In an official portrait Anson’s round face, pursed lips, and feminine curls make him look more like a grandmother than a ship’s captain. In late 1739 England and Spain declared war to determine control of the Caribbean. Anson, a British captain who had recently returned from the West Indies, was put in charge of a six-ship mission to the Pacific coast of South America, an area important to Spanish trade. Wikimedia Commons/National Portrait Gallery, London
#VIRTUAL SAILOR 7 OCEANIC FULL#
Scurvy affected many of the explorers we learned about in grade school: Vasco da Gama lost his brother to it Ferdinand Magellan watched it kill many of his men, who had nothing to eat, he wrote, but “old biscuit reduced to powder, and full of grubs, and stinking from the dirt which the rats had made on it when eating the good biscuit.” The most famous scurvy-related disaster, however-and the one that fully captures the enduring importance of the tart substance we call vitamin C-was the ill-fated voyage of George Anson, whose 1740–1744 circumnavigation of the globe was the scene of one of the worst medical disasters at sea. Many of our people died of it every day, and we saw bodies thrown into the sea constantly, three or four at a time. And the unfortunate thing was that I could not eat, desiring more to swallow than to chew. . . When I had cut away this dead flesh and caused much black blood to flow, I rinsed my mouth and teeth with my urine, rubbing them very hard. . . I also used my knife on my gums, which were livid and growing over my teeth. . . My thighs and lower legs were black and gangrenous, and I was forced to use my knife each day to cut into the flesh in order to release this black and foul blood. It rotted all my gums, which gave out a black and putrid blood. Left untreated, you will die, likely from a sudden hemorrhage near your heart or brain.īown quotes a survival story written by an unknown surgeon on a 16th-century English voyage that reveals the horror of the disease:
As the disease progresses, your gums become spongy and your breath fetid, your teeth loosen, and internal hemorrhaging makes splotches on your skin.
#VIRTUAL SAILOR 7 OCEANIC SKIN#
Your arms and legs swell, and your skin bruises at the slightest touch. The earliest symptom-lethargy so intense that people once believed laziness was a cause of the disease-is debilitating. None of the potential fates awaiting sailors was pleasant, but scurvy exacted a particularly gruesome death. In fact, scurvy was so devastating that the search for a cure became what Bown describes as “a vital factor determining the destiny of nations.” According to historian Stephen Bown scurvy was responsible for more deaths at sea than storms, shipwrecks, combat, and all other diseases combined. The problem was so common that shipowners and governments assumed a 50% death rate from scurvy for their sailors on any major voyage. Scurvy killed more than two million sailors between the time of Columbus’s transatlantic voyage and the rise of steam engines in the mid-19th century.
But of all the horrors faced by sailors at the time, one of the greatest threats had nothing to do with pirates or wars or weather. If the gang that attacked Urquhart had succeeded, he likely would have awoken trapped on a ship and with nearly no hope of escape. By the time he returned home-if he returned home-he would have endured storms, battles, fevers, and years away from family and friends. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London Whether English, Irish, American, or Canadian, any subject of the British Empire with seafaring experience was vulnerable to abduction. In the 18th and early 19th centuries fishermen and merchant seamen like Urquhart lived in fear of “press gangs,” groups of ruffians who roamed the nighttime streets, searching for victims to “impress” into the British navy. But unfortunately Urquhart’s experience was far from unique. They “tore my coat from my back, and afterwards me by the neck for fifty yards, until life was nearly exhausted,” wrote Urquhart in a letter that described the assault.įortunately for Urquhart passersby intervened, and the attackers fled. As the outraged Urquhart demanded to know by what right the man questioned him, three or four men seized him, smacked him on the head, and dragged him along the street. One summer evening in 1808, while on a stroll through London with his wife and sister-in-law, sailor Thomas Urquhart was accosted by a stranger who wanted to know his name.