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You actually don't need much Vit-C to avoid Scurvy (Barcoo Rot?), as the only reason Capt. Cook didn't suffer from this was not because he was eating barrels of vegetables, but because everyday he had toast with quince jam, IIRC.Quote:
Originally Posted by superquag
True to a point... as it doesn't take much to lift scurvy from 'frank', up into 'sub-clinical'.
Partially, because we humans can sort-of re-cycle some of our oxidised 'C', an advantage envied by Guinea Pigs and Great Apes. - Fruit Bats don't care about us as their native diet normally supplies them adequately.
Goats which can almost weigh as much as a skinny human or Dirty Harry in his movie, produce around 185mg/kg of body weight, or 13 GRAMS per day as normal, and you wouldn't believe how high it goes when stressed.
(If you go here, around 9:00 minutes, you'll find out ! YouTube )
The history of Vitamin C, Scurvy, Dr Lind and the British Admiralty will leave you wondering at the stupidity of the Ruling Class
And Yes, getting your Vit. C via food is always preferable, and we have a fantastic source in Oz
Australian Native Fruit Kakadu Plum Rich In Vitamin C | Asian Scientist Magazine | Science, technology and medical news updates from Asia
James Cook is celebrted for his conquest of scurvy at sea. This was not so much the result of his belief in fruit and vegetables as several other factors.
Firstly, he was supplied with large quantities of, and ordered to test, a variety of antiscorbutics (anti-scurvy remedies) and was sufficiently intelligent, well motivated and disciplined to do so, and having a scientific mind, did so properly.
Secondly, The RN had been reformed by the recently deceased First Lord of the Admiralty, George Anson, who lost 90% of his crew to scurvy during his voyage round the world in 1740-44, and had been determined to find a solution. Cook's voyage was seen as an ideal test for this, as it would be a long voyage with long legs out of communication with regular ports, in other words, something similar in this respect to Anson's voyage.
In this, Cook was successful beyond all expectation, with none lost to disease before they stopped at Batavia (Jakarta) on the way home, and none lost to scurvy in the entire voyage.
This was the result of forcing all crew members to eat things they did not want to, the effective one that was mostly used was sauerkraut, something totally unfamiliar to eighteenth century English seamen. Officers generally suffered less from scurvy than did other ranks, because they had their private supplies of luxury food, which typically included preserved fruit.
Anson had observed that his crew had recovered rapidly from scurvy when any sort of vegetables were available to supplement their diet of salted meat and biscuit, especially after their arrival at Juan Fernandez Id - when they arrived there had been only eight seamen in addition to the officers and their servants able to stand, and they had lost over 600 out of a crew of nearly a thousand.
And the sad thing is.... Anson would have lost NONE, if he'd read the book as published by Mrs Ebot Mitchell, thirty years previously. (1707).
But she was a mere woman, so we had to wait for Dr James Lind to come up with the goods - FORTY six years after her, - and then they didn't take him seriously enough anyway...
Science advances "One funeral at a time", but with the inertia of the British Admiralty it took thousands to make this cheap, non-patentable step.
With due respect to the good Dr Lind, there's evidence that the Ancients many have done it first...
James Lind and Scurvy: The First Clinical Trial in History? - OpenMind
The whole saga is a study in 'Human Nature'
Got my jab last Friday!Quote:
Originally Posted by NavyDiver
Pickles.
Yes. And the Spanish navy may have actually come up with it at the beginning of the 17th century, but lacked the discipline and organisation to make seamen eat things they did not want to - and probably neither did the RN, until Anson's reforms - which notably included funding for sailors' health. The effects of citrus fruit were known much earlier, published, for example, by Admiral Richard Hawkins in 1593, and also shown by the Portuguese in the early 17th century.
But even after Cook, it took another thirty years, and it was not until the late 1790s that the scurvy prevention was actually implemented in RN ships. And exactly what worked (and what didn't) was not fully established until well into the 20th century. Vitamin C (also known as ascorbic acid) was not isolated until 1927.
Interestingly, if you read some of hakluyt's accounts of the early long distance voyages in the 15th and 16th centuries, it becomes clear that in the early days of long voyages, starvation was as much, if not more, risk as was scurvy. Navies and ships owners and captains learned how to preserve food in ways that enabled it to last only in the early part of the seventeenth century. Salted meat and hardtack might not be a particularly attractive diet - but it beats starving.
Yes, scurvy is an interesting topic. Cook did well. Mind you, the Chinese had citrus gardens in greenhouses on their ships about 300 years earlier.
Yes, but available records do not suggest they did voyages with very long legs between port calls.
Reading 'Burke and Wills' by Peter Fitzsimmons, they found the large amount of citric juice they were told to carry to be completely useless and it did nothing to stop scurvy. The theory was the process used to distill the citric juice actually removed the beneficial qualities from it, so they gained no benefits.
They did better when they copied the tribes along the Cooper Creek and collected the plant known as nardoo, but it had to be prepared in the correct method, to create a kind of biscuit, or it too lost its benefits.
Of course, if they had copied the tribes and fished in the river they would have caught numerous fresh fish and benefited from cooking them fresh, but that's another story.
Its true they tended to hop between coastal ports rather than head straight out to sea, but they still covered long distances, I believe.Quote:
Originally Posted by JDNSW