Captain Cook and scurvy

Abstract

‘We were all hearty seamen no cold did we fear And we have from all sickness entirely kept clear Thanks be to the Captain he has proved so good Amongst all the Islands to give us fresh food.’ (Song by T. Perry, from H.M.S. Resolution ) (23). The first encounter with scurvy at sea for the young James Cook, then 28 years old, might have been in July 1756, when he rejoined H.M.S. Eagle at Plymouth. The ship was being refitted and Captain Palliser had reported to the Admiralty the terrible effects of scurvy on maintaining his ships at sea (1): Put ashore to the hospital 130 sick men, most of which extremely ill; buried in the last month 22. The surgeon and four men died yesterday, and the surgeon’s two mates are extremely ill; . . . so that we are now in a very weak condition. A year later Cook’s ship, H.M.S. Pembroke , with others lying at Halifax in Canada, had so many sick on board that it took no part in the military action of Wolfe against the French. Cook remained with the Pembroke till 1762, for the most part in the basin of Quebec, and then for a further five years surveying Newfoundland. He probably had not heard of Jacques Cartier, the first European to sail up the St Lawrence River, who wintered in 1535-36 at the site of the present city of Quebec, at Stadacona with a crew ill and dying from a strange and fatal disease, ‘la grosse maladie’. Nor would he have heard of their miraculous cure, on the advice of a friendly Indian, with a decoction of the leaves and bark of the tree Annedda, the ‘arbor vitae’ of the natives.