Lamb - Scurvy

SCURVY

SCURVY

THE DISEASE OF DISCOVERY

Jonathan Lamb

WITH A CODA WRITTEN BY
JAMES MAY AND FIONA HARRISON

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESSPRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright 2017 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

Jacket art by Port Jackson Painter, c. 178898. Detail from Aborigines Attacking a Sailor.

Courtesy of the Natural History Museum (London).

Graphic courtesy of Shutterstock

Jacket design by Pamela Lewis Schnitter

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lamb, Jonathan, 1945, author.

Title: Scurvy : the disease of discovery / Jonathan Lamb ; with a coda written by James May and Fiona Harrison.

Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016010625 | ISBN 9780691147826 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: | MESH: Scurvyhistory | Scurvycomplications | Expeditionshistory | Confusion | History, Modern 1601

Classification: LCC RC627.S36 | NLM WD 140 | DDC 616.3/94dc23 LC record available a http://lccn.loc.gov/2016010625

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

TO THE MEMORY OF

SIR JAMES WATT, KBE FRCS (19142009),

PHYSICIAN, SAILOR, AND SCHOLAR

The number of people who perish annually at sea, by famine [and] the scurvy affords matter for another shocking calculation.

J. J. Rousseau, Appendix to A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755)

She soon grew pregnant & brought forth

Scurvy and spottd fever.

The father grinnd & skipt about,

And said, Im made for ever!

For now I have procurd these imps

Ill try experiments.

With that he tied poor scurvy down

& stopt up all its vents.

And when the child began to swell,

He shouted out aloud,

Ive found the dropsy out, & soon

Shall do the world more good.

William Blake, An Island in the Moon (1787)

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T here are many people and institutions deserving thanks for the help they have given me during this enterprise for, had I gone without their support and guidance, the world would have missed another book. First of all, Vanderbilt University has been generous as always with leave and research financing. I am grateful to the National Maritime Museum for a Caird Fellowship, which launched my research and writing in 2011, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for funding another year of leave that proved crucial to the momentum of the exercise. A Research Scholars Grant from Vanderbilt was an invaluable resource, funding two trips to Australia and two more to Britain. I shared the grant with Fiona Harrison who, with her colleague Jim May, has been steadfast in support of the book since the very start. I have never worked with neuroscientists before, and this was an education for me not only in the biochemical mysteries of scurvy but also in the marriage of two widely differing disciplines. Thanks to Fiona and Jim, I now am familiar with the function of the choroid plexus and of many other moving parts of the body, especially the nerves, of which I had hitherto been entirely ignorant. Their contribution is evident throughout and, of course, clearly manifest in the last chapter. While I was on the Caird Fellowship, the National Maritime Museum very generously hosted a conference on scurvy. I thank Nigel Rigby for acting as coordinator of the event, Lisa de Jaeger for administering it, Robert Blyth for editing the proceedings, and Kevin Fewster and Margarette Lincoln for putting the Queens House at our disposal. This came in the early days of the project and was a very great boost to it. Mark Harrison and Erica Charters, as well as participating in the conference, invited me to Oxford for two colloquia when I first arrived in Britain on the Caird, and their advice, as well as their work, has been extremely useful.

For over twenty years, all the work Ive done on the sea has been heavily indebted to the knowledge and advice of Glyn Williams, an historian wonderfully patient with the more intuitive approaches to truth often taken by students of literaturesome of them not strictly consistent with good historical practice. He read part of the manuscript when it was in the making and has offered invaluable help in its revision. His colleague and close friend, James Watt, was the first to investigate the possibility of significant psychological effects arising from nutritional deficits. It was he who suggested that Captain James Cooks extravagant reactions to theft and disobedience during the third voyage might have been owing to pellagra. When I started work on scurvy, he was a generous and courteous source of encouragement: really a mainstay for what was still largely a conjectural project. Anthony Ossa-Richardson of Queen Mary University of London translated Walter Charletons difficult medical Latin, a terrific help. The chapter on nostalgia has benefitted from more revision than any other, and this is in large part owing to the very careful reading and advice given by Kevis Goodman and Jonathan Schroeder. I am greateful for all they have given me in advice and bibliographical direction. On the topic of photic damage, a conversation I had with John Mollon of Caius College Cambridge was of immense value. While I was working on the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, Karen May helped me a great deal. Michael McKeon, Simon Schaffer, Peter de Bolla, Noelle Gallagher, Margaret Cohen, and latterly Alistair Sponsel have been great supporters. Two former graduate students, Adam Miller and Killian Quigley, have participated so much in colloquia and in the field generally that it would be hard to specify how much they have helped me develop ideas, especially about prosthesis and aesthetics. My research assistant Katie Miller has been patience itself, smiling at chaos. Never in my experience getting books ready for the press has the awkward business of copyediting been more graciously and promptly handled than by Kelly Clody, to whom my sincerest thanks are due.

The Australian section of the book I have found a very exciting topic. I owe a special thank you to Iain McCalman. At so many stages in my career, he has been an inspiration and an active supporter, no less in this. Alison Bashford assisted me greatly and continues to do so. Paul Pickering and Alex Cook have looked after me in Canberra, and Simon During and Lisa OConnell in Brisbane. It was a great discovery to find that Michael Rosenthal, whom I used to meet frequently at the National Humanities Centre at the Australian National University, was working on a history of early Australian painting. He has been very generous with his material, particularly concerning the vexed identity of the Port Jackson Painter. I am indebted also to Jeanette Hoorn for information about this mysterious figure. On a brief trip to Sydney and Tasmania, I was treated so cordially by Jane Harrington and Susan Hood at the Port Arthur Historic Site, by Mary Casey, who took me on an archeological adventure to Parramatta, and by Kieran Hosty at the Sydney NMM, that I find it difficult to make an adequate acknowledgment of their kindness. It is such a pleasant memory; I am eager to renew these links.