For as long as humans have suffered severe food shortages, scurvy has been known. The first record of it appears to date to ancient Egypt, in 1550BC, and it was especially familiar to the inhabitants of northern climates, with fresh vegetation every winter becoming scarce. Our word for scurvy almost certainly comes from the old Norse skyrbjugr — the skyr being a sort of soured cow’s milk that was thought to have caused the disease by going bad. In mid-sixteenth-century sources, scurvy was often referred to as though it was endemic to the Netherlands — a flat land assailed by the North Sea each winter, that had suffered long sieges and devastation thanks to the Dutch Revolt, and where fishing and merchant shipping employed an especially large proportion of the workforce. The Dutch thus had a perfect storm of factors to make vitamin C deficiencies more common, even though they abounded in fresh-caught fish and imported Baltic grain.
And so, over the centuries, the people of the northern climes had discovered the cure. Or rather, cures. The Iroquois ate the bark, needles or sap of evergreen trees — most likely white cedar, or some other kind of spruce, fir, juniper or pine, all rich in vitamin C. Their remedy saved the lives of Jacques Cartier’s colonists based near modern-day Quebec City in the winter of 1536. It’s the reason white cedar is known as arborvitae, the tree of life. And the Saami of northern Scandinavia prized cabbages and other leafy greens, in the summertime filling up casks of reindeer milk with crowberries and cloudberries, to be ready for winter.
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Still more remedies were discovered by accident, as European ships began to range farther and farther abroad. The very first Portuguese voyagers around the Cape of Good Hope almost immediately discovered the value of orange and lemons — especially effective sources of vitamin C, as their acidity helps to preserve it. The voyage of Vasco da Gama, having been the first to round the Cape and reach the eastern coast of Africa, was then stricken with scurvy. They were only inadvertently saved when they traded with some Arabian ships laden with oranges, before landing at Mombasa. There, the ruler sent them a sheep and some sugar-cane, the gift also happening to include some oranges and lemons. Although the Portuguese couldn’t stay there long — they learned of a conspiracy to capture their ship — one of the voyagers later reported in wonder how the climate there must have been especially healthful to have cured them all.
Fortunately, at least some of the crew suspected the citrus instead. On the return journey from India, after a fatally slow three-month crossing of the Indian Ocean, some of the newly scurvy-ridden sailors asked their captain to procure them some oranges at Malindi. At least a few of the crew must certainly have been saved by this request, though perhaps the excitement of their imminent deliverance induced a few fatal aneurysms: “our sick did not profit”, was the report, “for the climate affected them in such a way that many of them died here.” By the time the fleet limped home back to Lisbon in 1499, scurvy had still managed to claim the lives of over two thirds of the original crew.
Nonetheless, the status of oranges as a scurvy wonder-cure had entered sailors’ lore. When Pedro Alvares Cabral repeated da Gama’s feat of rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1500, his crew purposefully treated their scurvy using oranges. And by the 1560s, if not earlier, the news of the cure had spread beyond the Portuguese. Sailors from the Low Countries, on the eve of the Dutch Revolt from Spain, were said to be staving off scurvy by eating oranges in large quantities, skins and all. (Orange peel is in fact especially rich in vitamin C, so they were onto something.) Their value was certainly appreciated by the Dutch explorer Jacob Corneliszoon van Neck by the time of his second expedition to the Indian Ocean in 1598. Not long after setting out, he purchased 10,000 oranges from a passing ship off the coast of Spain, rationing them out to all his crew. And on the return journey via St Helena they were dismayed when initially “we found no oranges, whereof we had most need, for those that were troubled with the scurvy disease.”
The account of van Neck’s journey was translated into English for the first voyage of the East India Company in 1601, which may be why its commander, James Lancaster, directed his crew to drink three spoonfuls of lemon juice every morning. Lancaster doesn’t appear to have paid any special attention to oranges and lemons ten years earlier, when he first attempted the voyage, although other English mariners like the privateer Sir Richard Hawkins had in the 1590s already been extolling their virtues. We don’t know many of the details of Lancaster’s lemon juice trial, but his flagship’s crew was not entirely saved. Contrary to common report, at least a third of them had died by the time they left their first landing at Table Bay, South Africa — a proportion similar those on the other ships of his fleet, though we don’t know how many actually died of scurvy or of other causes. But upon the expedition’s return, the experience placed lemon juice firmly on the list of known scurvy cures — “the most precious help that ever was discovered against the scurvy” as the East India Company’s surgeon-general put it.
