This is a passage from a book I just finished, Two Years Before the Mast, about a sailor’s recovery from scurvy. Sailors, living for months at sea on salted meat, ship’s biscuits and whale blubber, were particularly vulnerable to this disease of the pre-modern era.
What Is Scurvy?
Scurvy manifests in its earlier phases as red spots on the tongue and later, corkscrew hairs growing from red pores. I’m sure some of you have seen these less advanced symptoms, including maybe even red spots on your own tongue! It progresses through weakness, swelling, and depression to loose teeth, lost teeth, old wounds reopened, failure to heal, stunted growth, and death! In fact, many people have died of scurvy before we discovered that vitamin C, ascorbic acid, is the cure.
Medical practice up to the 20th century couldn’t reconcile theory with observation, and the renewing power of fresh fruit and vegetables was discovered and forgotten again and again. To be fair, understanding was confounded by the presence of vitamin C in fresh meat, especially organ meat, as well as its absence in lime juice stored in the sun, heat, and copper tubing. As you may recall, lime juice and limes were carried to sea as a protection against scurvy for hundreds of years but with variable efficacy depending on storage and handling. Vitamin C is rather fragile, thus the importance of “fresh” food.
The strong earthy taste and smell of this extract of the raw potato at first produced a shuddering through his whole frame…
Fresh Onions and Potatoes
In Two Years Before the Mast, several of the sailors have scurvy near the end of their voyage, and one of them lies close to death. Fortunately, they hail a ship recently out of port that gives them fresh onions and potatoes. The healthier men eat the onions raw, refusing to have them cooked. “We were ravenous after them. It was like a scent of blood to a hound. We ate them at every meal, by the dozen, and filled our pockets with them, to eat in our watch on deck.” (Dana, 302)
This is remarkable enough for us to imagine hardened sailors ravenous after raw onions! But the reaction of the men with advanced scurvy to these vegetables tops any account I’ve ever heard.
A Vivid Account
“One of them was able to eat, and he soon brought himself to, by gnawing upon raw potatoes and onions; but the other, by this time, was hardly able to open his mouth, and the cook took the potatoes raw, pounded them in a mortar, and gave him the juice to drink. This he swallowed, by the teaspoonful at a time, and rinsed it about his gums and throat. The strong earthy taste and smell of this extract of the raw potato at first produced a shuddering through his whole frame, and, after drinking it, an acute pain, which ran through all parts of his body; but knowing by this that it was taking strong hold, he persevered, drinking a spoonful every hour or so, and holding it a long time in his mouth, until, by the effect of this drink, and of his own restored hope (for he had nearly given up in despair), he became so well as to be able to move about, and open his mouth enough to eat the raw potatoes and onions pounded into a soft pulp. This course soon restored his appetite and strength, and in ten days after we spoke the Solon, so rapid was his recovery that, from lying helpless and almost hopeless in his berth, he was at the mast-head, furling a royal.”
Dana, 302-303
That royal is a sail. This account gives such a vivid visceral image of the healing power of living food that it’s hard to be unmoved. I read it to Michael and he went out the door singing, “Raw potatoes!”
Vitamin C Defficiency?
But I did wonder if I might have been inadvertently courting a slight vitamin C defficiency? I have disliked fruit for quite a few years, and am also a smoker. Though I eat a lot of fresh vegetables, they’re usually cooked.
So I looked up how much vitamin C is lost by cooking vegetables? The answer is: It depends on the vegetable and manner of cooking. Chard loses all its vitamin C. Broccoli retains a lot if it’s lightly cooked and actually has an enormous amount of vitamin C! Who knew? Here is the scientific paper I referenced. It seems to have some relationship to how much volume it loses. Fresh potatoes have Vitamin C 27mg, Potassium 620mg, Vitamin B6 0.2mg, Iron 1.1mg, Calcium 20mg, Sodium 0mg (Potatoes USA).
I think that I have been surviving for too long on Emergen-C and other vitamin C supplements! So I’ve resolved to eating at least one apple a day and trying for fresh citrus and other veggies more often. I had an apple while writing this and do feel much better! I am SURE that vitamin C supplements don’t give you nearly as much as fresh living food!
Two Years Before the Mast was written by a young Boston man who went to sea in 1834 because his eyesight was failing and preventing his studies at Harvard. The book was popular during his day, and a fascinating read even now for those interested in life aboard a sailing ship, and the early history of California where they spent almost a year sailing up and down the coast loading stores to bring back to Boston. I listened to the Audiobook version, but grabbed my quote from an online pdf of the second edition archived at the Library of Congress.
References
Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative. Second edition with a supplement by the author and introduction and additional chapter by his son. Houghton Mifflin, 1911. Retrieved from Library of Congress at https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services//service/gdc/calbk/139.pdf March 24, 2024.
Lee S, Choi Y, Jeong HS, Lee J, Sung J. Effect of different cooking methods on the content of vitamins and true retention in selected vegetables. Food Sci Biotechnol. 2017 Dec 12;27(2):333-342. doi: 10.1007/s10068-017-0281-1. PMID: 30263756; PMCID: PMC6049644.
Wikipedia contributors. (2024, March 15). Scurvy. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:34, March 24, 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scurvy&oldid=1213781624
