Scheurbuik, or scurvy
Scurvy was one of the most dreadful results of long seavoyages. Stinking water, salt meat, bread full of worms....
I was reading this story from a traveler on a East India ship. This was back in 1600. He mentioned that one of the 4 ships in the group had less scurvy than the others. The only difference between the eating habits was that the captain gave them 3 spoons of lime-juice every morning.
Another nice story how they tried various diets to prove what worked and what not. 'sea water diet', 'vinegar diet', ....
It took until 1795 that the British Admiralty issued a decree that all sailors had to be given lime-juice every day. 300 years of suffering (!) on the high seas since Spain and Portugal decided to split the world in two setting off era of the big seavoyages!
It is amazing that back in 1573 the Spanish used potatoes, found in the Andes, to cure scurvy. No wonder that knowing the cure was a 'weapon' at that time. Weakened crews made ships easy prey in war. That this was also the birth of 'patat' of french fries is another story.
Duivelsnaaigaren is good medicine against scheurbuik! (According to Google)
I was reading this story from a traveler on a East India ship. This was back in 1600. He mentioned that one of the 4 ships in the group had less scurvy than the others. The only difference between the eating habits was that the captain gave them 3 spoons of lime-juice every morning.
Another nice story how they tried various diets to prove what worked and what not. 'sea water diet', 'vinegar diet', ....
It took until 1795 that the British Admiralty issued a decree that all sailors had to be given lime-juice every day. 300 years of suffering (!) on the high seas since Spain and Portugal decided to split the world in two setting off era of the big seavoyages!
It is amazing that back in 1573 the Spanish used potatoes, found in the Andes, to cure scurvy. No wonder that knowing the cure was a 'weapon' at that time. Weakened crews made ships easy prey in war. That this was also the birth of 'patat' of french fries is another story.
Duivelsnaaigaren is good medicine against scheurbuik! (According to Google)
posted by frisian @ Tuesday, December 13, 2005
2 Comments:
At Thursday, December 22, 2005 2:07:00 AM,
Anonymous said…
Interesting story! You know those stories just take me with them on the ocean, on a ship and make me feel along with the sailors. Now I'm very curious of the birth of french patat. In 'Pirates of the Caribbean' they also talk about it...
A question: how do you make those stories? How do you chose subjects? Have you learned it on the sailor school at Terschelling? And why am I talking English?
At Thursday, December 22, 2005 7:57:00 AM,
frisian said…
Hi Rosan, thank you for the feedback. The topics pops up in the train or in the newspaper and then I google. There is so much interesting stuff out there. Because I wrote some other stories, the information starts to link together, sometimes in unexpected ways. Thats the nice thing about writing without knowing how its going to end.
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