyage. Aside from seasickness, scurvy is the one disease which may be said to be almost purely nautical. It occurs on land, of course, among the malnourished; but at the time of the great naval expansion during the sixteenth century, scurvy was comparatively rare, except among seafarers.
Scurvy, as we know now, is one of the deficiency diseases. It results from a diet too low, or entirely lacking, in vitamin C. As the human body is unable to store up any great reserve of this vitamin, a marked reduction in its amount in the diet is soon followed by symptoms of scurvy. Take away from the diet all fresh meats, milk, fruits, and leafy vegetables, and, within as short a time as two weeks, early symptoms of scurvy may appear. Exposure to cold and wet, fatigue, and loss of sleep hasten the onset of the disease.
Given these conditions — and these were the conditions that obtained in all navies in the days of wooden ships and canvas — scurvy was as common aboard ship as rats and cockroaches. Sir John Hawkins, Queen Elizabeth's great captain, says that in his twenty years at sea scurvy cost the British Navy 20,000 men. The disease played less havoc with Spanish, Portuguese, and Venetian sailors than with the British, perhaps because the ships that were outfitted at Mediterranean ports usually carried more of the anti-scorbutic citrus fruits, cabbage, and onions.
My friend, Captain Louis H. Roddis (MC), United States Navy,
