Selkirk's Island by Diana Souhami (best color ebook reader txt) 📕

and green with ‘a Monstrous high fin and a long extended mouth’, and a large fish they called an ‘Old-wife’, deep blue with yellow-tipped fins and covered in spots and crosses.

These creatures were drawn, dissected, had bits of their anatomy put aside for medicinal use (sharks’ brains were thought good for gallstones) and were boiled for questionable dinner in a large copper cauldron on a brick hearth.

Shark and jelly fish made a change from salt beef and weevil-infested biscuit. White booby birds ‘about the bigness of a Duck’ landed on the ships and went into the pot. ‘They are so silly that when they are weary of flying, they will, if you hold out your Hand, come and sit upon it.’ They tasted ‘very Fishy’ and unless heavily salted made the men sick.

Disease spread. By mid-November fifteen men had fever. The toll rose in the following days. Phlebotomy was the attempted remedy – seven ounces of blood taken from veins on the forehead, arm or foot, or from under the tongue. It was measured in little three-ounce porringers. If that appeared to fail, a concoction of barley, cloves, liquorice and water was proffered. If any ingredient was unavailable something else was substituted.

The ships’ surgeons, John Ballett and James Broady, were vague as to why men became ill and what made them well.† If the patient recovered, their treatment was assumed to have effected the cure. Those with the ‘bloody flux’ were prescribed anise or quinces, grated nutmeg, laudanum, or hot bricks to sit on. A few brass pails were available so that ‘poore miserable Men in the weakeness may be eased thereon and not constrained to goe to either the Beake Head or Shrouds to ease themselves, nor be noysome to their Fellowes’.

Scurvy, Scorbutum, the ‘scourge of the sea’, claimed more lives than contagious disease, inanition, gunfire, or shipwreck. Its causes were thought ‘infinite and unsearchable’. Perhaps it was a disease of the spleen, or caused by the ship’s biscuit, or contracted from dirty clothes and cabins, the damp sea air, the salty pork, cares and grief, or the heat of the day.

Those who observed it wondered at its horrors: lassitude, dejection, infected gums, filthy breath, loose teeth, weak legs, swollen flesh, aches and pains, skin blotched with blue or red stains, ‘some broad and some small like flea biting’ and ‘such costiveness as neither Suppository, Glister, nor any Laxative can put it right. For 14 Daies together they go not to stoole once’.†

Mariners knew that those with scurvy would, if given a chance, suck lemons even on an empty stomach. They had seen those sick with it eat fruit and greens and quickly find their former health. None the less for decades no prescriptive correlation was made between fruit and vegetables and scurvy. It was thought that fresh meat, wine, sugar and ‘other comfortable things’ would cure it, or oatmeal, or beer mixed with the yolk of an egg, or perhaps the juice of oranges, lemons or limes, or maybe bran, almonds and rosewater, or green ginger, or sweating in steam if that could be arranged, or strong Vinegar and ‘a good bathe in the Blood of Beasts’.

James Lind, the naval surgeon who would determine the prevention and cure of scurvy was not yet born. It was 1747 when he did a controlled trial of antiscorbutics on board a warship, the Salisbury. He took twelve sailors all with similar symptoms of advanced scurvy. For six weeks he fed them the ship’s standard diet: morning gruel, dinner of mutton broth, pudding and biscuits, supper of barley, raisins, rice, currants, sago and wine. But in pairs he also gave them different daily supplements: cider; elixir of vitriol; vinegar; seawater; two oranges and a lemon; a concoction of nutmeg, garlic, mustard seed, barley water and gum myrrh. The ‘most sudden and visible good effects’ were from the men who ate the fruit. Lind published these findings in his Treatise of the Scurvy in 1753. His was a scientific approach in a speculative age.

But on the St George and Cinque Ports, in 1703, Ballett and his assistants raked out excrement ‘like hard sheep’s treckles’ with a spatula from the rectums of men with scurvy. ‘Warm the spatula and anoint it with oil.’ They cut septic flesh away from the sufferers’ gums, so that they might better eat their biscuits and meat.

1703 Enough to Terrifie any Man

ON 2 NOVEMBER the ships crossed the equator. The fit were ritually ducked: hoisted up by a rope from the main yard, dropped into the sea from a height, then picked up by boat. Many ‘recovered the colour of their skins, which were grown very black and nasty’ Funnell wrote.

For days ‘much troubled’ by gusting southerly winds, the ships made no headway. The men could not hear each other or keep their foothold. Cold, soaked with spray, afraid of being overwhelmed by waves, they had no choice but to secure the guns and anchors and wait for the wind to drop.

The epidemic of fever spread. Captain Pickering lay in his hammock on the Cinque Ports, too ill to move. Command passed to his lieutenant, Thomas Stradling, a gentleman mariner only twenty-one years old. Selkirk disliked his highhandedness and complained that neither he nor Dampier adhered to the Articles of Agreement.

On 24 November they reached Le Grande off the Brazilian coast. They anchored in a bay to the south-west of the island. It led to woodland dense with foliage. It seemed like a jungle ‘not inhabited by any other than Jaccals, Lyons, Tygers etc. Which in the Night make a most hideous Noise, enough to terrifie any Man.’†

In a makeshift way the men ‘wooded, watered and refitted their Ships’. The holds were washed with vinegar and water, the deckhead was smoked and the stench subdued. The armourer improvised a forge, coopers repaired casks, carpenters mended masts. But the ships were in disrepair and beginning to leak. Their wood was infested with worms. They were not sheathed underneath and it